Kamala Harris‘s campaign survived a brutal few weeks of fund-raising in July to bounce back so dramatically before the end of the month that she more than doubled the amount of money raised by Donald Trump, her campaign announced on Friday. The Harris campaign, which for the first 20 days of July was the Biden campaign, said it had raised $310 million during the month, including $200 million in just 7 days after Biden dropped out of the race.
The Trump campaign and its own allies said Thursday that they had collected $139 million in July, an enormous sum but well short of Harris campaign’s. The Harris campaign raised almost as much in July as the Biden campaign had raised in March, April, May and June combined. The surge in fund-raising has allowed Democrats, for the first time in months, to have a cash-on-hand advantage over Republicans. The Harris campaign said it now had $377 million in its war chest, in contrast to the $327 million that the Trump campaign has said it has.
Neither campaign disclosed precisely how much of the money was raised or held by the campaigns themselves versus their allied party committees.
Democrats’ fund-raising was said to have plummeted in the first three weeks of the month, in the aftermath of Mr. Biden’s disastrous debate, although precise figures were not known or released by the Biden campaign. But after Mr. Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, the fund-raising spigot was opened wide. The $200 million that the Harris campaign said it had raised in the week after Mr. Biden ended his re-election bid was more than Mr. Biden’s haul in the first three months of the year.
The Trump campaign’s own fund-raising was strong – and most likely would have far outstripped the Democrats’ had the party not changed its standard-bearer. The $139 million raised in July amounted to one of the Trump team’s strongest fund-raising months to date, just off the sum raised in May, when Mr. Trump’s supporters responded to his felony conviction with $141 million in donations.