For decades, Kamala Harris has been bolstered by a tight-knit group of female donors who rose up with her in Democratic politics. And for weeks, even when she was still insisting that President Biden would be the party’s nominee, these allies began to make moves to make sure her historic campaign would not be built on the fly.
Quickly and quietly, her biggest supporters worked to rally support around her, creating enough momentum to effectively stamp out any opposition. They collected money, cut ads in advance and worked their networks to monitor the moves of other hopefuls.
On Sunday, when Mr. Biden announced his exit from the race and endorsed Vice President Harris, all the behind-the-scenes maneuvering appeared to pay off. The nation’s highest-ranking female officeholder, Ms. Harris rapidly picked up pivotal endorsements without attracting a single serious challenger. Money started flooding in. Ads began moving. And while some major Democratic donors remained on the hunt for a non-Harris candidate on Monday, their efforts were appearing increasingly futile by the hour.
Some Democratic donors who are not immediately supporting Ms. Harris — including former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Silicon Valley leaders such as Reed Hastings and Vinod Khosla — called for a competitive process, which Democratic donors and fund-raisers have been interpreting as something of a code to say they are not eager to support Ms. Harris against former President Donald J. Trump.
“The decision is too important to rush, because the election is too important to lose,” Mr. Bloomberg said on Monday.
The scale of the dissenters’ fortunes means that Ms. Harris’s team may not be able to fully ignore them, and now her allies’ task will be to silence — or at least muffle — remaining doubts. Donors and fund-raisers on Sunday and Monday were racing to put together briefings and calls with other donors, and to get pro-Harris ads on television, to capture whatever momentum Ms. Harris might harness.
“I work with women from Chicago from every socioeconomic background, and they’re all really freaking psyched,” said Lauren Harper, who helps lead the Chicago fund-raising chapter of what was called Women for Biden and is being renamed “Women for Kamala.”
Alexandra Acker-Lyons, a Democratic fund-raiser with roots in the Bay Area, began collecting pledges from prominent female Democratic donors in support of a Harris bid last Thursday, one of the earliest, most explicit pro-Harris efforts. Andrea Dew-Steele, a Democratic fund-raiser who served on Ms. Harris’s National Finance Committee in 2020 and has been friends with her since 2000, said she had spent the last few weeks funneling donors to groups like Emily’s List in preparation for any announcement.
“We were trying to make sure that we were ready for this moment,” she said. “I was just trying to prepare the ground.”
Should Ms. Harris win the nomination, her remarkable ascent would vault these California female backers such as Ms. Dew Steele and Ms. Acker-Lyons to the top of the heap in the Democratic campaign-finance industry — no small feat in a sphere dominated by men.
Some of the women behind Ms. Harris are already famous, both inside and outside Democratic power circles. For over a decade, Ms. Harris has had a particularly close friendship with the philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, one of the wealthiest women in the world, who hosted a fund-raiser for Ms. Harris in her Palo Alto backyard in 2013. The Silicon Valley billionaire would most likely play a bigger role in a Harris campaign owing to their friendship, people close to Ms. Harris say. Ms. Powell Jobs has yet to publicly comment on Ms. Harris’s bid.
Major female donors such as Karla Jurvetson and Susie Tompkins Buell have pledged their support to Ms. Harris. Ms. Tompkins Buell said she is planning a Harris event. Ms. Jurvetson, the vice chair of the board for Emily’s List, is not personally close to Ms. Harris but she had worked for weeks to encourage Mr. Biden to step aside, according to people familiar with her moves.
Other female Harris boosters are perhaps less well known, but no less loyal. Key backers over the last two-plus decades, according to people who know her social circle, include Joyce Newstat, a bundler who also sits on the board of Emily’s List; Quinn Delaney, part of a power couple in the East Bay who is set to host a fund-raiser for Mr. Biden later this week; and Stacy Mason, who has been among her biggest fund-raisers over the years.
Ms. Mason, who now runs a fund-raising platform for female candidates called WomenCount, said Sunday was the platform’s biggest fund-raising day since Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020.
Her organization was prepared with emails and links supporting the vice president, contributing to the sense of momentum that Ms. Harris has projected in the immediate aftermath of Mr. Biden’s shock decision.
Two super PACs targeting women, Emily’s List and One for All, are currently circulating pro-Harris ads to donors. Emily’s List has told donors it will aim to begin running their ads this week, according to a person briefed on the plans.
Publicly, in the first full day of Ms. Harris’s campaign, there was close to unanimity among major donors who said that they wanted to see her become the nominee. Multiple Democratic operatives and fund-raisers — together in touch with dozens of major givers — said they were aware of almost no pushback to a ticket led by Ms. Harris at this point.
But privately, some major donors and their advisers who worried about a Harris-led ticket were surveying their options to slow down what one described as a “stampede” in her direction, according to people close to the donor community.
Ideas abounded. There have been some preliminary talks between major donors about pooling their money into a combined entity that could show that there is a pledged amount of money that would go to a Democratic candidate who is not Ms. Harris, according to a person close to this group of donors.
But it’s unclear who that candidate could even be. Some donors last week had conversations about putting together an account meant to draft Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, one of the people close to these donors said. Ms. Whitmer on Monday publicly backed Ms. Harris.
A third person close to these Harris-apathetic donors said that several people, including Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, and Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who challenged President Biden in the Democratic primaries but attracted little support, had gotten calls or texts from these donors encouraging them on Sunday to consider a bid. But on Monday, most those efforts appeared to be for nought. Mr. Manchin, who left the party and is registered as an independent, said Monday on CBS News he would not be a presidential candidate. Ms. Raimondo backed Ms. Harris in a social media post.
The best way to quell doubters, her supporters believe, is to demonstrate her appeal with an outpouring of endorsements and a crush of high-dollar fund-raising events.
By far, Ms. Harris is the Democratic candidate on the surest financial footing: She will most likely have easy access to what was once the Biden campaign’s $96 million in presidential fund-raising, and $81 million flowed to her campaign after Mr. Biden’s decision, her campaign announced Monday.
On Monday, 300 donors piled into a conference call organized by a Harris fund-raiser, Stephanie Daily Smith, and attended by Ms. Harris’s chief of staff, Sheila Nix, and began to receive their marching orders, according to two people on the call. Ms. Harris is scheduled to appear at a sold-out fund-raiser in the Berkshires this week.
One donor, Ning Mosberger-Tang, is already in touch with her network to host an event with Norm Eisen, a longtime Washington lawyer, to support Ms. Harris.
“Ning and I will be co-hosting a Democratic unity fund-raiser ASAP with some of my colleagues from the Obama and Hillary finance committees,” Mr. Eisen said in an email to his network, which was seen by The Times. Two vocal Never Trump Republican voices, George Conway and Bill Kristol, are also said to be involved, Mr. Eisen said.
Ms. Harris’s coffers will be padded by whatever Mr. Biden brings in when he headlines a number of fund-raising events later this week in Texas, Colorado and California, according to a person close to the campaign. Mr. Biden is not planning on canceling the events, which would raise money for the Harris campaign, in part because the campaign has seen an explosion of interest from new co-hosts.
For some Democratic donors, even those who did not exuberantly back Ms. Harris, the conversation had already turned to a way they can exert influence in the veepstakes. One polling firm, Change Research, was already fielding a poll surveying Ms. Harris’s strength with various running mates, according to a person with knowledge of the poll.
“Donors behind the scenes are saying, who’s the best ticket to win?” said Mike Novogratz, a cryptocurrency investor who in recent weeks created a fund-raising vehicle called Next Generation PAC to raise money for a Biden successor. “And the donor community I speak to doesn’t think she’s the best to win, but everybody thinks she deserves a fair chance.”
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