Oprah sitdown, Las Vegas Sphere: How Harris campaign spent $1 billion

WASHINGTON – Kamala Harris' presidential campaign spent a quarter billion dollars during the final weeks of the 2024 White House race on advertising, travel, canvassing and rallies with big-name celebrities like Ricky Martin, Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey, according to new federal records.

The Democratic nominee’s financial report filed Thursday evening with the Federal Election Commission shows Harris raised and spent roughly twice as much as Donald Trump in the final weeks of a race that had appeared tight in the polls across all the critical battleground states but that ultimately broke hard for the Republican.

Overall, the Harris campaign raised $160 million and spent $277 million from Oct. 25 through Nov. 25, the period covered by the new financial reports, while the Trump campaign brought in $87 million and spent $113 million.

The largest shares of both campaigns' spending went to media buys on television, online and on ad production in an effort to reach the broadest swath of potential voters in the last days of the race. But the new federal records submitted from the Democratic nominee’s campaign include a variety of other expenses that are sure to provide fodder for post-election autopsies into how Harris' presidential campaign spent more than $1 billion but nonetheless lost to Trump.

Among the most notable items involving a bold-faced name is the confirmation that Harris' campaign paid $1 million to Oprah Winfrey's production company, Harpo Productions Inc. Other highlights include advertising for a 90-second spot on the Las Vegas Sphere ahead of a rally Harris had in the city right before Election Day, which came with a $575,000 price tag. A final November rally on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art featuring the likes of Fat Joe, Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin and Oprah Winfrey cost the Harris campaign $50,000 to rent the space.

Some Democrats have criticized the millions of dollars Harris' team spent on the large-scale rallies featuring major celebrities, arguing that the money could have been used elsewhere in the party's bid to hang onto the White House.

"The damage that the 2024 campaign has done – the damage that this decade has done to a Democratic brand – is almost unfathomable," political strategist James Carville said last month during his "Politics War Room" podcast. He called for an audit of Harris' 2024 campaign spending as Democrats look beyond their loss to Trump, and as the party considers whether their defeat this November will equal trouble raising money for other liberal causes in the future.

In a post-election interview last month on "Pod Save America," a liberal podcast hosted by former Obama staffers, Harris campaign chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon said the splashier events coupled with local promotions like murals painted in Philadelphia were an effort to build the feeling among voters that the campaign was something they could connect with beyond politics.

"We believed as we were closing the race that it was really important for people to feel like they were part of something bigger and that we were trying to identify opportunities to culturally reach people, not just politically reach people," she said.

Patti Solis Doyle, a longtime Democratic operative not affiliated with the Harris campaign, told USA TODAY that second guessing of the Harris campaign should be expected.

"I think that in a race where Democrats lost ground in every single county in the country, I think you have to look at everything; at your message, at your messengers, at the tactics, at the money. I think that we need to really do some serious introspection and look at everything," said Solis, who managed Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign during that cycle's primaries before shifting over to Barack Obama's team as it went on to win the White House.

"There are a lot of factors that go into these critical decisions going into the final days of any campaign," she added. “It's a nerve-racking game, and sometimes you don't even know if you've made the right call. It's best judgment at the time.”

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'We had to choose'

In the end, Trump won 312 votes in the electoral college to Harris' 226 votes. The former and future president won the popular vote by a smaller margin. While vote totals have not yet been certified in every state, Trump's current lead over Harris nationally is about 2.28 million votes.

“People are like, 'how do you spend a billion dollars in a hundred days?' It was necessary. How do you introduce somebody to the public as vice president? This was just a different set of facts,” Democratic political commentator Bakari Sellers told USA TODAY. “She lost the closest race since Bush v. Gore (by) less than a point and a half. It’s not as if she got Mondaled.”

He's referring to Walter Mondale's 1984 loss to President Ronald Reagan, where the Democrat won only Washington, D.C., and his home state of Minnesota en route to the largest electoral college loss in party history.

In 2024, Harris didn't lack financial support.

Donors large and small who stayed on the sidelines when President Joe Biden was the party's presumptive nominee suddenly opened their checkbooks after the incumbent bowed out over concerns about his age and political prospects, with Harris entering the race 107 days before Election Day. They flooded her campaign with millions of dollars to spend, largely without her having to do the grinding work that most presidential candidates must do of crisscrossing the country to attend fundraisers, most of which occur outside of swing states she needed to campaign in, Solis said.

"It's mind boggling. It really is," Solis said. "They had the luxury of playing everywhere that they needed to play, which is a dream scenario.”

Those donations allowed Harris to keep all seven of the expected swing states in play, opening additional campaign offices and paying hundreds of millions of dollars for canvassers and staff in areas where Biden's campaign had not been as active. Trump by contrast relied heavily on political action committees for canvassing and ground operations, polling and advertising. That includes Elon Musk’s America PAC, one of the major political action committees that supported Trump's campaign and that received $238.5 million in contributions from Musk, according to records filed Thursday with the FEC.

More: Elon Musk contributed more than $250 million to 2024 campaign groups backing Donald Trump

Harris' principal deputy campaign manager, Quentin Fulks, told the hosts of "Pod Save America," that the 2024 Democratic campaign chose to focus its advertising dollars on attacking Trump and defining Harris. They opted to do that rather than counter Trump's claims on controversial topics like transgender rights.

“It is easy to say with the kind of resources that we raised, we should have been able to do everything, but that’s not the case," he said. "You have to make decisions in the time frame that we were in in this race. We had to choose."

A spokesperson for Trump's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest FEC spending report. The Harris campaign declined to comment.

Walmart vs. Target, and churros in Arizona

The final reports from Harris and Trump show many of the same expenses; reimbursements to staff for parking or food deliveries, final payroll checks, postage, and rally location rentals.

Trump's campaign staff stopped at Walmart and Home Depot for event supplies. Harris' team made many of their purchases at Target or party supply stores. Her report shows $92.98 for a Hulu subscription and multiple subscriptions for YouTube TV. Trump's spending report includes a car wash.

On the food front, the Harris report reveals her staff spent more than $6,800 at Churros Locos in Glendale, Arizona, in the final weeks of the campaign. Harris' staff and Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., handed out churros from the restaurant on Election Day.

Trump's campaign ended the filing period with about $10,000 in debt. Harris reported having no debt.

Harris' spending in the final weeks of the 2024 campaign also included more than $5 million in contributions to groups targeting voting blocs that the Democrats saw as vital to their victory strategy, and on donations to swing state Democratic committees.

Mi Familia Vota, a national organization aimed at building political power within Latino and immigrant communities, received $465,000. Black Voters Matter Fund, a nonprofit voting rights group aimed at Black voters, received $150,000. Unite Here Action Fund, a hospitality workers union, received $105,000.

The Harris campaign had previously donated about $5.7 million to similar groups, including $2 million to the National Urban League, on Sept. 30.

It isn't unusual for a presidential campaign with a lot of money to give money to help state parties, which often times are promoting the White House candidate as well as local candidates.

The largest state donations were $1.1 million to the Arizona Democratic Party and $1.4 million to the Michigan Democratic State Central Committee.

Sellers said the critics who want to pile on the short-lived Harris campaign over their budgeting decisions are going to find ways to do it.

"Those are good questions to ask," he said, "but the spending is what it is and when you’re running a 107-day campaign you have to do more than other people have to."

(This story has been updated with more information.)

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Harris' 2024 cash: Blanketing battlegrounds, booking Lady Gaga, Oprah