Op-ed: Harris proves Dems don’t need big money donors

Joe Biden has had an interesting year, to say the least. In February, he wasn’t on the New Hampshire ballot for the electoral primary but instead engineered a write-in campaign, which he won. At the time, the Democratic Party apparatus said it would not consider New Hampshire’s electoral votes during their party primary in August. This came after Biden tried, unsuccessfully, to have New  Hampshire’s “First in the Nation” primary moved to another state.

Despite turning 82 on Nov. 20,  and facing the possibility of turning 86 in the last year of eight years in the Oval Office as president, Biden was committed to being the Democratic candidate. That is, until he had a disastrous debate on June 27, in which he looked his age and more. Despite Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, facing a variety of criminal charges and a sentencing hearing in September, Biden could do nothing about his opponent’s variety of lies, falsehoods, and usual misinformation.

The candidate who didn’t campaign in 2020 due to concerns over COVID and large gatherings that year showed during his debate that campaigning was not his strong suit. Until, that was, he delivered a strong speech in North Carolina that echoed his State of the Union address earlier in the year in which he appeared as sharp and intelligent as he ever was.

The Democratic Party’s mega-donors were more convinced by Biden’s performance on June 27  against Trump than they were by his State of the Union speech or his North Carolina rally. By July 3 , the New York Times reported Biden’s largest financial contributors had decided to withhold their money as calls for him to drop out of the race increased.

By July 18, a Thursday, the campaign knew it had a problem. MSNBC reported the Biden campaign expected it would raise only 25% of big donor money. By the weekend, Biden dropped out of the race for president.

Campaign finance law dictated that the only person who could use Biden’s campaign account was Kamala Harris, his running mate. Rather than scrambling to have a contested convention in a few weeks time and still further scrambling to get behind such a candidate with only months left to go before the November election, Biden endorsed Harris as the nominee.

Then, the unexpected happened. In addition to having big donors open up their wallets once more, Harris experienced a flood of grass-roots funding from a variety of sources unlike anything seen since Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016.

On the social media site Mastodon, the hashtag “Mastodon for Harris” spread during a fundraiser. The initial goal of the fundraiser was $1,000. At the time of writing, July 30, the amount stands at $437,033.54.

A Zoom call for black women supporting Harris was arranged on July 21st intended with a cap of 500 participants. The attendees were estimated at 44,000—a number so large that Zoom administrators had to intervene in order to make the meeting work as intended. The women on the call contributed over $1,000,000 to the Harris campaign in two and a half hours.

Another fundraiser called “White Dudes for Harris” has raised $4,019,83 at time of writing—with both men and women contributing, often in small amounts of $10 or $25.

The official Kamala Harris fundraising page has raised $4,542,771.50 at time of writing. The numbers provided for ongoing fundraisers are likely to increase with time.

In the space of nine days, from Joe Biden’s announcement that he would withdraw from the race, until July 30, the Democratic campaign for president has proven the big money donors who were reticent only 27 days ago might not have been as important as the size of their contributions suggested. 

If anything, Harris’ exploding, runaway popularity has proven that, with the right candidate, the Democratic Party might not need big money donors after all.