Broke Kamala Harris Fund Still Cash Grabbing Two Months After Loss
An email from the Harris Victory Fund revealed that it will keep charging donors “until you contact us.”
Saul Loeb/AFP
More than two months after Vice President Kamala Harris lost to President-elect Donald Trump, the joint fundraising committee she set up with the Democratic National Committee is still charging recurring donors, according to a Politico report.
Some of them are miffed.
“It’s silly, out of touch, and needlessly takes advantage of our most loyal supporters,” one Democrat told Politico, sharing screenshots of charges to their accounts continuing into January.
They said the Harris Victory Fund did not seek their explicit approval to keep withdrawing cash, instead saying in an email that they would continue “until you contact us.”
A former staffer for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign who spoke to Politico said they found the charges “super shady” and compared them to “grifting.” They added that Romney’s campaign cancelled all recurring donations a few days after losing the election that year.
“These people didn’t sign up to be paying bills in January,” the former Romney staffer said.
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A DNC official told Politico that the Harris Victory Fund is defunct and the contributions being collected are transferred to the DNC “to help Democrats across the country as we rebuild the party.”
Donors spent $4.7 billion in backing the Democratic and Republican presidential tickets and their allied groups during last year’s campaign.
Harris, the Democrats and their allied groups raised roughly $2.9 billion to the Republican’s $1.8 billion, according to Federal Elections Commission data.
“There’s an expectation that they’re going to shut down the recurring donations because there’s no need,” Mike Nellis, who runs Democratic online fundraising firm Authentic, said of losing campaigns.
However, he said he was “more than comfortable” if the committee is rolled into donating to the DNC “so long as it’s transparent to the donor and compliant with ActBlue and the FEC.”
Online donation collections, meanwhile, are a longtime, bipartisan pain, with everyday Americans the only victims.
During the 2020 presidential election, Trump’s campaign set up weekly recurring donations as the default option for online donors, burying the opt-out in fine print and charging his supporters tens of millions.
In the process, the Trump campaign essentially gave itself an interest free loan while some supporters said they unknowingly had their rent or grocery money taken.
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