The 2024 election was the most expensive in U.S. history with some $16 billion spent. Fundraising stats also reached the ten-digits, with the Harris-Walz campaign bringing in $1.2 billion in contributions. But apparently it wasn’t enough.
Not only did Kamala Harris lose the presidential race in a landslide to Donald Trump, but her campaign reportedly ended in the red. Several outlets are citing sources close to the vice president’s campaign who say it is $20 million in debt.
On Friday’s show, Megyn was joined by Batya Ungar-Sargon, author of Second Class, to discuss the allegations and how it speaks to a larger issue on the Democrat side.
Debt Crisis?
As The Wall Street Journal published a report titled “How the Democrats Spent $1 Billion and Still Lost,” reporters from Politico and Breitbart alleged on X that the Harris-Walz campaign is under water financially.
On Wednesday, Politico California bureau chief Christopher Cadelago tweeted that Harris’ campaign “ended with at least $20 million in debt, per two sources familiar.” He also noted that Harris “raised over $1 billion and had $118 million in the bank as of [October] 16.”
Matthew Boyle, the Washington bureau chief for Breitbart News Network, chimed in with similar information. “A Kamala campaign staffer who saw these posts called me just now and said there is a massive scandal here worthy of an audit,” he said in a lengthy post on X on Wednesday.
He said the staffer told him “the $20 million debt thing is real” and Harris’ deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty “is currently shopping around the Kamala fundraising email list to anyone who wants it to try to raise the money back.”
According to Boyle’s source, Harris campaign chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon blew through money on rallies that doubled as “concerts” with the likes of Katy Perry, Lizzo, Eminem, and Bruce Springsteen at the expense of “prioritizing and spending money on social media and other campaign priorities.” While it is unclear if the campaign paid the talent, the staffer said the production costs were “immense.”
The People Prevail
As the postmortems begin on what went wrong for Team Harris, finances will no doubt be under the microscope. “They spent so much and they wound up with absolutely nothing – with fewer counties by far than Joe Biden won, they have lost the Senate, they have lost the White House, and we’ll find out whether they have lost any chance of taking the House,” Megyn said. “I mean, worst investment ever.”
But, in her view, it is not just about the money. “There are no more grown ups in the Democratic Party – there is no leader, there is no heir apparent,” Megyn explained. “There is not even an identifiable ‘big brother’-type to step in and sort of hold their hands and shepherd them along.”
What we learned from the failure of the Harris-Walz campaign, Megyn said, is “there is nobody… not even a top surrogate,” which means the Democrats may be in the midst of a damning cycle. “Keep doing the same thing, if you want the same results,” she noted. “You could just keep flushing a billion dollars down the drain every two years, or you could change and you can actually bend the knee on the issues that are most important to the American people – never mind Republicans.”
This election cycle, those include immigration, inflation, and radical trans ideology. And as Ungar-Sargon explained, it didn’t take nearly as much money for Trump to drive home his message on those topics. “I think the most underreported story of this election cycle is that Harris outspent Trump by astronomical numbers, Nikki Haley outspent Trump two to one in the Republican primary,” she explained. “And yet American democracy is so robust and healthy, it didn’t matter.”
So while Harris may have squandered over a billion dollars to end up on the losing end, Ungar-Sargon said the American people emerged as winners. “It turns out you can spend $1.2 billion on an election… and be $20 million in the hole, and lose spectacularly against somebody who is spending a fraction of that amount,” she concluded. “What an amazing thing to learn about our nation – our systems work… and the will of the electorate is who gets elected.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Ungar-Sargon by tuning in to episode 939 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.