Fifty Million Small Reasons in 12 Hours

Kamala Harris for President campaign roars out of the gate

Photo by Andrew Dawes on Unsplash

Kamala Harris for President campaign staffers are predicting their candidate will have enough committed democratic delegates this week to plan on victory at the August convention.

The mostly white male establishment is rolling out their negative “ we’re not racists, but Kamala isn’t [insert excuse here]” red carpet.

Daily Beast editors even found a Black woman willing to say she didn’t think the Vice President could win. The New York Times found a bunch of undecided Republicans who expressed doubts. The San Diego Union Tribune editorialized against Harris, saying if Democrats want to win, they should consider other options. I have no doubt that CNN has a reporter interviewing people in a diner somewhere saying… etcetera, etcetera. 

Suck it up, boys. Vice President Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee and she will beat Donald Trump like a rented mule. (I know, not politically correct. Apologies to mules everywhere.)

How do I know this? Two simple words: voter enthusiasm.

Kamala Harris for President raised FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS in small donations in the 12 hours after she became a candidate.  (Some are saying $70 million, but I could not verify the number) This wasn’t Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or DeVos family money; it was voters sending cash through donor portal ActBlue. These are donors who don’t need celebrity-laden galas to get motivated; they’re people who believe.

Above is a chart of hourly donations for the first 12 hours of the Harris for President campaign at ActBlue. Below is a chart of where donations were coming from. 

I’ve bounced around the media, alt-media, and social media in preparation for today’s writing (see also: Project 25 outline for domestic policy coming at 11am) and can say that people are excited about having someone-not-the-same to take on Donald Trump.

Fifteen out of the eighteen Trending Stories on progressive activist Daily Kos site at 8:30 am were supportive of the Harris candidacy. These are the people who go out and knock on doors, talk to their neighbors, and share a lot of good news when they are enthusiastic about a cause or a candidate.

Finally, there was the Zoom call last night, organized by Black women who intend to organize their communities for Kamala Harris. It had an upper limit of 1000 users; leaders of the chat appealed to the app’s management for more bandwidth, and drew in 40,000 participants over a four hour period.

The Trump campaign had bet the farm on portraying President Biden as weak vs Donald Trump as strong. On Saturday at the MAGA Michigan rally, their guy spent his time praising dictators and authoritarians from around the world.  

It took months of subtle and not-subtle commentary across media platforms to achieve the framing the Trump (and let’s face it, Putin) campaign wanted. 

Now Donald Trump is the Old Man Who Wanders Off in speeches. And he picked a hardcore forced birther as his Vice President. Now they are running against a woman who’s been the face of the reproductive rights campaign. A prosecutor against a criminal defendant. Not good.

As Congressman Jamie Raskin reportedly said, "JD Vance has no convictions. But Donald Trump has 34 of them, so maybe he can share." 

Trust me, insults will be coming from the right, but they won’t be in an organized chorus.

For now, the question for readers to mull over should be what will you do this fall? It doesn’t have to be supporting the Harris campaign (in California), but it should be turning the Blue Wave into a Blue Tsunami. 

I’ll quote Jill Filipovic to end this piece….

• Joe Biden is not a perfect man (just ask Anita Hill). He was toward the bottom of my 2020 primary picks. He has made many significant mistakes over the decades he has spent in political office, and most of them are squarely in the universes of issues I personally care about the most (women’s rights, abortion rights, refugees).

• I write all of that not to trash the president, but to say that Joe Biden doesn’t need hagiography to affirm what is clear. His presidency did tremendous good for millions of Americans. We are a better country today than we were four years ago, and a much better one than we would have been had Biden not won in 2020. And by relinquishing potential power for the good of the nation, and in defiance of his own interests, Biden carved out his own legacy in stark contrast to Trump’s. Politics is a cynical game, but Biden demonstrated that it is possible for a politician to not be a power-hungry narcissist willing to burn it all down to stroke his own ego. He chose what he eventually came to believe is best for the rest of us, if not for Joe Biden. It’s impossible to imagine Trump doing the same. That alone should make voters think twice about Trump in November.

• Given the character and behavior of so many politicians, I think we’d all be forgiven if we sometimes forget that politics is supposed to be about public service, not self-enrichment, ego, or personal power. Today is one of those rare days when writing about politics feels really good. That’s in part because of the history-making potential of a Kamala Harris presidency(!). But it’s also because Biden’s announcement is a reminder that politicians can indeed still choose to be public servants — including when their greatest act of service to the public is to put power in someone else’s hands.