People Still Have Lots of Questions About Spending in the Kamala Harris Campaign

People Still Have Lots of Questions About Spending in the Kamala Harris Campaign

Harris raised and spent more than a billion dollars and no one seems to be able to say where all the money went.

From Current Affairs:

How Much of the Harris Campaign Was a Scam?

Since Kamala Harris’s catastrophic electoral defeat last month—the first time since 2004 that the Republican candidate has gotten the most votes in a U.S. election—a lot of criticism has been focused on the campaign’s message. That criticism is warranted, and long before Election Day, this publication had been among those warning that Harris was failing to effectively counter Trump’s populist appeal. But a campaign is not just a candidate and a message. It is also an organization, one with a budget and staff that makes decisions about actions that can be taken to transmit the message and convince people to turn out for the candidate. And any election postmortem needs to analyze Harris’s operation in addition to her words.

By one metric, the Harris campaign was a formidable organization. She raised over $1 billion, setting a record for the most money brought in in a single quarter. But reporting that has come out since Election Day demonstrates that a great deal of this money was squandered and might as well have been set on fire. A lot of people appear to have lined their pockets, while Harris neglected to fund some of the core pieces of a solid organizing apparatus.

The Harris campaign spent everything they took in, burning through virtually the whole billion. That’s not in and of itself a foolish thing; if they’d ended the campaign with a lot of unspent money, one could wonder if it could have been used strategically to change the election outcome. Elon Musk alone spent $250 million to elect Donald Trump, so the campaign was up against a formidable amount of money on the other side. (Although Trump ultimately spent far less than Harris.) The problem is that many of the Harris campaign’s spending decisions appear to have been egregiously poor, to the point where one can reasonably ask: How much of this campaign should be considered a scam, something that preyed on voters’ fears of Donald Trump and took their money for projects that had little real effect on the election’s outcome?

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