Kamala Harris’s campaign has raised a record-breaking $1bn within 80 days of her becoming the Democrats’ nominee yet has failed to translate her cash advantage over Donald Trump into a poll advantage in the key battleground states that will probably decide the election.
The vice-president’s fundraising haul, first reported by NBC, dwarfs the $309m raised by Trump’s campaign by the end of August, and equals the amount brought in by Joe Biden for his entire 2020 campaign.
But Democrats’ joy over the bounty is being tempered by a lack of evidence that it is giving her the edge she will need in the battleground states to win enough of them to affect the election outcome in her favor.
In the latest warning sign for the vice-president, a Quinnipiac university poll published on Wednesday showed her trailing Trump by two and three points respectively in Wisconsin and Michigan – states which, along with Pennsylvania, Democrats have labelled the “blue wall”.
The survey showed Trump ahead by 48-46% in Wisconsin and 50-47% in Michigan. Harris has a narrow lead in most nationwide polls.
Harris maintains a three-point advantage in Pennsylvania, according to Quinnipiac, as Barack Obama arrives in the state to campaign for Harris. The former president will headline a Thursday rally in Pittsburgh, where he is expected to urge naturally pro-Democrat voters to turn out for the 5 November poll.
Paradoxically, there are fears that Harris’s fundraising success may lead to cash drying up when it matters most, by dampening the enthusiasm of donors to give the extra funds that strategists believe might be necessary to get her over the line in a tightening race.
“There have never been so many electoral college votes in play so late in the cycle, which means that our strong fundraising and volunteer enthusiasm are not guaranteed to be enough to fully reach voters everywhere they are,” the Washington Post quoted an unnamed Harris campaign staff member as saying.
Obama’s appearance on the campaign trail follows evidence that Harris is failing to connect with key components of the Democrats’ constituency, including Black men.
Politico reported that Democratic operatives were worried about apathy among Black men in Detroit, Michigan’s biggest city, even as Harris’s campaign has dispatched several high-profile African American surrogates to the state, including the basketball legend Magic Johnson and the party elder James Clyburn.
“I am worried about turnout in Detroit,” Jamal Simmons, a former communications director for Harris, told the site. “Do they have the machine to turn people out?”
“We continue to have this widening apathy in cities like Detroit … [Harris] hasn’t done anything to change that,” added Scott Holiday, executive director of Detroit Action, a voter mobilisation group.
Concerns have spread to strategists of past victorious Democratic presidential campaigns, including David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Obama, who told Axios: “Harris made steady, incremental progress in the 10 days after the [10 September] debate, but now the race has plateaued.”
He added: “[Harris] had a great launch, right through the convention and the debate. But in these campaigns, every time you clear a bar, the bar gets raised. You have to lift your game and adjust your strategy.”
James Carville, an architect of Bill Clinton’s 1992 triumph, told the site that Harris “needs to be more aggressive”.
A Harris campaign official said it had always expected the election to be “a margin of error race”.
“We’re dealing with a polarised electorate – cycle after cycle, the pool of true swing voters just gets smaller and smaller,” the official said.
