Harris Raised $1 Billion. Where Did it All Go?

Kamala Harris raised more than $1 billion for her presidential campaign … which ultimately failed. In the afterglow of stunning defeat, some Democrats are now asking how she could have possibly spent anywhere near that much money and still lost her shot at the White House.

The Harris campaign finished out the race with at least $20 million in debt, two sources familiar told Politico’s Christopher Cadelago, who wrote on X Wednesday night that of the $1 billion Harris had raised, only $118 million remained in cash as of October 16.

With the realization that all of that spending ultimately accomplished very little and cost the party control of the White House and Senate (and maybe even the House), Democrats are now beginning to point fingers.

“We spent money in stupid ways because we had a really bad strategy,” a former consultant to the DNC told Puck’s Tara Palmeri. He cited money sent to fund Representative Colin Allred’s failed challenge against Texas Senator Ted Cruz, as well as money directed to help in Iowa, a state Democrats never, ever win. 

“Instead of owning any mistakes, or being transparent about the voter data and strategies that were so obviously wrong, they shut off their Twitter account and are patting each other on the back,” the former consultant said. “We dug out of a deep hole but not enough.”

Inside Harris’s crumbled campaign, some feel that they were misled about her chances, and led to believe it would be a margin-of-error race. In reality, Trump blew apart Harris’s play for the blue wall states and beat her by more than four million votes.

“People are depressed and frustrated about the overconfident leadership of the campaign,” one staffer told Axios.

One Biden staffer put it more simply: “How did you spend $1 billion and not win? What the fuck?”

Harris’s campaign budget was closely guarded by campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, so it’s unclear exactly how funds were allocated. An official for the DNC said that the majority of campaign spending was toward major events, paid media, and Harris’s supposedly expansive ground game—one that ultimately didn’t drum up that many votes at all.  

What’s clear is that Harris ran a very expensive campaign, one that dwarfed Donald Trump’s efforts. The campaign spent an average of $7.5 million a day in August, in comparison to the $2.7 million that Trump spent. In September, the Harris campaign spent $152 million on advertising, more than double the $63 million that Trump shelled out.

Unfortunately for Harris, dollars didn’t seem to translate into votes. And even after Harris lost, her campaign is still sending out slates of fundraising requests.

Conservatives are aiming high for their slash-and-burn goals during the next four years under a Republican trifecta, and next on the chopping block could be the Federal Reserve.

On Friday, incoming Department of Government Efficiency head and world’s richest man Elon Musk elevated a post on X (formerly Twitter) by Utah Senator Mike Lee, who posited that the central banking agency could be cut from the second MAGA administration.

“The Executive Branch should be under the direction of the president. That’s how the Constitution was designed,” Lee wrote Thursday night. “The Federal Reserve is one of many examples of how we’ve deviated from the Constitution in that regard. Yet another reason why we should #EndTheFed.”

During a press conference on Thursday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell addressed the mounting pressure against the financial institution by Donald Trump and his allies, telling a reporter that he would not step down from his post if Trump asked him to. Powell also noted that Trump’s election would “have no effects” on the central bank’s policymaking decisions “in the near term.”

Despite appointing Powell, Trump directed plenty of vitriol at the Fed chair during his first term in office. And the president-elect has been plenty vocal about his belief that the traditionally apolitical institution should bend the knee to his administration.

“I feel the president should have at least a say in there. Yeah, I feel that strongly,” Trump said during an August 8 press conference at Mar-a-Lago. “I think that, in my case, I made a lot of money, I was very successful, and I think I have a better instinct than, in many cases, people that would be on the Federal Reserve or the chairman.”

The Federal Reserve, which was created in 1913, has long been under attack by certain political subgroups in the United States, but Musk’s pointed attention toward the plan for control effectively brings it to the forefront of far-right thought.

In 2009, former Texas Representative Ron Paul—a flip-flopping libertarian—advocated for the demise of the central bank, arguing in his 2009 book End the Fed that in “the post-meltdown world, it is irresponsible, ineffective, and ultimately useless to have a serious economic debate without considering and challenging the role of the Federal Reserve,” which he claims prioritizes big banks in the U.S. financial system via bailouts and surreptitiously bankrolls U.S. warfare by way of inflation and devaluation.

But the Federal Reserve’s institutional predecessors, as well as the mere concept of central banking, have been contentious issues since the foundation of the country. Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury under the fledgling U.S. Constitution, argued in favor of a nationwide banking system to solve some of the country’s key issues in the aftermath of the Revolution.

The Democratic-Republican Party opposed the idea, perhaps most notably Thomas Jefferson, who believed that such a banking system would create a monopoly that could undermine smaller financial institutions and skew federal policy in favor of creditors over debtors, who tended to be plantation owners and farmers.

But Jefferson’s qualms would not thwart the inception of the institution, which proceeded to morph and reinvent itself over the nation’s 248-year history. Now, just about every nation in the world—especially every developed nation—has a central bank acting as the financial arm for its government. Stripping that away, which Trump’s key advisers seem to want to do, would place the United States on a short list alongside Andorra, the Isle of Man, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and a small handful of other nations.

Just hours after Donald Trump won the election, Elon Musk was already flexing his power over the new administration, joining a phone call with the man he helped elect to office and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Axios reported that the world’s richest man made a guest appearance on a phone call between Trump and Zelenskiy on Wednesday, even chiming in at several points during the discussion.

The call did not delve into specifics, but an Axios source noted that nothing Trump said to Zelenksiy was “alarming or made us feel that Ukraine is going to be the one who pays the price.” Musk also told the Ukrainian president that he will keep supporting Ukraine with his Starlink satellite network.

Still, Musk’s surprise addition to the call is a troubling sign, to say the least. Like Trump, the billionaire has a close relationship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. A bombshell report last month revealed that Musk is in regular contact with Putin, and the Kremlin may have even implicitly threatened him. That could explain his past refusal to let Ukraine use his Starlink internet network to carry out a surprise attack on Russian forces, or his public ridicule of Zelenskiy’s requests for aid.

However, the 25 minute call apparently left Zelenskiy feeling upbeat and reassured. “I had an excellent call with President Trump and congratulated him on his historic landslide victory — his tremendous campaign made this result possible,” Zelenskiy wrote on X after the call on Wednesday.

Bob Woodward shared a warning about Donald Trump in the hours after his election win.

Speaking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, the longtime journalist was asked about his thoughts on Trump’s election, having interviewed the president-elect more than 20 times. Woodward mentioned Trump’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“I talked a couple of months ago to Dan Coats, the former director of national intelligence under Trump, and I said, what’s going on in this relationship between Trump and Putin? And Dan Coats said, ‘It’s almost, it’s so close. It seems like it might be blackmail,’” Woodward said.

“CIA director Bill Burns said Putin manipulates. He’s professionally trained to do that,” Woodward added. “Putin’s got a plan just to do this exactly, and it’s what he did when Trump was in office previously, and he’s planning it again at playing Trump.”

Woodward’s warning came as Putin himself stayed silent on Trump’s victory, waiting until the next day to congratulate the president-elect in what could be a power play for the Russian leader. Putin’s congratulatory message came on Thursday and didn’t include any acknowledgment of Trump’s promise that he could end the Ukraine War in “24 hours,” and perhaps signaled the opposite.

Last month, Trump tried to avoid a point-blank question about whether he was still speaking with the Russian autocrat even after leaving office, telling Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait, “Well, I don’t comment on that, but I will tell you that, if I did, it’s a smart thing.” One week before, an excerpt from Woodward’s book “War” alleged that Trump and Putin still speak frequently.

On Election Day, bomb threats at polling stations around the country seem to be a product of alleged Russian election interference. It seems that with Trump’s return to the White House, the shadow of Putin is not far behind.

Incoming Department of Government Efficiency head and world’s richest man Elon Musk has proposed cutting $2 trillion in government spending—more than Congress’s entire discretionary budget. But some of Donald Trump’s key allies don’t see anything wrong with that picture.

In an interview with Fox Business on Friday, Virginia Representative Ben Cline claimed that it “absolutely is” possible to slash that much cash from the budget.

“We can do it, and make sure that we focus funding toward the American people and not toward bureaucracy in Washington,” Cline said.

Just a reminder: Congress’s discretionary budget funds practically the entire executive branch, doling out funding for the military, national security, and federal agencies.

And one cut in particular proved exceedingly uncontroversial for the Virginia congressman: public education.

“Give me one idea in terms of what’s significant that you think, ‘That’s got to go right away?’” asked Fox’s Maria Bartiromo.

“Well let’s just look at the Department of Education and how billions of dollars stay in Washington, funding bureaucrats whose simple goal is to interfere in the decisions about educational choice at local and state levels,” Cline responded.

But that’s not an accurate picture of the DOE. The federal government provides 13.6 percent of funding for public K-12 education across the nation. In Virginia specifically, it spends $2,020 per pupil per year, providing approximately 12 percent of the state’s education funding, according to the Education Data Initiative.

Trump himself has said that his Department of Education plan involves handing the reins and lofty responsibilities of public school administration over to parents, who famously have all the time in the world to oversee educational curricula while simultaneously working jobs and raising their children.

During a rally in Milwaukee in October, the MAGA leader promised that his vision for the nation’s educational system would involve very limited oversight from any government, including the states.

“I figure we’ll have like one person plus a secretary,” the soon-to-be forty-seventh president said at the time. “You’ll have a secretary to a secretary. We’ll have one person plus a secretary and all the person has to do is, ‘Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing? Reading, writing, and arithmetic. And are you not teaching woke?’”

He also openly admitted that it would, unfortunately, be to the detriment of a great swath of states—particularly poorer ones in the middle of the country.

“We’re going to have 35, like, different ones—Iowa will do good. A lot of the states will do very good. I can think of probably 30, 35 will be do—five will be OK, 10 will be OK. You’ll have four or five that will be terrible, but that’s OK, we have to control it,” Trump told 5,000 people in Indiana, Pennsylvania, in September. “But you’ll have, you’ll have Idaho, you’ll have Idaho will do a great job, no debt, they run a great state.”

But slashing the Department of Education was always part of the agenda. Despite attempts to distance the campaign from Project 2025, Trump allies have outright admitted in the wake of election night that the 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto was actually the blueprint for Trump’s second administration all along.

And it’s not all political smoke and mirrors. When it comes to budget cuts and the economy, experts believe that Trump is more than likely to keep his promises.

“He’s not very movable on trade issues, and he does what he says he’s going to do,” William Alan Reinsch of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told Yahoo! Finance in October, in an assessment of the Republican leader’s 2016 economic agenda.

“I think he means it, and I think he’ll do it,” Reinsch, a former trade lawyer and undersecretary of commerce, said of Trump’s tariff plan on Chinese goods. The outstanding question will be whether or not the courts attempt to block it.

A federal judge on Friday granted special counsel Jack Smith’s request to vacate the remaining deadlines in Donald Trump’s election interference case.

In a new filing earlier Friday, Smith requested that “the Court vacate the remaining deadlines in the pretrial schedule to afford the Government time to assess this unprecedented circumstance and determine the course going forward consistent with Department of Justice policy.”

Department of Justice policy prohibits the government from pursuing charges against a sitting president. Smith’s request cites that Trump is “expected to be certified as president-elect on Jan. 6, 2025, and inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2025.”

Prosecutors asked for the government to file “a status report or otherwise inform the court of the result of its deliberations” by December 2.

Judge Tanya Chutkan granted Smith’s unopposed request shortly after it was filed.

With this latest development, it seems Trump will escape all culpability for his role in interfering with the certification of the 2020 presidential election and allegedly inciting the January 6 riot at the U.S Capitol.

The same fate is likely for Smith’s other case against Trump, which concerns the president-elect’s alleged mishandling of classified documents during and after his first administration. That case landed in the lap of a pro-Trump judge who dismissed the case—landing her on the short list for Trump’s next attorney general.

As Smith scrambles to wind down his two cases against Trump, it’s worth noting that the former president has promised to fire Smith on his first day in office, and even threatened to have him deported.

This story has been updated.

Reports of a Latino Democratic exodus may be slightly exaggerated.

Anxiety was high after exit polls showed that 46 percent of Latinos, and 55 percent of Latino men, voted for Donald Trump. While it is a significant blow—Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton won Latinos at 65 and 66 percent respectively—a more detailed breakdown by heritage offered some pushback to the generalized narrative.

The Americas Society Council of the Americas research showed that of the largest Latino groups in the United States, Cuban Americans were the only one in which over half of voters chose Trump, as they went for him by a decisive 58 percent. Mexican Americans—by far the largest Latino community in the country—only went 33 percent for Trump, with Puerto Ricans at 37 percent and Central Americans at 36 percent.

This poll reminds us that, like any group, Latinos are not a monolith. And the “new coalition” that Republicans are celebrating may not be as solid as they think. Democrats just need to sift through the rubble and reevaluate how they message to Latino voters.

Donald Trump plans to enact the largest deportation in U.S. history, and private prisons are already sniffing the air at the “unprecedented opportunity” for moneymaking that a second Trump administration will offer. 

It seems that investors are betting big on Trump’s plans to detain and then forcibly deport millions of both undocumented and legal immigrants—a move that could send the U.S. economy tumbling while making those who profit off of human suffering rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Geo Group, the country’s largest private prison company, was the biggest winner in the stock market after Trump’s victory was announced Wednesday, according to economic outlet Sherwood. The company saw a 40 percent jump in shares Wednesday alone, and its share price went from $14.18 the day before the election to $24.43 on Thursday.

In 2023, 43 percent of Geo Group’s top-line revenue, more than $2.4 billion, came from contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  

George Zoley, the founder and executive chairman, could barely contain his excitement during an earnings call Thursday. “We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement, and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals,” Zoley said, according to Bloomberg.

“This is to us an unprecedented opportunity,” he added.

Private prison executives also talked about expanding their services to meet the demand of the government’s plans. Zoley said that GEO Group was “well-positioned” to more than double its number of ICE detention beds, from 13,500 to “over 31,000 beds,” according to HuffPost. 

They also discussed expanding their prisoner transport services, as well as their Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, or ISAP, which presents surveillance programs as “alternatives to detention.”

CEO Brian Evans said that the GEO Group’s ISAP programs currently had around 182,000 participants but could be scaled way, way up, to “several hundreds of thousands of participants, and up to several million if necessary.”

Signs indicate that ICE is already looking to expand this program in anticipation of Trump’s administration. HuffPost reported that CoreCivic, another private prison group, said that ICE had posted a request for information about ISAPs on Thursday, a precursor for contract proposals down the road. 

It’s already begun: On Thursday, a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a vital Biden-era immigration policy that provided a pathway to citizenship for the thousands of undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens.

The policy, which the Biden administration called “Keep Families Together,” applied to those who have been in the country for 10 years or more, were not a security threat, and were safe from deportation under the “parole in place” program. They just needed to be married to U.S. citizens and complete an application for permanent residency. The Department of Homeland Security estimated that the policy would help 500,000 spouses and 50,000 stepchildren.

“Without this process, hundreds of thousands of noncitizen spouses of U.S. citizens are likely to instead remain in the United States without lawful status, causing these families to live in fear and with uncertainty about their futures,” DHS wrote in an August statement.

Trump-appointed Texas-based U.S. District Judge J. Campbell Barker struck down the policy on the grounds that the Biden administration was abusing its power by circumventing Congress to enact the policy.

“The rule focuses on the wrong thing in identifying ‘significant public benefits’—the benefits of aliens’ new legal status, rather than their presence in this country,” Barker said in his decision. “The rule exceeds statutory authority and is not in accordance with law for this reason as well.”

This development is a grim precursor to an administration that has promised to break up more families in the “largest deportation program in American history.”

The Biden administration still has time to appeal the ruling.

Following Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, Black people across the country are receiving racist text messages from anonymous senders. 

Reports have come from locations as widespread as Washington, D.C., Alabama, Michigan, Georgia, South Carolina, and many, many other locations around the United States. The texts include messages telling the recipients that they have been “selected” to pick cotton “at the nearest plantation.” Some of the messages include the person’s name.

Many of the texts are targeting Black college students, with reports coming from schools like Clemson University, Ohio State, and the University of Alabama, among others. Students at historically Black colleges and universities, such as Fisk University, have also reported receiving the texts. Some of the texts have “A TRUMP SUPPORTER” as a signature. 

Many of the numbers seem to be tied to TextNow, a text messaging service that allows users to obtain untraceable, “burner” phone numbers, according to NBC News. TextNow said in a statement to the news network that it was aware of the racist campaign and was trying to prevent its service from being used to harass people.

“As soon as we became aware, our Trust & Safety team acted quickly, shutting down the accounts involved within the hour,” the statement read. “TextNow is proud to be an inclusive service offering free mobile text and data to millions of Americans. We do not tolerate or condone the use of our service to send harassing or spam messages and will work with the authorities to prevent these individuals from doing so in the future.” 

The Federal Communication Commission is also aware of the racist messages, and said in a statement that it “is looking into them alongside federal and state law enforcement.” Anyone who receives these messages can contact their local law enforcement office, or the FBI at 1-800-225-5324 or FBI.gov/tips.