Inside Kamala Harris' small-dollar fundraising operation

But those two days actually had something in common. They were days that Kamala Harris, the junior senator from California, had asked her email list to contribute to those colleagues.

Over the last two years, Harris has systematically constructed a database of donors and email addresses that raised several million dollars for her fellow Democrats, demonstrating an uncommon potency for a first-term senator, according to federal election records and interviews with numerous political strategists. Now, as she makes her own run for president, her digital following serves as a kind of stealth weapon, putting her in perhaps the best position to challenge the small-dollar fundraising operations of two top rivals, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Those two candidates outgunned every other 2020 Democratic candidate with their roughly $6 million hauls in the first day of fundraising, besting Harris by 4 to 1. Harris raised $1.5 million, the next-highest total in the field, from more than 38,000 donors in the first 24 hours.

In a campaign in which small donations have emerged as an early proxy for viability, Harris’ team hopes her grassroots appeal will allow her to compete at the highest level of American politics. The first full look at her strength will come in her total fundraising for the first quarter of 2019, which ends Sunday and will be publicly disclosed in the first half of April.

Laura Olin, a digital strategist on President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, said Harris’ standing among small donors remains “underappreciated.”

“She has more enthusiasm among the base than she is given credit for,” said Olin, who is unaligned in the 2020 race.

There is no question that Harris remains far behind Sanders and O’Rourke in the race for small donors. But unlike those two rivals, Harris has not benefited from running in a campaign that soaked up national attention, which suggests she has barely begun to tap into her fundraising potential, digital experts said.

Harris’ first-day fundraising figures were almost identical to what Sanders raised on his first day in 2015, when he made a splash as a favorite of grassroots givers. Her campaign has said that her email list grew by 20 percent on that day alone. People close to the Sanders and O’Rourke campaigns view Harris as the candidate most likely to eventually compete with them for small donations.

Some rivals have already witnessed her list’s force and reach.

The day of Klobuchar’s windfall, Harris had written an email seeking contributions for several female Democratic senators, including Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who is also running for president. The number of online donations Gillibrand received that day ranks as her fourth-most — one spot behind the day President Donald Trump attacked her on Twitter — according to an analysis of election data from ActBlue, which processes Democratic donations online.

For Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, also a 2020 candidate, her top two days in the last six years, in terms of number of online donations, coincided with days that Harris had asked her email list to support Warren financially. (One was after the now-infamous attempt to silence Warren on the Senate floor, when the Republican leader declared, “Nevertheless, she persisted.”)

“We couldn’t run a campaign of this magnitude without the consistent support of our incredible online supporters,” said Shelby Cole, who runs Harris’ email program and previously worked on O’Rourke’s Senate race. “Our supporters aren’t an ATM. This is a deep, lasting relationship we constantly seek to strengthen because their voices are central to our grassroots campaign.”

Unlike Sanders and Warren, who have sworn off big-money fundraisers, Harris has raced across the country to appear at events where donors give as much as $2,800 to attend; last week she held fundraisers in Texas and California.

For the most part, Harris has kept the breadth of her online donor list hidden by fundraising so heavily in 2018 for other candidates, rather than herself.

In October, Harris sent an email asking for donations to Joe Donnelly, an endangered senator from Indiana, during the fight over Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Though she split the proceeds with Donnelly, his campaign manager, Peter Hanscom, said it was the most money — about $100,000 — anyone had ever raised for the campaign with a single email.

“There were other colleagues of Joe’s” who did send such messages, Hanscom said. “She, by far, had the largest impact.”

The next day, Harris sent an email urging donations to Heidi Heitkamp, then a North Dakota senator, after she voiced her opposition to Kavanaugh. It raised more than $450,000, stunning the small world of political operatives who track such things.

Harris has used her email list for charity, too.

Lisa Blanchard, who founded the Grateful Garment Project, which provides fresh clothing at hospitals for victims of sexual violence, recounted how a co-worker burst into her office last year clutching a $29,966.48 check.

The check came from ActBlue, which Blanchard had never heard of. So she called, and ActBlue told her that Harris had sent an email on behalf of the Grateful Garment Project and three other nonprofits. She had no heads-up this was happening.

“Good for her, she’s got a powerful list! I say, go girl,” Blanchard said, before quickly adding, “We’d be glad for her to do it again!”

Simply including “Kamala Harris” in the sender line of an email can spur donations, said Ilya Sheyman, executive director for MoveOn.org, the online grassroots activist group. Emails signed by Harris raised more than $1 million from MoveOn members, he said.

“She was the top senator or elected official in 2018 when it came to galvanizing MoveOn members to give to candidates,” Sheyman said, noting it showed her appeal to activists and donors beyond her existing list. “One of the dynamics in the past year was seeing Harris emerge as a breakout on the national stage, as a galvanizing force,” he added.

Until recently, Harris had, like most politicians, relied overwhelmingly on large donations. In her 2016 election to the Senate, less than 16 percent of the $13.3 million she raised from individuals came from donations of less than $200.

But on the night of that election, her victory speech — which she made just as it became clear Trump had won — went viral. “Do we retreat or do we fight?” Harris said that night. “I say we fight. And I intend to fight.”

The next day, Harris’ political brain trust decamped to her Los Angeles campaign headquarters to figure out what came next, according to people involved in the discussions. The team agreed that Mike Nellis, her top digital strategist, would be given a budget to try to expand her small donor base, buying ads on sites like Facebook to mine new supporters.

The timing proved fortuitous. With the election over, many Democrats had suddenly withdrawn from the online advertising landscape. Harris’ campaign filled the void — and made back $10 for every $1 it spent initially, according to a campaign official. The money was promptly reinvested.

That reinvestment quickly netted even more money. And so the campaign invested more, repeating the process until, by the end of 2018, Harris had spent $4.93 million on digital advertisements over two years, campaign records show.

In those two years, Harris raised more than 75 percent of her money from donations of less than $200 — a total of $5.845 million — a major reversal from her reliance on big money in 2016.

The biggest moment, which one Harris adviser called “transformational,” was the confirmation fight over Kavanaugh.

She launched an online petition to stop the nomination that garnered more than 1 million signatures, according to ads she ran on Facebook — a gargantuan sum for a grassroots effort. Those signers are now part of her email database.

Records show that Harris’ list grew steadily in strength as her presidential bid approached: Eight of her top 10 days for the number of online donations came in the last four months of 2018, according to ActBlue data. In contrast, none of Gillibrand’s top 10 days, and only two of Warren’s, came in that time period; for Warren, one of them was Dec. 31, the day she announced her bid for president.

Harris’ ascendancy in online fundraising has produced a role reversal with Warren. After Warren’s election to the Senate in 2012, it was her email list that was the envy of Democratic politics. And it was Harris who depended on the generosity of Warren to drive her small-dollar donations.

In Harris’ 2016 run for Senate, according to ActBlue records, she topped 1,000 online donations only three times. Those three days had one thing in common: an email from Warren to her list asking for donations to Harris.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Inside Kamala Harris' small-dollar fundraising operation

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