Not long after Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election, her senior advisers and the Democratic National Committee struck a handshake deal.
Ms. Harris still had bills piling up, and campaign officials had counted on raising more money during a prolonged fight over tallying votes. Instead, the race was called early in the morning after Election Day.
The private agreement was this: The party would pick up the tab for any outstanding 2024 bills, allowing Ms. Harris to claim she did not end the race in debt. In turn, Ms. Harris would raise the money to cover all of those leftover costs, leaving the party whole financially as it sought to navigate the second Trump era.
Left in the dark were the small donors who received nearly 100 email solicitations sent from the Harris operation this year alone on behalf of the D.N.C. The emails did not disclose that funds raised from those emails were essentially earmarked for leftover bills. Convincing donors, both big and small, to pay for debts is typically a tough sell.
The arrangement was described by four people with knowledge of it and corroborated through Federal Election Commission disclosures. The people spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Though the deal was struck before the current party chairman, Ken Martin, was elected in February, it has continued during his tenure.
The total tally in post-election bills that the D.N.C. has covered so far is $20.5 million, federal records show. While significant, that sum amounted to less than 2 percent of the $1.5 billion that the presidential campaign spent in 15 weeks.
”The vice president is committed to building a strong, resilient Democratic Party equipped to fight for the people and shape our future,” Kirsten Allen, a senior adviser to Ms. Harris, said in a statement. “She continues to work hand in hand with the D.N.C. to invest in core infrastructure, grow grass-roots support, and ensure we have the resources to win — not just in the next election, but for years to come.”
Roger Lau, the executive director of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement that the party appreciated “the strong support from the vice president as a grass-roots fund-raiser working in concert with the D.N.C.”
“The D.N.C. has raised more grass-roots dollars in 2025 than in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2023, not including sends from the vice president,” he added.
The D.N.C. began 2025 with $22.1 million in the bank and entered this month with $13.9 million.
The agreement with Ms. Harris helps to explain the seeming dissonance between the party’s promotion of record fund-raising while it reports dwindling cash on hand.
There is no sign that the arrangement violated any campaign finance rules. National parties have broad latitude to assume a portion of presidential campaign costs, and many campaigns end in debt, such as the $20 million in party debt after President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election victory.
But the accounting sleight-of-hand after 2024 has had a number of important effects.
For one thing, it served to obscure the extent of Ms. Harris’s unpaid bills after her $1.5 billion campaign. The post-election payouts for 2024 expenses have included money for chartered planes, polling, music licensing and millions in fees to an agency that does online influencer work.
For another, it brightened the appearance of the D.N.C.’s overall fund-raising early this year because the Harris operation was raising so much for the D.N.C. “The D.N.C. has just set a new record for most money raised in the first four months under a new chair — ever,” Mr. Martin said in a June news release.
Yet nearly 20 cents of every dollar that the party spent in the first seven months of 2025 went toward retiring these leftover campaign bills, records show.
Perhaps most significantly, the deal kept hidden from donors that Ms. Harris’s repeated, earnest and often urgent solicitations for the D.N.C. were, in fact, going to settle old bills from her campaign.
“They will put your donation to work immediately toward winning the next set of elections,” Ms. Harris wrote in an email in February to supporters.
In reality, there was a ledger of how much she was raising and how much was paid for old bills, three people familiar with the arrangement said.
In addition to the digital fund-raising, Ms. Harris headlined two large donor events for the D.N.C. this year.
Saurav Ghosh, the director of federal campaign finance reform for the Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group, said the party appeared to have followed all the reporting rules, even if the process was not the most transparent.
“It’s not completely forthright but it’s also far from the most exploitative of campaign practices we see happening,” he said.
One Harris adviser, granted anonymity to discuss the financial arrangement, noted that the party would receive long-term benefits from the new donors the former vice president had brought into the fold. According to the Harris operation, its emails and texts had so far generated nearly $900,000 in new recurring contributions for the D.N.C. that the party can use for any purpose. The party expanded its network by nearly 50,000 donors who were not previously on the party’s email list, the Harris team said.
In the immediate aftermath of the election, the Harris team denied that there would be any campaign debts. Patrick Stauffer, the campaign’s chief financial officer, told The New York Times in November that “there will be no debt” on the D.N.C. and Harris campaign’s post-election filings and that “there were no outstanding debts or bills overdue” as of the election.
That was technically true. There were no debts on the next report. Yet the party has since reported paying $20.5 million in Harris campaign expenses as “party coordinated expenditures” from 2024, according to federal records filed between late November 2024 and the end of July 2025.
The spending includes $3.5 million to the company that works with influencers, the Village Marketing Agency; $2.1 million to a media production company, Assembly House LLC; nearly $440,000 to a chartered plane company; and $100,000 to an entertainment and production firm, SpringHill Company, co-founded by LeBron James.
The D.N.C.’s finances, meanwhile, are on shaky ground.
Money is so tight that party officials began discussing whether the committee should consider tapping a line of credit, The New York Times reported in late June.
The party that holds the White House often raises more than the one that does not. Still, the D.N.C.’s cash disadvantage with the Republican National Committee is especially large. The R.N.C. entered August with six times as much money as the Democrats do: $84.3 million.
A review of email fund-raising requests shows the Harris spigot has now turned off. There has not been a single email in August that the Harris operation has sent that benefited the D.N.C. — down from more than a dozen per month early in the year.
The emails sent through the KamalaHarris.com domain started to slow in July, and so did the D.N.C.’s small-dollar fund-raising. The party raised $3.25 million in donations of less than $200 last month, the worst month of the year, though donations do often dip in the summer.
It is not clear if nearly all the remaining Harris bills had been fully paid or covered with fund-raising, but the payments have slowed to a trickle.
The last Harris expense that the party reported paying, according to disclosures made public last week, was in July. It was $498,287.30 to Howard University, the site of Ms. Harris’s concession speech.
Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
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