Vice President Kamala Harris raised $47 million in the first 24 hours following her debate with former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night, a sum that will likely expand a widening funding gap between the two campaigns.
That tally, shared by the Harris campaign with The New York Times, included donations from 600,000 people. It is her largest 24-hour fund-raising period since an initial burst of donations when she entered the race in July and raised $81 million on the first day.
Ms. Harris already had a significant financial edge over Mr. Trump entering September. Her operation said it had $404 million cash on hand, while Mr. Trump had $295 million. Ms. Harris’s campaign nearly tripled the Trump fund-raising in August.
Presidential debates often become fund-raising bonanzas because of their audience: 67 million people watched Tuesday’s contest live, not including likely millions more watching on a variety of websites and streaming platforms. And Ms. Harris was widely seen as commanding the performance, with the rush of donations evidence of Democratic enthusiasm.
The Trump campaign has not released a similar fund-raising figure after the debate, and several major Trump donors have voiced concern about his performance and how it could hurt at least high-dollar fund-raising. The largest 24-hour figure his team has announced was following his felony conviction in May when he raised nearly $53 million online. That same day, Timothy Mellon, a reclusive banking heir, also donated $50 million to a pro-Trump super PAC.
There is some concern inside the Harris operation that the lopsided fund-raising figures announced in July and August — when Ms. Harris and the Democratic Party raised a combined $671 million compared to $269 million for Mr. Trump and the Republicans — could dampen Democratic giving among small donors this fall.
“We cannot let up,” the campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, wrote in a memo over the weekend to members of the campaign’s national finance committee. Before the debate, the campaign encouraged members of the committee to try to collect as much money as possible around the evening.
While the Harris operation has an edge financially over the Trump team, Ms. O’Malley Dillon wrote that their “campaign strategy relies on a wide map,” which is costly. Mr. Trump’s advisers see one of the most efficient electoral paths to the White House in holding onto North Carolina while winning back Pennsylvania and Georgia, swing states won by President Biden in 2020.
“Trump is all in on one to two ‘must win’ states,” Ms. O’Malley Dillon wrote. “We don’t have that luxury.”
The Harris campaign and its allies are currently scheduled to outspend their Republican counterparts on television and radio by about $130 million in the final six weeks of the race, according to AdImpact. But several of the Republican groups are heavily dependent on individual donors — such as Mr. Mellon or the billionaire philanthropist Miriam Adelson — so Republicans could become competitive with Democrats in paid media quickly with the help of just one large check.
Democratic outside groups, too, are likely to report and spend enormous sums of cash in the closing months of the tight race.
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