Former rivals woo Kamala Harris’ big donors

Within days of Kamala Harris’ exit from the presidential race, one major Harris fundraiser’s phone blew up with inquiries from people aligned with four other candidates seeking support: Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker.

The one-time rival campaigns are hoping to get a cash boost before the first votes are cast early next year. And they believe Harris — a three-term statewide officeholder in California, the Democratic Party’s unofficial ATM — has left ripe for the picking a powerful network of supporters that belied her low polling in the 2020 race.

Many Harris supporters could decide to hold onto their money until Democrats pick a presidential nominee, and the Harris fundraiser besieged by requests last week said they don’t plan to throw support to a new candidate anytime soon: “I don’t have a clear second choice,” the fundraiser said.

But that won’t stop other candidates from turning on the pressure: As they warily size up months of primaries ahead and begin spending heavily on the most expensive piece of campaigning, TV advertising, the need to stockpile new cash reserves is greater than ever. No candidate other than Biden got more donations from the elite fundraisers who powered Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s campaigns than Harris. And Biden’s camp, which saw his fundraising lag in the third quarter but pick up in recent months, is among those pursuing Harris’ donors most aggressively.

“I have called some. And I’m optimistic that a lot of [Harris’] supporters are going to end up supporting Joe,” said Denise Bauer, former U.S. ambassador to Belgium and a fundraiser for Biden. “It’s tough when the person you’ve worked hard for and really believed in leaves a race, but I think so many of those people already know and trust Joe.

Steve Westly, a former California state controller and gubernatorial nominee now raising money for Biden, said he was in conversation with Harris fundraisers and “things are shaking out.” He emphasized the importance of amassing cash now, before the holidays and the final sprint into the Iowa caucuses.

“We’re coming to crunch time. It is incredibly hard to raise money,” Westly said.

This week and next, the Democratic candidates will get an important opportunity to plead their case to California donors in person, as they head west to prepare for the Dec. 19 primary debate in Los Angeles. In between debate prep sessions, they are squeezing in events with prominent Democratic fundraisers before the end-of-year fundraising deadline.

Biden will attend fundraisers in the Bay Area on Thursday, one hosted by Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her husband, Richard Blum, and another hosted by San Francisco lawyer Joe Cotchett. The events are a part of an aggressive in-person and online Biden fundraising push since October, when his campaign attracted widespread attention for raising less money than the other frontrunners in the Democratic primary. Biden’s campaign recently announced that he had raised as much in the first two months of this quarter as the $15 million he amassed in the entire third quarter.

And the rush to raise money helps explain why the campaign of Sen. Elizabeth Warren — who does not do in-person fundraisers herself — organized its first Hollywood party last Saturday in Los Angeles, featuring a cardboard cutout of the senator as a stand-in for the real thing, according to ABC News. Scheduled guests included actresses Elizabeth Banks and Busy Philipps.

Pete Buttigieg has a series of big-money events scheduled in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the coming days, including a Napa Valley dinner this weekend at the home of investor Craig Hall and his wife, Kathryn.

Even Cory Booker, who has not qualified for the December debate, will head to the Bay Area for a pair of events this weekend, including a dinner hosted by chef Alice Waters at her restaurant, Chez Panisse, and an afternoon reception at the Palo Alto home of real estate agent Brian Chancellor and his wife, Nana.

Hollywood-area donors, many of them galvanized by Trump to step up their involvement in politics, have also been discussing other ways to ensure Democrats come out of the 2020 election with major wins. So far, that includes pouring money into the campaigns of Democrats running to flip the Senate — in particular Arizona candidate Mark Kelly, the former astronaut married to former Rep. Gabby Giffords who has made frequent stops in Southern California.

And issues that have been hard to sell in other years, like voter registration, are attracting enthusiasm from the entertainment industry to go along with the intense focus on the presidential race.

“There’s no question that people are being much more thoughtful than they used to be,” said Mathew Littman, a Los Angeles-based Democratic political strategist. Rather than just focusing on local congressmen and big name politicians, “It’s more about how can we register voters? How can we get people out to vote and these Senate races?”

Though the Harris campaign’s stumbles hurt her ability to raise money — she was on track to bring in only $4 million during the last three months of the year, POLITICO reported — the network of established fundraisers she built during her presidential bid was one of the largest in the race.

Harris was second highest in contributions from former Clinton and Obama bundlers this cycle, surpassed only by Biden, the former vice president. Of the 401 former bundlers who have given money to a candidate by the end of September, 86 — almost one in four — had supported Harris, according to a POLITICO analysis.

But Harris’ donors won’t be easy to win over, cautioned California-based political strategist Garry South.

“The donor base is highly discriminating,” South said. “I don’t think that, with Harris’ withdrawal, donors who gave to her are going to flock en masse to some other candidate. They’re going to step back, see who’s running a good campaign and see where they might move.”

Harris, too, “can’t snap her fingers and tell her donors to go one way,” South added.

Ann Walker Marchant, a Washington D.C.-based consultant and former bundler for Hillary Clinton who supported Harris in the 2020 race, said she will be sizing up other candidates based on some of the same issues that Harris emphasized on the campaign trail, such as equality and women’s rights.

“I will absolutely support another candidate. I haven’t made a decision as to who that candidate is now,” Walker Marchant said.

Christopher Cadelago contributed to this report.