In a statement issued Thursday night, Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign said it raised over $310 million in the month of July. The campaign had previously announced that Harris brought in $200 million during her first week as the presumptive nominee.
The staggering sum raised by the Democratic nominee is more than double the $137.8 million July total announced by the Trump campaign. Trump’s July haul is just off his best month ever, when his campaign raised $141 million in May following his conviction in the New York “hush money” trial.
While not the largest single month in presidential fundraising history, Harris’s July 2024 haul is the largest this presidential cycle and nearly as much as the $333 million that Trump raised in the entire 2016 campaign.
The Harris campaign attempted to present the fundraising total as an expression of “grassroots” support for the nominee. “The tremendous outpouring of support we’ve seen in just a short time makes clear the Harris coalition is mobilized, growing, and ready to put in the work to defeat Trump this November,” Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement.
The millions raised by Harris reflect the enormous support she has among the financial oligarchs, who are generally eager to back the former California senator and attorney general, knowing full well she will not champion policies that impinge on their colossal wealth.
Earlier this week, multiple news outlets reported the formation of “VCs for Kamala,” a collection of hundreds of venture capitalists, investors and tech CEOs who have signed a public letter pledging to vote for Harris. Politico reported that the group was started by Leslie Feinzaig, founder of the Seattle-based investment firm Graham & Walker.
Signatories include billionaires such as Mark Cuban, former owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team; Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, founder of Khosla Venture, and OpenAI investor; “angel investor” Ron Conway; and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. Conway and Hoffman, through a Super PAC they created, Clear Choice, have spearheaded efforts to block independent and left-wing candidates from appearing on the ballot.
As of this writing, 645 CEOs, managing partners, founders, directors and managers have signed onto the “VCs for Kamala” letter pledging to vote for Harris.
In an interview with Politico, Democratic Party bundler Steve Spinner said the formation of the group was intended to “push back to the narrative that Silicon Valley is now split” in light of far-right billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and David Sacks publicly supporting Trump.
“It’s still very, very much Democratic country out here, and now it’s Harris country,” Spinner said. “Just because there are a couple of big name, big ego investors that are for Trump—they do not speak for the broader tech community and the broader VC community out here. For every one person who’s backing Trump, there’s 20 who are backing Kamala.”
Andrew Byrnes, a lawyer in Silicon Valley and longtime booster of Harris, assured Politico in an interview last week that “she’s one of us.” Byrnes told the news outlet that after Biden dropped out, several “well-known tech lawyers in the Valley” signed up to bundle donations for the Harris campaign.
Bradley Tusk, CEO of Tusk Venture Partners and one of the signers of “VCs for Kamala,” told Politico he intended to donate at least $100,000 to her campaign. “As long as she seems viable, the money’s gonna be there,” he said.
The New York Times reported on July 31 that Harris is planning a fundraising trip to the San Francisco Bay Area in August.
On Friday, in a virtual roll call, Democratic Party delegates officially nominated Harris ahead of the convention in Chicago in two weeks. In the next week, Harris is expected to begin campaigning in several “battleground” states alongside her vice presidential pick. The first stop, on Tuesday, is currently slated to be Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
While Harris has yet to announce her pick, it appears increasingly likely that Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro will be the selection. In a highly produced video published Friday on Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker’s X/Twitter account, the Democratic mayor and several others encourage Pennsylvanians to support “Kamala Harris for president and Josh Shapiro for vice president!”
Philadelphia-based journalist Ernest Owens, citing “Philly political sources,” reported that the video was scheduled to be released on Monday “after VP Kamala Harris was expected to announce her pick.”
Shapiro is one of several governors who has been repeatedly named as a top choice for Harris. He defeated Trump-backed fascist Doug Mastriano for the position in 2022. Prior to being governor, Shapiro was the attorney general of Pennsylvania from 2017 to 2023.
Like Biden and Harris, Shapiro is an ardent defender of the Zionist state of Israel. He has led efforts to quash anti-genocide protests in Pennsylvania. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper this past April, Shapiro called for shutting down Gaza solidarity encampments, comparing the protesters to white supremacists.
He said that “the act of gathering, in the way that some of these students have at some of these universities, violates university policy and may violate the rules of that particular city or that particular state.
“That can’t be allowed in the name of free speech,” Shapiro continued. He added, “It is simply unacceptable. And you know what, we have to query whether or not we would tolerate this if this were people dressed up in KKK outfits or KKK regalia.”
Shapiro’s disdain for Palestinians and those who advocate in their defense apparently goes back decades. Earlier this week, a 1993 opinion article written by Shapiro, then a 20-year-old college student at the University of Rochester, was unearthed. In the article, the future governor argued that there will never be peace between Israelis and Palestinians because the latter “do not have the capabilities to establish their own homeland and make it successful even with the aid of Israel and the United States. They are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.”
Shapiro seemingly admitted to having previously been a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, writing of himself “as a Jew and a past volunteer in the Israeli army.”
In a statement to the Times of Israel, Shapiro’s spokesperson Manuel Bonder claimed that while in high school, Shapiro did a “service project” with “several classmates” on a kibbutz in Israel, where he “worked on a farm and at a fishery.”
Bonder added, “The program also included volunteering on service projects on an Israeli army base. At no time was he engaged in any military activities.”