Nearly three million donors, each of whom gave just over $120 on average to help Kamala Harris win. On Friday, the Democratic candidate’s campaign team rightly boasted that August was “the best month of grassroots fundraising in presidential history,” “about triple the fundraising of the Trump team.” It also congratulated itself on the fact that 1.3 million of these contributors were newcomers since the start of the election cycle. As a result, the vice president’s coffers have already been filled with $615 million.
This success highlights the tremendous growth in election funding by small donors, or “grassroots donors,” since 2020. The record is even more impressive if we consider not the calendar month ($361 million in August), but the first thirty days of a campaign that began on July 21, with Joe Biden’s withdrawal: Kamala Harris attracted $540 million in donations to her name. A golden month, compared to the very good months of Barack Obama (2008, 2012) or Hillary Clinton (2016), which were ten times less spectacular…