Kamala Harris sets records for voter registrations and fundraising
In the three days after President Joe Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president, her campaign raised $126 million.
Vice President Kamala Harris is setting records with her newly minted presidential campaign, raking in cash and spurring a surge in voter registrations for the high-stakes November election.
After President Joe Biden announced on July 21 that he was dropping his bid for president and endorsed Harris to lead the Democratic ticket, Harris’ campaign said it had raised $126 million as of July 23. Some $81 million was donated within the first 24 hours after Biden’s announcement, the highest one-day fundraising number in the history of U.S. presidential politics.
Harris’ single-day fundraising record dwarfs that of former President Donald Trump, whose campaign boasted of raising $52.8 million in a single day after he was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to pay hush money to a pornographic actress and Playboy model during the 2016 campaign.
Harris’ campaign said the $126 million the campaign raised came from 1.4 million donors, 64% of whom had not donated at all during the 2024 election cycle.
The campaign added that 100,000 people signed up to volunteer, with 2,500 of those volunteers coming from Pennsylvania, a key swing state that could determine the outcome of the election.
“Following a groundswell of support from across the country, she is now the presumptive Democratic nominee – and she’s in a strong position to win,” Harris’ campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a campaign memo.
Meanwhile, Vote.org, a nonpartisan group that works to increase civic participation by helping people register to vote, announced that it had experienced its single-largest number of voter registrations in the first 48 hours of Harris’ campaign.
Andrea Hailey, the group’s CEO, said on X that nearly 40,000 people registered to vote through the platform, with younger voters making up 80% of the registrations.
That is more than the 35,000 people pop megastar Taylor Swift convinced to register through Vote.org in September 2023.
“A strong democracy depends on all Americans making their voices heard at the ballot box,” Hailey said. “We at Vote.org will work everyday to build off of this surge through Election Day.”
