Vice President Kamala Harris has raised $200 million for her presidential campaign in less than a week, her campaign announced Sunday, as she hopes the surge will improve her chances of defeating President Donald Trump.
Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler called it a “record-breaking result.”
“Of those, 66 percent came from first-time donors, further evidence of the tremendous grassroots support for the vice president,” he said.
Harris urgently needs to boost fundraising to make up for a drop in donations to President Joe Biden after his disastrous debate defeat against Trump in late June.
Harris raised more in one week than Biden and Trump combined in June. Biden’s campaign raised just under $63.8 million last month, about $42 million less than Trump, according to Open Secrets.
The Trump campaign and its affiliated political action committees had raised a total of about $757 million as of the end of last month, including $431.2 million from April through June, according to campaign finance data.
Before Biden dropped out of the race, groups linked to him had raised $746 million, including $332.4 million in the second quarter.
The race has changed dramatically in the week since Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed his vice president as his successor.
Harris’ candidacy has quickly unified the Democratic Party and given her a modest advantage over Trump in opinion polls compared with Biden’s record.
She is vetting potential vice presidential candidates and plans to announce her choice within the next two weeks.
But at a fundraiser in Massachusetts on Saturday, Harris acknowledged that Trump still has the edge in the election, which will be held in early November, 100 days from now.
“We are the underdogs in this race, but this is a people-powered race,” Harris told donors.
On Saturday night, two weeks after the assassination attempt, Trump slammed Harris at a rally in Minnesota, calling her “evil” as he sought to adjust his campaign to target her instead of Biden.
“If a crazy liberal like Kamala Harris gets elected, the American Dream will die,” Trump said.
President Trump briefly called for “unity” in American politics after the attempt on his life, but on Saturday he suggested the time for flattery was over.
“People say, ‘I think he’s changed. I think he’s different from where he was two weeks ago. Something has affected him,'” Trump told the crowd. “No, I haven’t changed. Maybe I’ve gotten worse, because I get angry at the incompetence that I see every day.”
President Trump drew criticism on Friday after telling a group of Christian conservatives that if they cooperated in this year’s presidential election, they “won’t have to vote anymore” in four years.
Harris and her campaign have also focused on attacking Trump. She has sought to highlight that he poses a threat to fundamental American freedoms, from abortion and voting rights to economic security. She has also described Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, as bizarre and extreme.
“As you may be aware, Donald Trump has told outrageous lies about my record, and some of the things he and his running mate have said are, well, just bizarre. I mean, you put that in a box,” she said Saturday.
Trump was leading national polls by 3.2 percentage points when Biden dropped out of the race, according to the Fivethirtyeight.com average, but Harris has shown signs of closing the gap since then.
An ABC/Ipsos poll conducted Sunday found that more voters have a favorable view of the vice president than unfavorably (43% to 42%). In the same poll conducted last week, 35% had a favorable view and 46% had an unfavorable view.
According to a Wall Street Journal poll, Trump leads Harris by 2 percentage points in head-to-head races among registered voters, but 1 percentage point behind her when third-party candidates are included. Polls in battleground states are also tight, including a Fox News poll that shows Trump and Harris neck-and-neck in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, a Republican who was once a critic of Trump but now supports him, acknowledged that Ms Harris’ entry into the race would create a “whole new race” and give Democrats “momentum” heading into next month’s convention.
But he also said the “honeymoon” period would end in September and Trump would be able to deliver a better message as long as he avoided “personal attacks” and focused on policy differences, including on the economy and immigration.
“I hope that the numbers, the polls, will help Donald Trump understand what’s worked and what’s not worked,” Sununu told ABC.
But on the same television show, Illinois Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker said the winds were clearly swinging in Harris’ favor. “The electorate is fired up, the Democrats are ready. You’ve seen hundreds of thousands of people signing up to volunteer,” he said.