According to her team, Democratic US presidential candidate Kamala Harris has raised more than half a billion dollars in campaign donations in one month. This is “a record for any campaign in history,” her campaign team said on Sunday. Shortly before Harris officially accepted her nomination at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago on Thursday, “we officially passed the $500 million mark,” said campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon.
Since entering the race for the presidential nomination after US President Joe Biden’s withdrawal on July 21, Harris and her running mate Tim Walz have raised $540 million (around €480 million) in donations. A third of these donations came from first-time donors, O’Malley Dillon said. “Immediately after her speech, we experienced our best hour of fundraising since the start of the campaign,” she explained.
Harris and her Republican rival Donald Trump are now entering the ten-week final sprint to Election Day on November 5. Trump, whose campaign was shaken by Biden’s withdrawal, said he had $327 million at the beginning of August.
Current Vice President Harris’s campaign appears to have energized donors – a reversal from the uncertain period following Biden’s disastrous performance in a TV debate in June, when major donors reportedly stopped giving. At the same time, the campaign appears to have mobilized what O’Malley Dillon called an “army of volunteers” – at the convention, people signed up in droves.
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