Over the course of the dozen days since President Joe Biden withdrew from 2024 presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, the Harris campaign has shown unprecedented momentum.
During the first three weeks of July, fundraising for the then-Biden/Harris campaign cratered, but that changed after it became the Harris campaign, blowing past Donald Trump’s campaign in terms of donations by the end of the month. In July, the Democratic ticket raised $310 million, more than twice as much Trump did.
“Harris’ campaign and other affiliated committees have $377 million in cash on hand, a $50 million advantage over Trump’s $327 million war chest, according to figures released by both campaigns this week,” Politico reported on Friday.
According to the Harris campaign, most of the money came from small-dollar donors giving $200 or less, and two-thirds of those donors were first-time donors in this election cycle.
The Harris campaign has also seen a flood of volunteers wanting to help.
On Monday, July 22, one day after Biden stepped aside and Harris became the candidate, the group Win with Black Women held a Zoom call to organize support for Harris. The original 300-person capacity of the call was immediately overwhelmed, and Zoom had to continue to expand the capacity of the call until there were more than 44,000 people participating in the four-hour call.
Win with Black Women went into the call with the goal of raising $1 million for the Harris campaign over the course of 100 days. By the end of the call, they had raised $1.6 million in less than four hours.
That first call set a pattern that saw a steady stream of Zoom-based organizing and fundraising throughout the week. Three days after that first call, a group named White Women: Answer the Call broke records for the largest Zoom call in history, with more than 164,000 participants. The pace of donations generated by that call caused the Democratic National Committee’s fundraising site to repeatedly crash. More than $8.5 million was donated by participants in the call.
And on Monday night at 7 p.m., Iowa will have its own Zoom event to support Harris.
The lead organizer of Iowans for Kamala is Deidre DeJear, the Iowa Democratic Party’s (IDP) 2022 nominee for governor. DeJear has remained active in politics since her 2022 run, with much of her focus on voter education and registration, as well as get-out-the-vote organizing. In 2019, she was the chair of the Harris campaign in Iowa, when the then-California senator joined more than 20 other Democrats running in the Iowa Caucus.
“I’m a firm believer in the vice president, not only what she’s done, but what she’s capable of with regard to fighting for the freedoms of Americans,” DeJear told Little Village during an interview about the upcoming Zoom event.
DeJear wasn’t in Iowa on that Sunday afternoon when Biden made his announcement. She was attending a family reunion in New Orleans. As soon as Biden published his letter withdrawing from the race, DeJear’s phone started going off with messages, but she was trying to ignore it.
“Then my sister handed me her phone, which had a news story about Biden’s decision already pulled up,” she said.
“I started reading the letter that the president wrote, and my heart just stopped,” DeJear recalled. “Because at that point, the last 30 days had been just up and down, up and down.”
Within 30 minutes of publishing his letter on social media, Biden endorsed Harris for president.
“Then there was a sigh of relief,” DeJear said.
There was also excitement. Most of DeJear’s family aren’t very political, but expressed enthusiasm when she shared the news.
DeJear was still in New Orleans when the Win With Black Women call happened on Monday night.
“Even though I registered very early for it, I couldn’t get in the call when I first tried,” she said. “There were just too many people. I eventually got in, but that is how eager, that is how excited, that is also how desperate women were to be a part of that call. It was a sign in real time that we’re at a precipice in our history right now.”
“There is a great deal of energy that’s out there, and it is incredibly moving.”
DeJear has known Harris since 2018, when Harris came to Iowa to help with DeJear’s campaign for Iowa Secretary of State. DeJear knew Harris’ reputation as a Democratic leader in California, but she said it was what she saw on a personal level that year that truly impressed her.
“She is a true servant-leader,” DeJear said.
On her trip back to Iowa last week, DeJear saw that energy both in person and via her phone.
“Along the way I was getting calls and emails and text messages and direct messages,” she said. “Folks were communicating in every which way because they’re excited, they’re engaged and they want to get involved.”
DeJear decided to create “a space to help those folks that have this energy meet the other folks out there that have this energy.”
It’s very unlikely Harris will win Iowa, and so far, her campaign doesn’t have any official presence in the state. Biden wasn’t campaigning in Iowa either, which made sense. Trump not only won Iowa in 2020 by a larger margin than he did in 2016, every poll conducted since Biden became president showed dismal results for him. In February, an Iowa Poll found the president’s approval rating in the state had dropped to 29 percent.
But even without any campaign organization in Iowa, Harris has still had an impact here. The first three days of her presidential run saw a 35 percent uptick in contributions to the IDP, making those three days better than any whole week of fundraising this year.
“Kamala Harris’ candidacy has brought an explosion of new energy and enthusiasm,” Iowa Senate Minority Leader Pam Jochum told her fellow Democrats at the party’s annual Liberty and Justice Celebration on July 27.
DeJear sees the excitement generated by Harris as potentially playing an important part in reviving the Iowa Democratic Party’s political fortunes.
Iowa Democrats have seen a steady decline in their power since 2014. Republicans have controlled both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office since 2017. In 2020, Democratic nominees for every statewide except auditor lost, and the lone remaining Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation was defeated.
But DeJear said that over the last two years, Democratic leaders in counties around Iowa have done important party-building work that is laying the foundation for the party to become competitive again.
“This is going to be an effort to lift up the work that’s happening, and to help those volunteers who hop on this call to get involved right in their communities,” she said. “Kamala supporters are really, really excited about helping Democrats across this state. The big question I’ve been hearing is, ‘What can we do and how can we get involved?’”
DeJear declined to say how many people she is expecting on Monday night’s Iowans for Kamala Zoom call, but did say the initial capacity for it is 250 participants and that she made sure Zoom would be able to provide expanded capacity if necessary.
“I just politely said, ‘We’re going to need a bigger boat.’”
