It shouldn’t shock anyone that VP Kamala Harris’s campaign is $20 million in debt despite raising $1 billion.
You mean a politician spent way more than they brought in? No way! Never! They totes budget like us normies.
Well, the campaign was a mess. It spent too much money on frivolous decisions that could have been avoided.
No wonder the Harris campaign flooded my email inbox with fundraising requests. This line hit hard in Jasmine Wright’s article at NOTUS:
Because of its inability to get a mass amount of people to donate multiple times, the campaign continued to miss and revise its fundraising goals, two operatives told NOTUS.
For being so leftist, celebrities sure love capitalism. Is anyone surprised that celebrities demanded heavy price tags for appearances?
The Democrats never learn. We normies do not care about celebrities. We know they’re detached from reality. Even if they came from humble beginnings, most have forgotten what it’s like to budget and make sacrifices to meet ends.
The campaign spent $20 million on election eve concerts in swing states with out-of-touch celebrities: Jon Bon Jovi in Detroit, Christina Aguilera in Las Vegas, Katy Perry in Pittsburgh, and Lady Gaga in Philadelphia. However, because of costs, they had to cut Alanis Morissette.
The campaign even paid Oprah Winfrey $1 million for that town hall.
While the musicians are out of touch, people still enjoy their music and performances. If I had chosen my music based on my political beliefs, I doubt I would have any bands in my music collection.
So that means they’re tuning in for the show, not for Harris. I would go to any political rally if it featured Smashing Pumpkins or Tool, even one for Sen. Bernie Sanders!
Again, most people likely tuned in to watch the concerts, not Harris. It’s not a good idea to be overshadowed when you’re running for office, especially president.
I mean, Harris lost all of the swing states.
But the costs also included sets, venues, and vendors.
Speaking of sets…
Joe Rogan refused to go to Harris for his podcast. Many of us, including me, thought it was weird that she made such a demand because she traveled to other places for a podcast.
Nope. Call Her Daddy podcast host Alex Cooper flew to D.C. to film the podcast. The Harris campaign spent $1,000,000 to build a set for the interview to imitate Cooper’s podcast set in Los Angeles.
Harris also spent $56.6 million on payroll and taxes. President-elect Donald Trump spent $9 million. He had hundreds fewer staff on his team.
I doubt the Democrats will learn from this mistake, even though people pointed out that consultants interfered with Harris’s need to define herself:
Harris’s payments to the consultant class will likely come under the microscope in the months ahead, as Democrats look to diagnose who is responsible for why the party lost this election so handily. Speaking on MSNBC after Harris’s Wednesday concession speech, former Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill said Harris “was listening too much to consultants,” which McCaskill argued detracted from her ability to “exude who she was” to voters.“There was a segment of the electorate that was very consistently saying, ‘I’m not familiar with Kamala Harris,’ and, because of that, ‘I’m not comfortable enough to decide to vote for her,’ whereas Trump is incredibly well-defined,” said Jake Dilemani, a Democratic political strategist based in New York City. “It was easier for him to spend less and still win.”“It’s the advantage of being such a well-defined person,” Dilemani told the Washington Examiner.
Those who spoke to Wright at NOTUS pointed the finger at Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair, and Rob Flherty, her deputy.
Harris inherited both from President Joe Biden’s campaign:
When Biden dropped out and endorsed the vice president, multiple people told NOTUS that he asked Harris to “take care of his people.” O’Malley Dillon requested a meeting with Harris and asked to remain on as campaign chair. Fearing critical stories about staffing similar to those that plagued Harris’ first campaign and first years as vice president, Harris relented.“Kamala did not want to shake things up. She thought that what she could do is install certain people into leadership roles to make sure that she got the campaign that she wanted,” said the operative close to the campaign.Others say that because of the structure of the complicated campaign, there was no way to turn O’Malley Dillon out. Her critics cite her leadership and the implosion of Beto O’Rourke’s 2020 Democratic primary campaign — which raised $6.1 million on its first day but ended months later due to major financial strain — as a precursor to this campaign.O’Malley Dillon’s critics say she was insular and wanted to own all the decision-making, creating a bottleneck. In her role, she had centralized a major part of the Democratic Party’s power. She was effectively the head of the White House political arm; was in control of decision making at the DNC, despite Jaime Harrison serving as its official leader, according to two sources familiar; and chaired the campaign’s political operation.
The campaign did not have a leadership structure.
Some of the black aides felt “mistreated and demoralized, multiple people told NOTUS. Some had even wanted to make formal complaints and refrained for fear of retaliation.”
Bringing in Obama people didn’t help:
Harris hired an onslaught of high-profile operatives from former President Barack Obama’s successful 2008 and 2012 campaigns, hoping they could harness the late summer excitement and turn it into a winning outcome. But many saw the additions of Plouffe and others as just back up for O’Malley Dillon, as they had all come from Obamaworld.“There was no one who had a different viewpoint. And anybody who had a different viewpoint was always sidelined,” said the operative close to the campaign. In the days since the blowout election, Democrats have criticized Plouffe’s focus on white people in the suburbs and moderates, calling the strategies like small-intimate town halls with former Rep. Liz Cheney, a failure, since Harris did not make significant gains with Republicans or people in the suburbs (though she did increase her numbers with college-educated white women).“David Plouffe wanted to run a 2008 campaign for a 2024 election,” the operative said. “He wanted to win the middle. He wanted to win white moderates. He wanted to have people vote for Kamala despite what their tendencies would be. [He] wanted to treat Kamala Harris as Barack Obama, and she’s not Barack Obama.”
The volunteers didn’t have talking points or yard signs until October. They lacked reporting structures.
The campaign also did not find it necessary to fight the Trump ad mentioning Harris’s support for sex changes for incarcerated people. Well, Harris’s people “did not see voters moving over the anti-trans attacks.”
Let me tell you this. My X “Protect Female Everything” list has many women and men who went Republican due to the trans insanity. But all of us scream over the fact that no one listens to us.
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