Harris campaign's spending comes under scrutiny

Vice President Harris’s campaign is seeing growing scrutiny over its spending strategy as Democrats continue to reckon with her devastating loss to President-elect Trump. 

Harris’s campaign blew through more than $1 billion in spending, and her team was reportedly left $20 million in the red after the election — though her campaign has vowed there will be no debt listed on the next campaign finance filings. 

While Democrats acknowledge Harris faced an uphill climb given President Biden’s late exit from the race in July, her loss of all seven swing states and the popular vote to Trump has prompted the party look inward for answers.

“Everybody fell short,” said James Zogby, a longtime member of the Democratic National Committee.

Zogby explained that if you’re going to be sending out emails asking members of the party for money, “then we ought to be able to say to people, ‘and here's what we did with it.’” 

Recent reports have placed a greater spotlight on the Harris campaign’s spending and debt as the party reels from a decisive defeat in the presidential race. 

Some members of the party have questioned the campaign’s tactics, including spending money on production costs associated with celebrity-studded events with Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé and others.

Democratic strategist Jon Reinish wondered if, instead of using the money on some of those events, “could that have been put into a podcast strategy? A Hispanic communication strategy focused on men, a much more effective series of outreach to Black men?”

Rodell Mollineau, a Democratic strategist who has advised the pro-Biden super PAC Unite the Country, said that while the Harris campaign did not have the luxury of raising money early because of when it began, there should be some scrutiny of the spending.  

"When you lose an election and there's that much money there, there are definitely going to be arrows flung at you,” he said. “As part of the autopsy of this campaign, an audit of all funding should be done so we understand what went right and what went wrong. When you lose, you question everything, but we shouldn't start with, ‘Every dollar that was spent was stupid money.’" 

Mollineau also said there should be similar audits of super PAC money, since the "soft side" didn't have the same time restraints as Harris.

While her campaign suffered a decisive defeat in every battleground state, the margins in each state were largely narrow, with the team crediting its “fundraising prowess” for keeping the race tight. 

“Because of Vice President Harris’s unparalleled fundraising prowess, we were able to run an aggressive all-of-the-above strategy to reach voters, keeping the seven battleground states incredibly close,” said Patrick Stauffer, chief financial officer of the Harris campaign. 

Democrats, including the campaign, say Harris was handed a nearly impossible task with taking the helm of the Democratic ticket roughly three months before the election.

"In a historically short amount of time, Harris for President had to do the near impossible: reach a divided electorate, break through a fragmented media environment, and introduce our candidate to the American people — especially undecided, lower information voters,” a Harris campaign spokesperson said.

The spokesperson added that the campaign had "invested more and earlier than ever before into Latino media and outreach.”

Harris’s former communications director, Jamal Simmons, noted there were problems at the top of the ticket long before Harris became the nominee.

“We didn’t know how frail Joe Biden would appear at the debate, but maybe other people did know,” he said, referring to Biden’s disastrous debate performance that led to him stepping aside.

Simmons also argued that he believed Biden’s team could have done a better job blunting Republican attacks against Harris long before she became the nominee.

“The problems with the Harris campaign were long simmering. They weren’t problems of the last 100 days,” he said. “The Biden White House should have been advertising on her behalf much earlier to counteract the sustained assault Republicans have been waging against her online and on television for years.”

The extent of the Harris campaign’s spending and debt isn’t immediately clear, though they will come more into focus next month, after its post-campaign filing Dec. 5.

While the Harris campaign is learning hard lessons from the election, members of the party also think there are things it did well.

“The Oprah interview was a very creative experiment in direct-to-consumer political productions and there are costs associated with that,” Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic strategist and former senior adviser to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, wrote on social media. “I would expect to see MORE of this type of thing in the future, rather than less, and think it was a steal for $1m in production costs.” 

Amie Parnes contributed.