Democratic National Committee leaders are frustrated over the prospect of facing a multimillion-dollar debt from Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, Axios reported Wednesday.
DNC chairman Jaime Harrison privately criticized the Harris campaign’s spending and expressed concerns about the scale of its debt, sources told Axios. While the campaign raised just over $1 billion in contributions, the Harris-Walz ticket and its allies spent nearly $1.4 billion on political ads alone, outspending the Trump-Vance campaign and Republican groups by about $460 million.
The debt could hinder the Democratic Party’s efforts to rebuild and prepare for upcoming elections, according to Axios. DNC leaders are worried about a repeat of the aftermath of Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, which left the committee over $2 million in debt by late 2015—a strain Hillary Clinton’s team believes contributed to her defeat in the 2016 presidential race.
It remains unclear exactly how much debt Harris’s team accumulated as the campaign is still receiving bills from vendors, Axios reported.
Harris ended her presidential bid with at least a $20 million debt, a source familiar with her campaign confirmed to NewsNation this week. The campaign has sought to make up for the losses by continuing to solicit donations from supporters and selling its email list, according to reports last week.
Many Democrats, including Harris staffers, remain perplexed over how President-elect Donald Trump secured such a decisive victory despite the Harris campaign’s massive spending on high-profile rallies and ads.
“We lost all the swing states. We lost in every county in America,” said Lindy Li, a member of the DNC finance committee. “This is just astounding. This is not some like blip. This is an avalanche.”
“How do you raise a historic amount of money and not win a single swing state?” a Harris aide asked. “The honest answer is: I don’t know. It seems we lost the national narrative, and that’s what we need to diagnose.”
