Kamala Harris campaign ends with over $20M in debt: report
Vice President Kamala Harris’ unsuccessful presidential campaign ended with over $20 million in debt, a report has revealed, as the introspection following the 2024 presidential election continues.
After Harris lost the election to former President Donald Trump last week, Politico’s California bureau chief Christopher Cadelago reported in an X post that the vice president’s campaign “ended with at least $20 million in debt, per two sources familiar.” According to Cadelago, “Harris raised over $1 billion and had $118 million in the bank as of Oct. 16.”
Matthew Boyle, the Washington bureau chief for Breitbart News Network, elaborated on the campaign’s financial disarray in an X post Wednesday. Boyle detailed how a Harris campaign staffer told him that campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon “blew through a billion dollars in a few months.”
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“It was Jen’s idea to do all the concerts,” the unnamed campaign staffer told the news outlet. The “concerts” refer to high-profile musical events featuring Harris-supporting celebrities such as Katy Perry, Lizzo, Eminem and Bruce Springsteen. The campaign staffer maintained that money used to pay for these concerts came at the expense of “prioritizing and spending money on social media and other campaign priorities.”
In addition to highlighting the staffer’s concerns about the “immense” costs associated with the concerts, Boyle maintained that “several people who were working for the Kamala Harris for President campaign are still awaiting several overdue payments they were promised for their work.” He noted that Rob Flaherty, the deputy campaign manager who reports to O’Malley Dillon, is sending emails to people on the fundraising list in an effort to secure the funds necessary to pay off the debt.
“People didn’t like working with her,” the campaign staffer said of O’Malley Dillon. “Many people on the campaign felt like we lost because Kamala wasn’t allowed to run her campaign. They were running Joe Biden’s campaign instead of a Kamala campaign.”
The staffer described O’Malley Dillon as “obnoxious and very much a gate keeper and interfering with the vice president’s people who were trying to do their job.”
The comments about how it felt like top campaign staff were “running Joe Biden’s campaign instead of a Kamala campaign” reflect the unprecedented nature of the 2024 presidential race, where President Joe Biden was running for reelection and had secured renomination by Democratic primary voters only to drop out in July following a widely panned debate performance.
Biden endorsed and installed Harris, who served as his vice president for the entirety of his term, as his successor. She ended up becoming the Democratic presidential nominee without receiving any votes from the Democratic primary electorate.
Trump, who received the most electoral votes of any Republican presidential candidate since George H.W. Bush in 1988, has decided to make light of the Democrats’ reported financial difficulties on social media. On his Truth Social account Saturday, Trump remarked, “I am very surprised that the Democrats, who fought a hard and valiant fight in the 2020 Presidential Election, raising a record amount of money, didn’t have lots of $’s left over.”
“Now they are being squeezed by vendors and others,” he added. “Whatever we can do to help them during this difficult period, I would strongly recommend we, as a Party and for the sake of desperately needed UNITY, do. We have a lot of money left over in that our biggest asset in the campaign was ‘Earned Media,’ and that doesn’t cost very much.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
