OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Democratic strategist James Carville issued a stark warning earlier this week, stating that the Democratic Party’s reputation has been severely harmed by the excessive spending during the ultimately unsuccessful 2024 presidential campaign.
Reports indicate that Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign and the Democratic Party spent nearly $1.5 billion during her short-lived presidential bid, which began on July 21. Speaking on Politics War Room, Carville predicted future challenges in fundraising and called on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to conduct a thorough audit to restore trust and provide accountability for the campaign’s expenditures.
“The resistance is going to have trouble raising money. These fundraisers are burnt,” Carville said. “They’re really pissed now, and the damage that the 2024 campaign has done — the damage that this decade has done to the Democratic brand — is almost unfathomable. Almost unfathomable.”
“So I have people that are contacting me to run for DNC chair. Promise you I’m not going to to get in the middle of that … But I would say the policy, number one, is we’re going to audit everything,” Carville continued. “We’re going to audit the campaign. We’re going to audit Future Forward.
“We’re going to audit the DNC so people can know,” he added. “But I’m telling you, without complete transparency, the campaign — we think — raised a billion and a half dollars. Okay, we know that Future Forward, the last we saw, was $900 million, so we can assume that they got to a billion before the election. That’s two and a half freaking billion dollars.”
Future Forward, the primary Super PAC aligned with Vice President Kamala Harris, raised over $900 million to support her presidential campaign—a record for external political groups in a single election cycle, according to The New York Times.
“Do you have any idea where that money went? Does anybody have any idea where that money went?” Carville asked. “I mean, I have some places I’d start looking … I promise you this: the amount of money and the amount of lobbyists that were involved in this campaign is staggering.”
Lindy Li, a member of the DNC National Finance Committee, expressed shock on Tuesday over Harris’ failure to take “responsibility” for her campaign’s excessive spending during a donor call held earlier that day.
“I don’t recall anyone taking responsibility for the fact that we spent about $2 billion across the super PAC and the campaign and came up so significantly short,” Li said. “We lost seven swing states.”
“I’m just, frankly, stunned that there was no sort of post-mortem or an analysis of how we can do better, what sort of lessons were learned,” she added. “It was really just patting each other on the back, congratulating each other on I’m not sure what. And saying, ‘We’ll see you for Christmas.’”
Democratic megadonor John Morgan, meanwhile, argued last week that Harris’ exorbitant campaign spending should end her political career.
Morgan, on NewsNation’s “CUOMO,” said Harris’ campaign spending and loss suggest she has no “political future.”
“A lot of people got rich on the back of donors trying to stop Trump. And I think this disqualifies her forever. Forever. If you can’t run a campaign, you can’t run America. And that would be the argument just day one. So it was terrible,” Morgan told host Chris Cuomo. “Look, I think she did a good job in the debate. I think she did as good a job as you could hope for in a short period of time.”
“I told you, I told everybody, she should not have been the nominee. She was not going to win. And she didn’t win and she lost badly,” he continued. “So she’s got to go figure out her life … She’s having a call with donors this week, they tell me, about her political future. I don’t think she has a political future.”
