1.5 Million New Supporters Appear After Biden's Resignation
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris has reportedly attracted more campaign donors in the ten days following President Joe Biden's withdrawal from the race than Biden did over the past 15 months.
According to Politico and others on the 22nd (local time), the Harris campaign received donations from approximately 2.3 million donors between April 21, when President Biden dropped out of the primary, and April 31. During this period, the amount raised through the Democratic official fundraising platform 'ActBlue' reached $183 million. In contrast, the number of donors Biden gathered from when he declared his re-election bid last April until his withdrawal was about 2.1 million.
Notably, about 1.5 million of the donors who contributed to the Harris campaign in late last month?accounting for 70%?had no prior history of donating to the Biden campaign. Furthermore, most of these donors had not opened their wallets for any other Democratic candidates running for the upcoming November elections, including Congressional and gubernatorial races.
Politico described this as an "unprecedented enthusiasm among Democrats," calling it "an example showing that Harris is reaching into corners of the party base that even Biden could not access."
In particular, the 1.5 million new donors who appeared only after President Biden stepped down were found to be younger, more educated, and more often female compared to Biden’s existing donors. According to an analysis by The New York Times (NYT), only 10% of Biden’s donors last month were under 45 years old, whereas they made up 28% of Harris’s donor pool. Among them, the proportion of women was 17%, more than twice that during Biden’s campaign. Additionally, Harris’s donors were more likely to come from regions where over half of adults aged 25 and older hold a bachelor's degree.
Meanwhile, Vice President Harris is scheduled to deliver her acceptance speech as the confirmed Democratic presidential nominee on the final day of the Democratic National Convention. In a summary released ahead of her speech, Vice President Harris stated, "This election is a crossroads between returning our country to a past marked by division and cynicism or seizing an opportunity to move forward into a new era," adding, "This is not a partisan issue but an American issue. I promise to be a president for all Americans."
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