Since Kamala Harris’s catastrophic electoral defeat last month—the first time since 2004 that the Republican candidate has gotten the most votes in a U.S. election—a lot of criticism has been focused on the campaign’s message. That criticism is warranted, and long before Election Day, this publication had been among those warning that Harris was failing to effectively counter Trump’s populist appeal. But a campaign is not just a candidate and a message. It is also an organization, one with a budget and staff that makes decisions about actions that can be taken to transmit the message and convince people to turn out for the candidate. And any election postmortem needs to analyze Harris’s operation in addition to her words. 

By one metric, the Harris campaign was a formidable organization. She raised over $1 billion, setting a record for the most money brought in in a single quarter. But reporting that has come out since Election Day demonstrates that a great deal of this money was squandered and might as well have been set on fire. A lot of people appear to have lined their pockets, while Harris neglected to fund some of the core pieces of a solid organizing apparatus. The Harris campaign spent everything they took in, burning through virtually the whole billion. That’s not in and of itself a foolish thing; if they’d ended the campaign with a lot of unspent money, one could wonder if it could have been used strategically to change the election outcome. Elon Musk alone spent $250 million to elect Donald Trump, so the campaign was up against a formidable amount of money on the other side. (Although Trump ultimately spent far less than Harris.) The problem is that many of the Harris campaign’s spending decisions appear to have been egregiously poor, to the point where one can reasonably ask: How much of this campaign should be considered a scam, something that preyed on voters’ fears of Donald Trump and took their money for projects that had little real effect on the election’s outcome? 

The New York Times, for instance, has reported that even as the Harris campaign splurged on celebrity-filled events (including paying Oprah’s production company $1 million), in Philadelphia, many of the field offices “were filthy and lacked basic supplies like tables, chairs, cleaning products and printers, staff members said,” with city campaign staffers “being forced to raid the campaign’s better-stocked suburban offices or to raise money independently.” That is when they even had field offices, and in many predominantly Black neighborhoods “campaign staff members were operating out of public parks, grocery-store parking lots and church basements.” A volunteer told the Times: 

“There were no yard signs, there was no visibility, there were no T-shirts… There was nobody handing out literature. There were no bumper stickers. There was no sign that we were in the fight of our lives in the most important city in a presidential campaign.”

Even when there were T-shirts, they could be slapdash (one box of them said “Harriz-Walz”). A “get-out-the-vote bus tour for [Pennsylvania’s] Black mayors” had its funding pulled without explanation. The head of a pro-Harris group “recounted frantic campaign staff members in Philadelphia, Detroit and North Carolina calling him in the final weeks of the race to say they did not have enough money to provide food or water to volunteers.” In Georgia, a county party chair “said the Harris campaign’s get-out-the-vote operation had been nonexistent, even as he had pleaded for resources.” Black staff members reportedly felt that the Black vote was being taken for granted, and when they aired their complaints in a post-election call, Harris’s deputy campaign manager “told staff members that talking to the press would ruin their career prospects.” There appears to have been racism in the allocation of resources, with the campaign deliberately choosing to more heavily fund operations in white suburbs and neglecting Black urban centers. (Perhaps on the theory that the Democrats had already successfully appeased Black voters by selecting a Black woman.) Organizers “said they were told not to engage in the bread-and-butter tasks of getting out the vote in Black and Latino neighborhoods” and instead were turned “into glorified telemarketers.” As a result, Harris staffers resorted to going rogue and setting up their own unauthorized operations in a desperate attempt to get out the Black vote. 

As operations targeting Black voters were starved, the Harris campaign spent lavishly on other things, “paying for an avalanche of advertising, social-media influencers, a for-hire door-knocking operation, thousands of staff, pricey rallies, a splashy Oprah town hall, celebrity concerts and even drone shows.” They “spent roughly twice as much as Trump in the final days of the race.” Harris ally Bakari Sellers comments that “We had so much money it was hard to get it out the door.” Not that they didn’t try, and the Times reports that “a bevy of consultants, allies and others were often angling for a cut.” Some of them seem to have succeeded and “four companies received at least $90 million in payments as of mid-October, including one firm whose cumulative receipts from the Harris campaign approached $300 million.” There was “$2.5 million directed toward three digital agencies that work with online influencers” and “the campaign spent around $900,000 to book advertising on the exterior of the Sphere venue in Las Vegas.” YouTube host Roland Martin received $350,000 from the campaign for a “media buy,” at least part of which appeared to consist of an interview on his show that racked up under 130,000 views. (The Harris campaign never offered to pay Current Affairs $350,000 to come on our show, not that it would have mattered since we don’t take bribes.) Al Sharpton’s nonprofit received $500,000 from the campaign ahead of his MSNBC interview of Harris, which was, unsurprisingly, friendly. Democratic megadonor John Morgan says that consultants saw the giant pool of money as being like getting the “keys to the candy store,” and concludes that much of the money was essentially stolen, albeit legally. 

Some of this seems to have been simply bad decision-making. Harris made the same error that Hillary Clinton did in 2016, deploying resources in states like Texas that she was clearly not going to win that could have instead been used in states she desperately needed to win. “We spent money in stupid ways because we had a really bad strategy,” a former DNC consultant told Puck. They even bought an expensive TV ad in Florida, a state Harris knew she wouldn’t win, just to “troll” Donald Trump. Other aspects make the Harris campaign look like little more than a multi-level marketing scheme. For instance, they spent “$111 million in online ads seeking donations,” in other words ads asking for money to pay for more ads asking for money! I was struck over this campaign season by how many texts I got just pleading with me urgently to SEND MORE MONEY. I never did, even though I did not want Trump to win the election, because I had zero confidence that the money would actually end up being spent on anything useful. Turns out, this lack of confidence was fully justified, because your donation might well have gone to a drone show production company, or Oprah’s staff, or to pointlessly build a set for a podcast (which reportedly cost $100,000 yet had “cardboard walls,” raising the question of who got the money), or just toward sending you even more texts. What it did not go toward, apparently, was adequately funding field offices in Black neighborhoods. 

Now, much and probably most of Harris’s campaign spending was legitimate and sensible. Much of the money was spent on ordinary campaign expenditures. But with over a billion dollars being spent in just over 100 days, and staff hurrying to get the money out the door, the existing reporting suggests that a shocking amount may have been squandered. Of course, Harris had a significant disadvantage: thanks to Joe Biden’s stubborn insistence on staying in the race despite his obvious incapacity, Harris had to take over an operation that she did not build and had a short time to sell herself. I am sure that many decisions had to be made quickly and it was often thought that it was better to overpay than to risk losing the election. Nevertheless, from the Times’ reporting, it seems that many decisions were utterly inexcusable, such as giving huge amounts to consultants while starving those in Black areas who were pleading for adequate funds. Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville says that the irresponsible use of money by the campaign has led to almost “unfathomable” damage for the party, because people are no longer going to have confidence that Democrats know how to spend donations well. Carville has called for a full audit of how the Harris campaign made a billion dollars disappear only to perform substantially worse than Joe Biden had in 2020.

From the most cynical perspective (which I happen to think may be close to the truth), what happened here is in part that a whole class of people exists to make money off political campaigns and doesn’t particularly care whether their candidate wins or loses. Barack Obama relied on millions of volunteers, and the advantage of volunteers is that you know they’re there because they want to help the candidate win, so they lack an incentive to take the campaign’s money and give little in return. Harris spent “about $50 million… for paid door-to-door canvassers,” and I wonder how good a job they did for the money. 

I do think the focus needs to be on how abysmally the Democrats have failed to offer a program or achievements that make people feel their needs are being met. I have an article in the upcoming print edition of Current Affairs on what we can learn from looking back at FDR and the New Deal, which transformed many people’s lives and made them feel the government was actually looking out for them. But as the Democratic Party leaders’ ideology has become hollow, it’s not surprising that their operations, too, seem like they are the kinds of organizations that would be built by people who don’t really believe in anything, a consultant class completely out of touch with on-the-ground organizing. All they know how to do is demand money and spend it on nonsense, like a big light-up sphere or a concert with celebrities. It is not quite a scam on the level of Bernie Madoff or the crypto industry, but it is certainly a kind of fraud, because it relies on convincing good people to part with their money, thinking they are paying for one kind of thing when they may in fact be paying for something they wouldn’t want to fund if they understood where the money goes. It’s deceptive and wrong, and I suspect we haven’t heard the last of the damning reports about how spectacularly this campaign failed.