How Celebrity Worship Left the Harris Campaign $20 Million in Debt After Raising $1 Billion
It had everything to do with paying celebrities to endorse Harris and to perform at her rallies, particularly those who appeared in the final days of the campaign.
Donors to the Harris-Walz campaign must have been shocked to receive an email calling for new donations the day after they’d been crushed by President-elect Donald Trump. The email said that the “Harris Fight Fund” urgently needed funds to help Senate candidates in “races where ballots were still being counted.”
After amassing a war chest of more than $1 billion and outraising Trump by a margin of 3 to 1, the campaign was $20 million in debt.
Kamala Harris's campaign ended with at least $20 million in debt, per two sources familiar. Harris raised over $1 billion and had $118 million in the bank as of Oct. 16.
— Christopher Cadelago (@ccadelago) November 7, 2024
BREAKING: The vanquished Harris-Walz campaign has morphed into the “Harris Fight Fund” and has dispatched Tampon Tim Walz to send a begging email asking for more donations from their broken supporters.
They raised a billion dollars but somehow ended up 20 million in debt— and… pic.twitter.com/BtruxYxEIx
— John Hancock, DMin (@rdscrypto) November 8, 2024
It turned out that the need for cash had nothing to do with helping Senate candidates. It had everything to do with paying celebrities to endorse Harris and to perform at her rallies, particularly those who appeared in the final days of the campaign.
For starters, you may recall Harris’s much-hyped “Unite for America” livestream event in September that was hosted by Oprah Winfrey. Fox News’ Jesse Watters reported on Friday night that Winfrey was paid $1 million dollars for her time. He added that if Oprah thought she was “saving democracy, she should have done it for free.”
We have no way of knowing how much other celebrities were paid. However, it has been widely alleged that Lizzo was paid $2.3 million for reading a speech at an October rally in Detroit.
🚨BREAKING: Lizzo charged the Harris-Walz campaign $2.3 million for a single appearance at a Detroit rally.
Imagine what $2.3 million could have done for the victims of the hurricanes.
— Jack (@jackunheard) October 23, 2024
The Kamala Harris campaign turns to have been a barely-legal grifting operation. She raised a billion dollars to payoff celebrities to ‘support’ her. Oprah got a million dollars. Millions more to Lizzo and Cardi B. America just dodged a bullet. pic.twitter.com/U9KcgHJvza
— @amuse (@amuse) November 9, 2024
On Friday night, the New York Post reported that the Harris campaign’s election eve concerts alone cost $20 million – ironically the same amount the campaign is currently in debt. This leaves staffers and vendors worried that they won’t get paid for their services.
Anonymous staffers told the Post:
The concerts had a ruinous effect on the Democratic campaign’s coffers and that fact was no secret — with one planned performance by ’90s alt-rock goddess Alanis Morissette getting scrapped to save money.
The seven swing-state concerts on election eve featured performances by Jon Bon Jovi in Detroit, Christina Aguilera in Las Vegas, Katy Perry in Pittsburgh and Lady Gaga in Philadelphia — with 2 Chainz joining Harris on Nov. 2, three days before the election, for an eighth concert in Atlanta.
Two sources said that Obama campaign alum Stephanie Cutter pushed the concert concept as a way to woo lower-propensity voters to the polls.
While the performers donated their time and talent, the sets still required an immense commitment of manpower and financial resources.
Cutter’s plan was supported by fellow Obama alum David Plouffe, one source said.
Kamala Harris campaign’s election-eve concerts said to cost up to $20M — as rank-and-file staff, vendors fear they won’t be paid https://t.co/bKpqy90uXv pic.twitter.com/QfI1Cp7sWx
— New York Post (@nypost) November 8, 2024
One staffer said that while campaign chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon approved the concert plans, “she has since told colleagues … she didn’t want to do them and sat on the idea for weeks.” The staffer pointed out that O’Malley Dillon’s procrastination wound up costing the campaign even more because “putting [concerts] together last minute makes [them] cost twice as much.”
The staffer called the concerts “a real misuse of funds that could have been better spent on ads laying out economic policies. … It didn’t matter to have a bunch of celebrities talking to no one because one, 75 million people already voted, and two, people were concerned about their own financial issues, not Oprah telling them America won’t exist.”
The campaign spent money recklessly and unnecessarily. You may recall Harris’s appearance on the “Call her Daddy” podcast last month. Well, Harris didn’t want to travel to their studio for the interview. She wanted the show’s host, Alex Cooper, to come to her.
A source familiar with the matter told the Washington Examiner that “the Harris campaign spent six figures on building a set” in a Washington, D.C. hotel room for the interview.
The Harris campaign cites her unwillingness to travel to podcast host Joe Rogan’s Austin, Texas, studio as the reason she refused to do an interview. Most people knew the real reason: Harris wanted to avoid a three-hour interview at all costs.
It turned out to be a huge missed opportunity. It would have been an inexpensive way to reach a huge swath of voters. Fox News reported that to date, Trump’s interview with Rogan has received more than “47 million views on YouTube, while Harris’s on the raunchy women’s sex and relationship-focused ‘Call Her Daddy’ podcast has failed to break 1 million, at 813,201 views since being uploaded Oct. 6.”
If the election eve concerts did indeed bring any low propensity voters into the fold, it was obviously too few to carry Harris over the finish line. The next day, she lost every swing state, and with it, the election.
More than anything else, the Harris campaign’s wasteful spending gives us a pretty good idea of what a Harris administration’s spending might look like. And it’s safe to say, this is just one more reason why America dodged a major bullet on Tuesday night.
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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20 million low propensity voters failed to show.
While Kamala was wasting millions of dollars on fat celebrities, Trump was giving an unemployed interior decorator a job on national TV.
“with one planned performance by ’90s alt-rock goddess Alanis Morissette getting scrapped to save money.”
Isn’t THAT ironic!
I don’t often comment on comments, but the “Isn’t THAT ironic!” comment was quite good.
Ironic?
Yes, and completely lost on liberals
No sense of humor
No sense of self-awareness
No sense of irony
Alanis Morissette. Just reading the name makes me hear nails dragging across a chalkboard. And I’m being unfair to the nails and chalkboard comparing them to her voice.
They got Lizzo for just $1/pound. That’s not bad.
You can’t even get 70/30 ground chuck for that.
And I’m talking genuine woodchuck.
How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
The most inept and vacuous presidential campaign in American history, not to mention the most dishonest.
Wokeism deserves to be in the dustbin of history, alongside the Salem witch trials. According to Shellenberger,
“If you had to point to a moment where the lies were at their greatest power, it might have been during the summer of 2020, when the public health experts who had demanded that we shut down the schools said it would be immoral not to join Black Lives Matter protesters in physical real-world events that were no different from the ‘super-spreader’ events they had just a few weeks earlier demanded people be arrested for attending.”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/11/07/michael_shellenberger_why_trumps_victory_is_cathartic_for_millions_of_us.html
The wasted money, what else is new? Complain as they might, everyone can see that it illustrates how they would have treated the country, as their piggybank, while persecuting defenders of the First Amendment.
We are not running $2T deficits because Biden was any different than this. Think $7B for 8 EV charging stations.
Kamala Harris has to pay her friends to spend time with her. I bet she has to tie a pork chop around her neck to get the dog to spend time with her.
Send Commander to play with her.
Her weird cackling would scare off even that bite machine.
I’m pretty sure that they could have paid Lizzo in donuts, instead of dollars. Just a guess.
You don’t appear to have purchased a donut recently…. Go order a dozen donuts and see how far a $10 bill goes. Just saying. She saved money giving her dollar bills.
“What, are donuts framed in gold?” Joe Scarborough
I truly don’t understand the logic behind those concerts. “I’m going to vote for Harris tomorrow because I was able to see Lady Gaga for free!” While I certainly wasn’t someone whom they were targeting, I was paying attention to what was going on in the days before November 5 and didn’t know about these concerts until the post-loss mudslinging began (maybe I wasn’t paying attention enough!). How were these marketed? It’s not like they were in large arenas so were they expecting the livestreaming to be huge?
As for the hotel room for the podcast, the campaign certainly got taken to the cleaners. Probably had to rent that room and some of the surrounding rooms for a week, and while I don’t know which hotel it was it certainly wasn’t a Holiday Inn Express. Then DC + Democrat campaign = Union labor for the buildout/teardown and production crew.
And now they have to ask financially tapped-out, angry donors for some more cash. Good luck with that.
It drew people to her rallies. It was reported that 30,000 people showed up to her Houston rally because they thought Beyonce would perform.
It drew pissed off people.
I’m still wondering if Beyonce didn’t get paid enough and that’s why she didn’t perform. They were out of money.
I’m betting it was another tactical error by the Harris campaign. The people running it just don’t know how ordinary Americans think. I think Beyonce gave one of those “As a ….” speeches like I read Eminem gave at a Harris rally in Detroit (dunno if he performed but I think not). You were supposed to be impressed that one of the beautiful and famous people that Harris gets to pal around because she’s a politician with took time out to talk to the great unwashed.
You’re right that it just pissed people off. Instead of having a warm glow after the rally, and likely being enthused about Harris, they were just mad their expectations weren’t met.
And when they realized it was a bait and switch, how many of them were excited to vote for Kamala?
Yeah 20 million. That’s a lot of cat food.
But out of a 2 billion campaign, it is almost a rounding error.
As has been mentioned already, the big difference between the two campaigns is that people were going to see Beyoncé with a 6 minute speech from Harris while others were going to see Trump to hear him speak for a couple hours.
Mr. Bowman and Dr. Jacobson, here’s irony for you at the top of this article. ” Cecil B. DeMille Award OPRAH WINFREY”.
DeMille, the evil nasty terrible racist no-goodnick to directed “Birth of a Nation” and “Intolerance”.
I had no idea these ‘celebrities’ (often a too charitable use of the word) charged for their appearances. Is this a new phenomenon? Or, was Harris so uniquely unpopular that they literally had to pay people to endorse her?
They paid the big stars and gave the rank and file the shaft.
How they campaign is how they will govern.
Thank dear God in heaven these idiots didn’t win.
I thought those celebs loved Kamala and now I find out they are just whores selling their endorsements.. Another time I need the not shocked face emoji.
Picking up on a comment that I made about the role Obama has played in the Great Unraveling, we also must credit his fellow communicant at the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s deeply racist church in Chicago, Oprah Winfrey.
You’ll recall that during the 2008 presidential campaign that Winfrey had Obama on her talk show giving him the complete star treatment.
Oprah’s influence on women during her time on television was enormous (I have no idea why but I’m not a woman) and in having Obama on the show, she gave her audience permission to support and vote for “President Boyfriend” without first performing their due diligence.
If they did they would have discovered a deeply closeted man with a dark, checkered past that was raised by a communist mother and got his political indoctrination from Frank Marshall Davis.
Political indoctrination from Frank Marshall Davis (Get side by side pics of Frank, and Barry, and tell me what you think), and his political apprenticeship from Weatherman Bill Ayers.
The Webster Hubbell effect?
It’s likely Davis was BHO’s dad. It would explain why Davis took a shine to the young BHO. It also explains the whole birth certificate/Kenyan father nonsense. If Davis was BHO’s dad, he couldn’t possibly admit it and expect to become POTUS. Because of his mother’s peripatetic nature, she was unable to bestow her citizenship on little Barry (due to residence/age requirements of then-current law that disqualified her from being a conduit of citizenship to a child). So, what to do? Replace Barry’s real dad with a Kenyan, and claim (falsely) birth in Hawaii to secure his “natural born citizen” status (without reference to his real dad, from whom his citizenship actually derived). BHO was/is a “natural born citizen,” but had to fake being born in Hawaii to conceal his real father’s identity.
These are attractive conspiracy theories, but they seem to require foreknowledge that the child would grow up to need these subterfuges. Do we really think that Davis just decided that “my boy’s gonna be president someday” and spent 45 years making it happen?
That’s bullshit. First of all, they weren’t planning in 1960 that he would one day run for president.
Second, he got his citizenship from being born in the USA. There’s no reasonable scenario for him being born anywhere else, except maybe Canada. He certainly wasn’t born in Kenya. Especially if BHO Sr wasn’t even his father!
This is the fourth day that we haven’t heard that unbearable cackling. America is beautiful again.
No, JR was here just yesterday.
I frequently comment at Althouse’s blog, and we had a day or two of blissful conversation before the regular trolls got over their crying jags and showed up again. On the plus side, one of the more rabid cut-n-paste talking points mavens appears to have decamped for the foreseeable future.
What a tremendous relief!
I understand paying Lizzo $2,3 MM to show up. That may seem like a lot but it’s basically her food bill for a month.
Where do you think aborted babies are shipped to?
The dog food factory.
We really need to thank George Clooney. He made the trainwreck possible,
I heard that Trump offered to pay the $20m with leftover campaign funds.
https://www.breitbart.com/2024-election/2024/11/09/trump-teases-democrats-kamala-harris-dnc-debt-joking-offer-pay-it-off-using-his-leftover-campaign-funds/
That’s really a clever move.
Since custom dictates that the payment has to be made directly to her (political) pimp, we’ll finally all get to discover exactly who that is.
I read recently that the Harris Campaign spent over $500M on “staffing”.
Makes you wonder how many of the staffers were family of the candidates (or other prominent Dems) with high-paid sinecures.
No reason to treat their campaign funds any differently than foreign aid or the rest of our tax money…
Having heard all the stories from her VP staff, they all demanded hazard premiums.
Paying celebrities for endorsements is just another materialization of Harris’ inauthenticity. Fake candidate, fake celebrity endorsements. Not a surprise.
I guess that when I heard she was paying not only celebrities to show up but also renting crowds for town halls and flying/bussing people to rallies I knew that she was in real trouble despite the polls. I’m not sure why no pollster or talking head picked up on that.
Those stories were being reported in the conservative media.
I’m wondering… if the celebrities HAD volunteered to show up for free, would they have been dinged for making an in-kind contribution?
How much of that “deficit” went into Doughboy Emhoff’s offshore bank accounts?
Way less than 10%, because he doesn’t have Jill’s balls.
Imagine you’re David Plouffe. You’re great at running campaigns. You got Obama elected and reelected. Now you have a much harder job: getting Harris / Walz elected.
This pair never was properly nominated. They are probably the two worst major party nominees, ever in the history of the country. Harris has an IQ of 120 at most and is an evil person, as shown in her track record. I don’t know how smart Walz is, but he’s also slimy and ruined Minnesota, and there’s the bit about running away from his unit because of deployment.
How do you try to win with such people? Neither one can stand a proper interview. Well you flood the zone with glamor and celebrity bullshit, and that’s what they did. And it worked for a while. And then Kamala started being even worse than I imagined, failing in every interview, and then even the news media stopped trying to put lipstick on that porcine creature.
It didn’t work, but it probably had the best chance, and nothing else short of even more successful cheating could have gotten her the W. That’s why they tried it. I always hated David Plouffe because he forced Obama on us, but I always respected his effectiveness and still do.
120 IQ is safely above average. If you were denigrating her feeble mind saying she had an 80 IQ would be more like it
If the election had been held two months earlier, say after the Sept. debate, it would have been closer. But the more voters saw her, the less they liked her. So relieved she lost. She and Biden will be history in 2 1/2 months!
Elizabeth, I really like your posting here! I suspect they are pretty much “history” now.
They really muffed it. If your candidate can’t do interviews, you just don’t do them. You put everything into ads, voter registration, and GOTV.
I can’t wait till the dust settles and ALL the stories come out.
Wait, did performers get paid or not? Most of the post seems to say yes, but then we have this: “While the performers donated their time and talent, the sets still required an immense commitment of manpower and financial resources.” So the performers were not paid, and that $20M was spent in building sets for them, bringing them and their equipment to the concert site, and actually producing the concerts.
Is that what it normally costs to put on a concert nowadays?! If it is, then I don’t see how concerts can make money. And usually money is the sole reason for having them. So there’s got to be something wrong here.
It seems a little garbled. From the reporting I was under the impression the performers themselves charged the fee’s but it appears they did not. They donated their time and the money was for the band, back up singers, staging, travel etc so I guess that would be the same thing as few of them are talented enough to do any song acapella needing that entourage. In any case, the Harris campaign burned through the cash to get those people to show up.
You’re mixing up two different topics in the post, and being deliberately obtuse. You claim to be a lawyer but your reading comprehension sucks worms.
Half of the post talks about the speaking fees various celebrity endorsers were paid. Lizzo and Oprah were both obviously paid speaking fees rather than donating their time.
The other half talks about the $20 million dollars the Harris campaign spent on the election eve concerts when they didn’t have the money.
The concerts obviously weren’t put on to make money, they were GOTV rallies. That they didn’t work doesn’t mean that wasn’t the intent (or at least the excuse) for staging them.
Wow, you’ve got a real hide talking about reading comprehension.
The post as a whole is about performance fees. There is no distinction made between some performers and others.
And if the performers at the 6 concerts were not paid, and $20M was what it cost simply to stage 6 concerts, that’s more than $2M per concert.
Concerts are held to make money. That is their purpose. It’s an industry. But if it costs that much to put one on, then how can it possibly be profitable? That leads to a conclusion that this is not a normal amount to spend on that, and more questions need to be asked.
There are reports that Lizzo was paid. Oprah was paid for the Michigan Live Stream event. Other performers did not take money, but their staff did, and setting up the stage and equipment is expensive. The campaign spent a fortune bringing these performers to their rallies.
A grift operation at its finest. Also minion salaries are much higher than what Trump spent on his campaign.
Money means nothing to Leftists, just spend it because more will show up.
Trump clearly didn’t pay himself enough for appearing at his own rallies. Not to mention hazardous duty pay.
“Most people knew the real reason: Harris wanted to avoid a three-hour interview at all costs.
It turned out to be a huge missed opportunity. It would have been an inexpensive way to reach a huge swath of voters.”
If Harris had done a Joe Rogan show, she would have lost more states and probably dragged down more Senate candidates to defeat.