Reports say Vice President Kamala Harris burned through an extraordinary $1.5 billion during her whirlwind 15-week presidential campaign, only to suffer a stunning loss to President-elect Donald J. Trump. Her campaign, despite a massive financial edge, failed to secure the national popular vote—a first for a Democratic candidate in 20 years—and ceded every battleground state to Mr. Trump.
According to a recent report in The New York Times, the campaign’s cash splurge, averaging $100 million per week, fueled a dizzying array of expenses: wall-to-wall advertising, social media influencers, a sprawling ground operation, celebrity-packed rallies, a high-profile Oprah town hall, concerts with stars like Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, and even drone shows. Yet the strategy has sparked a firestorm of criticism, with some Democrats questioning whether glitzy events and ostentatious spending were more showy than strategic.
Harris’s biggest line item was advertising, with $494 million spent on media by mid-October and a total nearing $600 million. Despite this, Mr. Trump outspent her on broadcast TV in the campaign’s final stretch. Lavish expenditures included $900,000 for ads on the Sphere in Las Vegas and $2.5 million for digital agencies targeting influencers.
In the aftermath of defeat, Harris’s team has scrambled to raise funds, sending out frantic solicitations that hint at looming post-election debts. Democratic National Committee finance chair Chris Korge acknowledged the stunning losses across all seven battleground states, calling them a “shock to us all.”
Still, some campaign insiders found a peculiar silver lining: Harris performed slightly better in battleground states than nationally, even as Mr. Trump decisively claimed 312 electoral votes—well beyond the 270 needed for victory.
“There is not a single expenditure in a different spot that would have changed the outcome of the race,” Bakari Sellers, a close ally of Ms. Harris and a former lawmaker in South Carolina, told The New York Times. In fact, Mr. Sellers said, the campaign faced an unusual problem: “We had so much money it was hard to get it out the door.”
