After the Democrats lost the election, reports emerged that the Harris campaign had overspent, running up debts of up to $20 million and raising concerns that staff who worked on the operation would not be paid.
Kamala Harris’ campaign spent $24,000 on fast food and ice cream, filings show, amid questions about how the party spent $1.5 billion on a botched election. Democrats spent $14,974.31 on food deliveries from Uber Eats and DoorDash from July onwards, according to the Federal Election Commission. The details of Harris’ campaign spending decisions come amid accusations from the party after the Democrats’ crushing loss in the Nov. 5 election. “We didn’t emphasize the economy,” Ro Khanna, a congressman from California, told The Washington Post on Saturday. “Instead, we spent a billion dollars having concerts all over America. I mean, it was funny.”
Records show the campaign also spent $8,929 on ice creams, such as Sweet Lucy’s Ice Cream and Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, after Joe Biden withdrew from the race. A $6,000 “fee” was paid to a bar in Arizona for a visit by Tim Walz.
Democrats also spent another $2.6 million on private jet travel in the final days of the campaign as part of a quick sweep of battleground states. As Ms. Harris criss-crossed the nation between Oct. 1 and Oct. 17, her campaign spent nearly $2.2 million on the South Florida-based firm Private Jet Services Group and another $430,000 on the Advanced Aviation Team in Virginia, the New York Post reported. The late flurry of flights brought Ms. Harris’ total spending on private jets to $12 million, the paper reported.
The use of private jets, which can be up to 14 times more polluting than commercial flights, flies in the face of her campaign calls to cut carbon emissions. Ms Harris has previously called climate change an “existential threat”.
Despite Harris’ campaign spending a record $1.6 billion, Mr. Trump won in nearly every state, especially picking up votes among the blue-collar workers who have traditionally made up the base of the Democratic Party. After the Democrats lost the election, reports emerged that the Harris campaign had overspent, running up debts of up to $20 million and raising concerns that staff who worked on the operation would not be paid. Bernie Sanders, the veteran senator from Vermont, said after the election that the Democratic Party “has abandoned working class people” and should not be surprised that “the working class has abandoned them.”
Sanders, an independent who previously ran for the Democratic leadership, said multi-billionaires like Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, and Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, had too much influence over the campaign.
