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.
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.
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.
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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