Kamala Harris campaign raises $310 million in July, more than double Donald Trump

Money alone doesn’t win elections, but it’s a big help. And last month, the Democratic campaign for the U.S. presidential election received a very generous helping hand: the campaign received $310 million in donations throughout July. Two-thirds of this amount, more than $200 million, was raised in the week following President Joe Biden’s decision to step aside to be replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris. The amount is more than double what the Donald Trump campaign raised in the same month, $139 million.

The surge in funding since July 21 — the day when Biden withdrew from the race — is a sign of the enthusiasm of Democratic donors, who in the final weeks before Biden’s resignation had been reluctant to contribute more funds to what they feared had become a lost cause against Trump.

That trend has done a U-turn. Harris’s campaign says it has $377 million in its coffers, far exceeding the $327 million her Republican rival’s campaign said it had at the start of August. The Republican fundraising haul was boosted last month by the attempted assassination of Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania, the nomination of Sen. J.D. Vance as vice presidential nominee and the Republican National Convention.

Democrats say two-thirds of their July donations came from first-time donors, with the vast majority of money coming in small amounts from ordinary citizens. Sixty percent of donors were women, and the number of contributions from people under 30 increased tenfold.

“The tremendous outpouring of support we’ve seen in just a short time makes clear the Harris coalition is mobilized, growing, and ready to put in the work to defeat Trump this November,” Harris campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez said in a statement. “Our money is going to the work that wins close elections.”

Adding to the enthusiasm of Democratic supporters are polls indicating that Harris is gaining ground in voting intention and is hot on the heels of — or even surpassing — her Republican rival: in July, she secured a lead outside the poll’s margin of errors. A poll published on Friday by the firm Civiqs found that the vice president is polling at 49%, while Trump is at 45%. The average of the different national polls, made by RealClearPolitics, puts the Republican at 47.7%, 1.2 percentage points over the Democrat, who is at 45.5%. The website specialized in analyzing political statistics FiveThirtyEight maintains that Harris currently leads Trump by 1.3 percentage points, 44.9% versus 43.6%.

The Harris campaign could receive a new injection of enthusiasm in the coming days. The vice president will be officially named the Democratic presidential candidate next Monday, when the virtual roll call to formally nominate Harris for president comes to an end. It is expected that she will announce her running mate that same day, days before the Democratic Party starts its convention in Chicago on August 19.

The law firm that has been investigating potential Democratic vice presidential candidates has concluded its work and submitted its reports to Harris, who will finish interviewing her possible running mate this weekend. In the veepstakes, the main names are Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania — a state that Democrats need to win at all costs to remain in the White House in the next term — and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, a former astronaut and war veteran.

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