Steph Deschamps / August 27, 2024
“Just before Vice President Harris's speech on Thursday night, we officially passed the $500 million mark,” said Jen O'Malley Dillon, his campaign manager, in a note released to the press.
The total now stands at 540 million, she boasted, assuring us that this is a “record for any campaign in history” - though she didn't specify what period she was basing her comparison on. “Immediately after his speech, we observed our best fundraising hour” of the campaign.
The memo stresses the importance of small donors, pointing out that “a third” of donations recorded during the week of the Democratic convention came “from first-time donors”. These figures concern donations to the various structures that finance the national campaign.
Within 24 hours of announcing Joe Biden's withdrawal from the race and his support for his vice-president, the Democrats had raised $81 million. A radical change of dynamic after the slump in which the Democrats found themselves at the beginning of July, following Joe Biden's catastrophic performance in the debate against Donald Trump at the end of June.
At the beginning of August, the Republican candidate's campaign had declared that it had some $327 million at its disposal, three months ahead of an American election in which hundreds of millions of dollars are needed to finance, among other things, the broadcasting of political advertisements on television.