US Vice President Wins Battle for Small Donor Support

US Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign said it has raised about $540 million in just over a month.

Photo caption — US Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, US. Photo: Kyodo/TTXVN

According to Al Jazeera on August 30, since Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party's leading candidate in the US presidential election and then became the party's official candidate, donations to her campaign have been pouring in. Harris's campaign said it has raised about $540 million in just over a month. This is the largest amount of money any political campaign has ever raised in such a short period of time. Patrick Frank, former director of ActBlue (the largest online fundraising platform for the Democratic Party), said that this fundraising milestone is very important. He said: "This is definitely unique. This is an unprecedented amount of money..." According to him, only disaster relief funds can raise an equivalent amount of money. But even in a country where political campaigns often rely on large fundraising machines known as “super PACs,” Harris’s campaign also stands out for the significant inflow of money she is receiving from small donors. Of the $497 million Harris has received as of August 20, about 42% came from 631,000 such small donors. Small donors are those who contribute less than $200. In total, candidates in the 2024 US presidential election across the political spectrum have raised about $1.5 billion from both large and small donors. Overall, Harris has built a significant financial gap over former President Donald Trump, her Republican opponent in the November election. According to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission, Harris had about $489 million in the bank by the end of July, compared with $265 million for Trump. According to a memo from Harris’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, during the week of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago from August 19 to 22, when Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, accepted the nomination, their campaign raised $82 million in donations. “This is the largest amount of any presidential campaign ever raised during this time period,” Dillon said. Harris also leads Trump in small donors: Trump received 32% of his campaign funds from small donors, compared with 42% for Harris. Still, Ms. Harris lags behind any previous campaign in support from small donors: In the 2008 race, Barack Obama received about 44% of his funding from small donors. Mr. Obama has improved that record in his reelection campaign. In 1971, the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) was passed to regulate campaign finance. It requires candidates to disclose contributions and spending on election campaigns. Although FECA did not explicitly track small donations at the time, a small donation can range from $1 to $200 sent to a candidate’s political campaign or a political action committee. Small donors tend to be more representative of the overall population than large donors, economists say. Women make up 37.5% of large donors, compared with 54.1% of small donors. 89.4% of major donors are white. Only 3.9% are black.

Researchers also found that between 2006 and 2020, the number of contributions increased while the average donation amount fell from $292 to $60.

Small donations became more important after Barack Obama’s 2007 primary campaign, when he raised a total of $750 million, of which about $335 million came from small donors. By Obama’s 2011 primary for the 2012 US presidential election, small donors had increased their contribution by nearly 50%. In the process, he doubled the amount of small donations he had received four years earlier. Meanwhile, leading investors and executives in the sector are planning a major fundraising event in Washington on September 13 to support Harris’s softer regulatory stance on the cryptocurrency industry. According to Cleve Mesidor, CEO of the Blockchain Foundation and one of the organizers, the goal of the event is to raise at least $100,000 for Harris' campaign. Tickets to the fundraising event range from $500 to $5,000 per person. He said the event will attract a diverse group of donors and create opportunities for discussions on how a Harris administration can promote the development of the cryptocurrency industry and increase access to capital for communities of color. Although the amount raised is only a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars Harris has raised since becoming the Democratic presidential candidate in July, it is still an important sign of support from the cryptocurrency industry for Harris, instead of Trump. While Harris has yet to publicly address her views on cryptocurrencies, her campaign has been in contact with major companies in the industry such as Coinbase and Ripple.