Kamala Harris raised over $1 billion—much of which was spent on advertising—but internal polling showed that she still struggled to convince swing-state voters that Donald Trump had been a bad president.
Harris, based on filings, disclosed spending $880 million on the election by mid-October, more than double the $354 million disclosed by Trump, according to The Washington Examiner.
And from July 22 to Election Day, Harris and her associated committees outspent Trump and his backers on advertising by a margin of $654 million to $378 million.
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It also dwarfed Trump’s campaign when it came to payroll expenditures and the associated taxes. Harris reportedly spent $56.6 million on staffing, while Trump spent just $9 million on a much smaller team.
The filings also show that Harris spent $12.8 million on a team of political, digital, and media consultants.
One of the firms that scored a sizable payday, at $3.9 million, was Village Marketing Agency, which reportedly worked to garner support for Harris from thousands of social media influencers in an effort to appeal to young voters.
Former Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, now an MSNBC analyst, became teary-eyed on Wednesday, after Harris’ concession, as she lamented the fact that the vice president “was listening too much to consultants” and struggled to “exude who she was.”
Another spending area likely to raise eyebrows is the $15 million the Harris campaign spent on event production, which went in part toward star-powered musical performances at rallies during the lead-up to the election, featuring the likes of Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Christina Aguilera, and Ricky Martin.
Harris paid $1 million to Harpo, a production company owned by Oprah Winfrey, who emerged as one of the vice president’s top celebrity allies, appearing at a town hall in September and the campaign’s final pre-election rally, in Philadelphia.
An unnamed source also told the Examiner that Harris’ team spent over six figures to build the set for her appearance on the popular yet raunchy women-oriented podcast Call Her Daddy, which aired in October.
One Democrat political strategist told the Examiner that Trump’s greater existing visibility meant that he didn’t need to spend as much as Harris.
“There was a segment of the electorate that was very consistently saying, ‘I’m not familiar with Kamala Harris,’ and, because of that, ‘I’m not comfortable enough to decide to vote for her,’ whereas Trump is incredibly well-defined,” said Jake Dilemani. “It was easier for him to spend less and still win.”
Even within the Harris campaign, there were concerns during the run-up to the election about her ability to win the battle over voter perception.
A Harris campaign operative told The New Republic that internal polling across battleground states suggested that undecided voters, even those who had a negative opinion of major events from Trump’s presidency, didn’t think the Republican was at fault.
Specifically, these voters didn’t hold Trump accountable for economic woes of 2020 or the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade—even as Trump has frequently taken credit for the latter.
Instead, these voters associated Trump with the strong pre-COVID economy, and gave him a pass for what happened during the pandemic.
“There was frustration inside the campaign that voters turned the massive job losses into a non-issue,” another Democratic operative familiar with the data told The New Republic.
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