Kamala Harris has raised a record amount of cash to fight Donald Trump and the Republicans

Vice President Kamala Harris has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign donations since Joe Biden dropped out of the election race and the amount of cash now in her war chest has broken fundraising records. 

On August 25th, the Washington Post along with several other news outlets reported the Harris campaign has raised $540 million dollars for her fight against Donald Trump, which a memo from her campaign noted was “a record for any campaign in history.”

The Harris campaign saw an $82 million dollar donation surge during the Democratic National Convention, which added together with her donations throughout August and her total at the end of July has put the Vice President’s campaign in a healthy position for the fight to come. 

Harris campaign manager Jen ​​O’Malley Dillon noted in a post-convention memo that the best fundraising night occurred on August 22nd when the Vice President gave her nomination acceptance speech. But the memo also noted some other interesting trends. 

One-third of the donations that flooded in during the Democratic National Convention were from first-time contributors and two-thirds of those first-time donations came from women. 

“The enthusiasm and energy at the United Center this week was palpable,” ​​O’Malley Dillon wrote. “But that enthusiasm extended well beyond Chicago, spreading far and wide throughout the battleground states that will decide this election.”

The Washington Post’s Matt Viser noted the Harris campaign’s donation numbers reflect “a massive wave of fundraising by Democrats since Biden decided on July 21 to abandon his presidential reelection bid and throw his support behind Harris.”

On July 28th, the Harris campaign announced that the Vice President raised $200 million in donations and signed up over one hundred thousand new volunteers in the week after she became the presumptive 2024 Democratic Presidential Nominee.

"In the week since we got started, @KamalaHarris has raised $200 million dollars," Harris campaign Deputy Manager Rob Flaherty wrote on X about Harris' big achievement just one week into her bid for the presidency.

"66% of that is from new donors. We've signed up 170,000 new volunteers," Flaherty continued. "A people-powered campaign for a people-powered presidency!"

Business Insider reported that Vice President's $200 million in donations at the time added to the $95 million dollar war chest that she inherited from Joe Biden after he withdrew from the race. But such stunning success should have been predictable following the significant amount of donations that began rolling in after Harris announced her candidacy.

Biden officially dropped out of the 2024 election on July 21st and later endorsed  Harris to replace him at the top of the ticket as the Democratic Party's ticket, a move that injected the Democrats and American left with new energy and the Vice President's new campaign with lots of extra cash. 

Harris still wasn't the Democratic Party’s nominee at the time, but when she announced her candidacy in the wake of Biden’s endorsement, the news spurred on one of the greatest donation runs of the election cycle, according to a report from ActBlue.

ActBlue is a non-profit organization focused on collecting small-dollar donations for the Democratic Party, and the group reported on the social media platform X that grassroots donations to Harris following her campaign launch quickly reached the tens of millions. 

“Small-dollar donors raised over $27.5 million on ActBlue in the first 5 hours of Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign. Grassroots supporters are energized and excited to support her as the Democratic nominee,” ActBlue wrote on July 21st. 

While $27.5 million dollars in just a few hours may already have seemed like a lot of money, things only got better for Harris and the Democrats since the rush of donations only kept flooding into the Vice President's campaign coffers.

“As of 9pm ET, grassroots supporters have raised $46.7 million through ActBlue following Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign launch. This has been the biggest fundraising day of the 2024 cycle,” ActBlue revealed on X the same day as its previous tweets.

“Small-dollar donors are fired up and ready to take on this election,” the nonprofit group added. The total number of small-dollar donations made following Harris' announcement was later revised to $49.6 million by Vice President Harris’ campaign aide Brian Fallon. 

More than 2.4 million unique small-dollar donors gave more than 10.4 million donations to 15,927 campaigns and organizations via ActBlue in the first quarter of the year, which totaled over $460 million at an average contribution size of $42.73 dollars according to the fundraising group.

“Small-dollar donors are giving during pivotal moments, especially those that contrast President Biden’s vision for the country against that of the MAGA Republican agenda, with 86.3% of all donors giving at least one federal donation,” ActBlue noted. 

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