Will Harris’s massive fundraising spree actually help her?

On Friday Vice President Kamala Harris announced a massive August fundraising haul of $361 million, one that is nearly three times the $130 million former President Donald Trump reported. 

August was the first full month that Harris was at the top of the ticket, and it marked a continuation of a dominant fundraising performance Harris began immediately after President Joe Biden stepped aside as Democrats’ presidential nominee. In the first two-and-a-half weeks of her campaign, she raised over $310 million.

Harris’s strong fundraising has completely reversed the fundraising advantage Trump once had on Biden. Democrats say they now have $404 million in the bank, compared to Republicans’ $295 million, and they are using it to try to expand the number of states their party is competitive in at both the presidential and congressional levels. 

Harris’s fundraising the previous month was notable for its mix of small and large dollar donations, and for how much she seemed to activate new donors: According to the campaign, 66 percent of donations came from first-time contributors. The deadline for full financial filings for August is September 20, and those will reveal whether Harris was able to maintain that breadth of giving. 

All told, Harris and Trump are expected to have spent more than $1 billion by the time the election is over. It’s a lot of money — but how much will it actually affect results?

It’s more expensive than ever to run for president

Presidential campaigns are raising ever greater amounts of money because the amount required to run a successful campaign ballooned following the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That decision allowed corporations and outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections, often via super PACs that operate independently of a campaign. 2020 marked the most expensive presidential election in US history.

“Presidential elections are incredibly expensive — at this point, a billion-dollar enterprise,” said Dan Weiner, director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program. “You need enough money to mount a viable campaign.”

That money goes toward supporting staffers and field offices across the country; ads across television, newspapers, radio, and social platforms; polling and research; as well as voter outreach through rallies, door-knocking, and more.

Both grassroots support and big donors are critical to funding a presidential campaign. Citizens United gave the wealthiest donors outsize influence. But grassroots donations are a sign of enthusiasm: They don’t necessarily translate 1-to-1 to votes, but they also function as a signal to big donors about which candidates are the most viable.

Both Harris and Trump will need to keep the money flowing as they enter the final stretch of campaign season, said Brendan Glavin, deputy director of research for OpenSecrets. Now is when candidates typically travel more often to battleground states, hold more rallies, fine-tune their strategies through more frequent polling, and ramp up advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts.

While Harris’s unusual rise, the parties’ conventions, and the announcements of vice presidential candidates may have helped gin up donations, previous campaigns suggest the most lucrative days might actually still be ahead. There are nine weeks until Election Day, and it was in the 10 weeks before the 2020 election that Biden brought in about 60 percent of his overall fundraising haul.

Big fundraising hauls are necessary — but not sufficient — to win

The issue with focusing too much on fundraising though, is that money isn’t everything. While the victor in presidential contests often has the fundraising edge, that isn’t always the case. Piles of cash ultimately can’t compensate for poor spending decisions or bad candidates.

Biden outspent Trump in 2020. But Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State and Democratic nominee in 2016, far outspent Trump yet still lost the election. Her campaign spent heavily in states she didn’t need to win, including Arizona, but neglected Rust Belt states that ultimately cost her the election. 

And then there are the well-funded campaigns that never really got off the ground because of a weak candidate.

“Put lipstick on a pig, it’s still not going to be a good candidate,” said Ray La Raja, associate director of the UMass poll and a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “No amount of money is going to make a bad candidate really good.”

Take former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s four-month Democratic primary campaign in 2020 that cost him $1 billion of his own money. “In the end, primary voters did not respond to him,” Glavin said. “He had the money. He got his name out there. But he didn’t get the response.”

Campaigns like Clinton’s and Bloomberg’s show that money is only one piece of the puzzle. Research suggests that challengers benefit more from campaign spending than incumbents, and that for any candidate, early spending is more effective than late spending. Incumbents don’t benefit as much from campaign spending because voters often already know who they are and there isn’t as much room to change their minds about that. The research suggests that the more incumbents spend, the more likely they are to lose — the spending itself is usually a signal that they are in hot water. 

Harris has some advantages of an incumbent in that she has Biden’s campaign apparatus behind her, but in other respects, she fits the profile of a challenger. 

“That marginal dollar is worth more to a challenger. And she’s more in that role, because let’s face it: Most people don’t know what the vice president does,” La Raja said.

Harris used August’s Democratic National Convention to introduce herself — and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — to the American public. She is newly in the spotlight and as she’s traveled the US campaigning, has tried to use that fact to shape her image in a way that a typical candidate might not. Her campaign is spending heavily on ads right now, announcing plans to spend $370 million on paid media between Labor Day and Election Day. That follows the $50 million the campaign spent on ads in the lead up to the Democratic National Convention.

“It’s a well-known dynamic in presidential races that you try to define your opponent early,” Weiner said. “I have no doubt that what the Harris campaign wants to do — and also part of the reason why it was so critical that they raise so much money so quickly — is to define her before the Trump campaign can define her.”

Americans may have somewhat forgotten what the Trump presidency was like, but as a former president, Trump is already fairly well-defined to voters and fits the profile of an incumbent more readily than a challenger. As a result, his strategy has been to leverage established recognition — and go on offense against Harris with a slate of attack ads.

But there are diminishing returns on ad spending, since the media gives presidential candidates so much free coverage. Trump may not have spent as much as Clinton in 2016, but he certainly benefited from the media limelight that year — and so did the media, which experienced a “Trump bump” in viewers and readers. This year, Trump has successfully fundraised off of big media events, like a conviction or the assassination attempt against him. So, too, has Harris after Biden dropped out. 

Their fundraising — and electoral — success will likely depend on whether that momentum lasts. Also, at a certain point, “money has diminishing returns,” Weiner said. There are only so many ads a candidate can buy, doors they can knock on and rallies they can hold to make their best case to voters. Once a candidate and their positions are well-understood, they can only hope that voters prefer them. 

“If you’ve raised enough money, raising even more money doesn’t help you that much,” he said.

Update, September 6, 2024, 11:35 am: This piece was originally published on August 7 and has been updated to reflect Harris’s and Trump’s August fundraising totals.