US Vice President Wins Battle for Small Donor Support

According to Al Jazeera on August 30, since Kamala Harris became the leading candidate of the Democratic Party in the US presidential election and then became the official candidate of this party, donations to her campaign have continuously poured in.

Harris' campaign said it has raised about $540 million in just over a month, the most any political campaign has ever raised in such a short period of time.

Patrick Frank, a former director at ActBlue, the largest online fundraising platform for the Democratic Party, said the fundraising milestone is significant.

“This is absolutely unique,” ​​he said. “This is an unprecedented amount of money.” Only disaster relief funds could raise a comparable amount, he said.

But even in a country where political campaigns often rely on large fundraising machines known as “super PACs,” Ms. Harris’s campaign stands out because of the significant influx of money she is receiving from small donors.

Of the $497 million Harris has raised as of Aug. 20, about 42% came from 631,000 such small donors. Small donors are those who contribute less than $200.

In total, candidates in the 2024 US presidential election across the political spectrum have raised about $1.5 billion from both large and small donors.

Overall, Ms. Harris has built a significant financial gap over former President Donald Trump, her Republican opponent in the November election.

According to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission, Ms. Harris had about $489 million in the treasury at the end of July, compared with $265 million for Mr. Trump.

According to a memo from Harris’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, during the week of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago from Aug. 19 to 22, when Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, accepted the nomination, their campaign raised $82 million in donations. “This is the largest amount of any presidential campaign ever raised during this time period,” Dillon said.

Ms. Harris also leads Mr. Trump among small donors: Mr. Trump has 32% of his campaign funds coming from small donors, compared to 42% for Ms. Harris.

Still, Ms. Harris lags behind her previous campaign in terms of support from small donors: In the 2008 race, Barack Obama received about 44% of his funding from small donors. Mr. Obama has improved that record in his re-election campaign.

In 1971, the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) was passed to regulate campaign finance. The act requires candidates to disclose their campaign contributions and expenditures.

Although FECA did not explicitly track small contributions at the time, a small contribution could range from $1 to $200 sent to a candidate's political campaign or a political action committee.

According to economists, small donors tend to be more representative of the overall population than large donors.

Women make up 37.5% of large donors, compared to 54.1% of small donors. 89.4% of large donors are white. Only 3.9% are people of color.

The researchers also found that between 2006 and 2020, the number of contributions increased while the average contribution amount decreased from $292 to $60.

Small donations took on greater importance after Barack Obama's 2007 primary campaign, when he raised a total of $750 million, of which about $335 million came from small donors.

By the time Obama ran for president in 2011, small-donor contributions had increased to nearly 50 percent. In the process, he doubled the amount of small-donor contributions he had received four years earlier.

Meanwhile, in a bid to push Harris to take a softer regulatory stance on the cryptocurrency industry, top investors and executives in the sector are planning a major fundraising event in Washington on September 13 to support her.

The goal of the event is to raise at least $100,000 for Harris’ campaign, according to Cleve Mesidor, CEO of the Blockchain Foundation and one of the organizers. Tickets to the fundraising event range from $500 to $5,000 per person. He said the event will attract a diverse group of donors and provide an opportunity for discussions on how the Harris administration can promote the development of the cryptocurrency industry while increasing access to capital for communities of color.

While the fundraising amount is a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars Harris has raised since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee in July, it is still a significant sign of support from the crypto industry for Harris, rather than Trump.

While Harris has yet to publicly take a stance on cryptocurrencies, her campaign has been in contact with major companies in the industry, such as Coinbase and Ripple.