In this election, campaign money has been flowing in at both the standard moments and the not-so-standard.
“HOLY COW!!!!!” read the subject line of a fundraising email just after the debate on Tuesday evening. Democrats and their allies were quick to use Kamala Harris’s strong performance to ask voters to chip in. Many heeded the call—Harris’s campaign reportedly raised $47 million in the 24 hours following the debate.
Presidential debates aren’t everything in the grand scheme of an election, and Tuesday’s looks to be the last of this cycle, given that Donald Trump is refusing another round. But one tangible effect of the debate is that it sparked major donations for Harris. And it may end up doing the opposite for Trump: The New York Times reported yesterday that the former president’s rambling, falsehood-filled performance aggravated some of his very rich supporters. Although the full picture of donations won’t become clear until next month, the debate is likely to strengthen Harris’s already solid fundraising lead.
In a standard election, donations tend to flood in after big moments such as debates and conventions. Harris’s memorable 2019 primary-debate comments about busing led her to exceed her previous best fundraising day; Joe Biden broke his single-hour fundraising record following a 2020 debate against Trump. But this is not a standard race: In addition to the normal fundraising touchstones, real money movement has also followed felony convictions and last-minute candidate swaps. In the 24 hours after Trump’s conviction in May, he raised nearly $53 million, according to his campaign, far surpassing his previous single-day fundraising high point, and his camp quickly fundraised after the attempt on his life in July (“NEVER SURRENDER,” his team wrote, demonstrating a bipartisan propensity toward all-caps email subject lines). Harris, meanwhile, got an influx of donations after Biden announced that he was leaving the race: Her campaign said she raised more than $100 million just after Biden endorsed her, and she went on to reverse the cash lead that Trump had held over Biden earlier this summer.
