By the close of September, Kamala Harris’ campaign had raised more than $1 billion in support of her candidacy, NBC News and multiple outlets reported earlier today. The amount raised includes not only monies raised by the campaign itself, but also joint efforts with the Democratic National Committee and its state affiliates.
It took the vice president only two months to pull those funds together, making NBC News and other mainstream outlets concede that the excitement around Harris–unlike the center poet WB Yeats wrote of during the First World War–would appear to have held. Surely her debate performance helped, as likely the slippages Trump has demonstrated–along with his messages of doom, gloom and hate–did.
The Times had this to say:
“Past presidential candidates, including Joseph R. Biden and Mr. Trump four years ago, have [each] raised more than $1 billion together with their parties.
Mr. Trump announced that he had surpassed that mark in July 2020, after he had been raising funds for his re-election for multiple years.
It is the sheer speed with which Ms. Harris has reached the $1 billion threshold that is notable. No presidential candidate is believed to have ever raised so much so fast after entering a race…”
Trump has rich friend too! (Maybe just not as hopeful friends.)
Elon Musk, who has ensured he is seen and known as the super villain he perhaps always has been, has made his super PAC–and a whole bunch of in-kind advertising–work for Trump. There are others in the vulgarly wealthy class–Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, for example–who are doing the most they can for the ex-president. But it may not be enough. Voters may need the one thing Trump is almost universally incapable of offering: hope.
Of course there are many who don’t read anything credible–evidence-based–about the economy or the state of the world Trump left in his wake. Perhaps they feel something like hope in Trump, who may not feed them and may let them die of one disease of despair or another, but will never let them die not thinking that their whiteness was the only saving grace they ever needed.
More legitimately, hope for a Trump presidency lives among members of the vulgarly wealthy class who most certainly would have even grander tax shelter under his rule. And as for rights, they could be bought, sort of like they are now, only probably more openly, probably without shame. But these truths generate something like hope. Not the thing itself.
Source: Bettmann / Getty
A legacy unbroken
That kind of hope has been seeded in Kamala Harris’ run only–rightly or wrongly, but without question, observably, tactilely. People feel it. Black people above all. We know it and we know it soul-deep. It’s the kind of hope bequeathed us across 20 generations foremothers and forefathers who clung to hope even in a nation that was founded as their death camp. A nation that many ways, is still a death camp for their progeny.
What MAGAs don’t feel is the kind of hope felt by families of women who died as a result of inaccessible or wildly subpar reproductive healthcare. It’s a thick, desperate hope: Not another mother’s daughter will be lost. Nor is it the hope felt by parents whose children grew up to be soldiers who never made it home alive after serving on an American war theater’s stage: Please do not let the next leader of this country publicly and cruelly dishonor my baby. Please god please.
And it isn’t the kind of hope that lives in rumbling stomachs of at least 1 in 3 Black children: Can the next billion dollars raised please help us eat?
SEE ALSO:
‘Say Her Name’: At DNC, Kerry Washington, VP Harris’ Grandnieces, Teach America How To Properly Pronounce ‘Kamala’
Black Voter Registration Rates Surge Amid Kamala Harris’ Historic Candidacy, Data Shows
