Kamala Harris stunningly ended her 2024 presidential campaign leaving Democrats $20 million in debt.
But her defeated campaign’s joint fundraising committee is still charging supporters recurring donations that were set up during the vice president’s bid for a promotion, according to a new report from Politico.
And many feel seeing the continued charge on their credit cards adds salt to the wound of an already stinging loss.
The Harris Victory Fund did not seek donors’ explicit approval to keep withdrawing cash after the 2024 election on November 5, 2024. Rather, an email claims they would continue seeing the charge ‘until you contact us’ to stop it.
A staffer who worked on former Sen. Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign says that the charges are ‘super shady’ and called it a sort of ‘grift.’
They disclosed how Romney’s campaign immediately canceled all recurring donations a few days after his election loss to President Barack Obama.
‘These people didn’t sign up to be paying bills in January,’ the former Romney staffer claimed.
The move is also seen as tone deaf and ‘out of touch’ considering Harris drove her party into massive debt and ran up a huge bill after taking over President Joe Biden’s campaign.
There’s usually an expectation that campaigns shut down recurring donations once their bid for office ends – whether in victory or defeat.
A Democratic National Committee official explained to Politico that the Harris Victory Fund is defunct.
They claim that the contributions collected for Harris’ campaign through recurring charges set up during the 2024 presidential race are now transferred to the DNC ‘to help Democrats across the country as we rebuild the party.’
‘It’s silly, out of touch, and needlessly takes advantage of our most loyal supporters,’ one Democrat told Politico when sharing screenshots of charges to their accounts continuing into the new year.
Donors spent $4.7 billion backing both the Democratic and Republican tickets in the 2024 presidential election.
Federal Election Commission data shows that Harris and her Democratic allied groups raised roughly $2.9 billion over the Republicans who brought in $1.8 billion to back Trump’s third straight White House bid.
Mike Nellis, who runs Democratic online fundraising firm Authentic, said that among losing campaigns ‘there’s an expectation that they’re going to shut down the recurring donations because there’s no need.’
He admitted, however, that there is some ‘comfort’ in knowing that the committee is rolled into donating the funds to the DNC as long as they are transparents to their donors about where the money is going.
Recurring contributions are a common tactic in political campaigns to secure steady bankroll for the election. Many candidates and the groups backing them encourage supporters to sign up for low recurring donations rather than higher, one-time contributions.