In fewer than 80 days since taking over the top of the ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris has reportedly taken in more than $1 billion across her campaign and allied committees.
The eye-popping figure dwarfs the roughly $853 million former President Donald Trump raised across his political operation thus far during 2024, based on publicly available data. It also far outpaces the fundraising tempo under President Biden.
Past presidential cycles have seen candidates, including Trump, 78, and Biden, 81, leap past the $1 billion mark between totals raised across the campaigns and outside groups, but the breakneck pace at which Harris, 59, has reached the feat is unprecedented.
For context, Biden’s 2024 operation didn’t cross the $1 billion threshold until August, shortly after Harris ascended to the top of the ticket and rebranded the campaign.
At the time, the newly launched Harris campaign crowed about blowing past the $1 billion milestone at the fastest clip for a presidential campaign.
Harris managed to get to the $1 billion tally even faster by herself, the New York Times first reported. All of those fundraising figures also include money raised by her campaign, allied joint committees and the Democratic National Committee.
Her campaign has yet to publicly release its numbers for September, which has become customary ahead of the Federal Election Commission’s deadline for public disclosures from the presidential campaigns.
By contrast, the Trump-Vance campaign quickly announced at the start of October that it brought in $160 million in September and ended the month with some $283 million cash on hand across its political operation.
For comparison, the Harris-Walz campaign brought in $361 million and capped off August with $404 million cash on hand, across its political operation.
Some Harris-Walz campaign allies have privately expressed consternation that the mammoth haul could give Harris backers a false sense of security and lead to complacency.
“Talking about this type of big money doesn’t convey the sense of urgency to do every single thing in all of the big and small ways,” a source told The Washington Post. “We are in the margin of error. This will come down to grinding it out.”
The vice president and her allies have long held a campaign cash advantage over Team Trump, while spending more than two and half times as much, per data from AdImpact.
They’ve been sitting on such a large mountain of cash that the Harris-Walz campaign and DNC announced it was funneling over $25 million to down-ballot races last month in a bid to help Democrats.
Despite the weeks of bonanza fundraising and constant blanketing of the airwaves against Trump, the 2024 presidential contest remains very tight.
Harris has a 2.2 percentage point edge over Trump in the latest RealClearPolitics aggregate of national multicandidate polls. Trump is leading in the RCP’s no-tossup map of battleground states.
Furthering Democrats’ anxieties are painful memories of Trump outperforming polls in 2016 and 2020, despite many party strategists feeling that Republicans underperformed polls in the 2022 midterm elections.
The Post contacted the Harris-Walz campaign for comment.
