After Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, Kamala Harris must now raise funds for herself. Without strong financial backing, this will be difficult.
Kamala Harris is the presumptive presidential candidate of the US Democrats. – keystone
the essentials in brief
- US President Joe Biden has withdrawn from the race.
- Kamala Harris is now the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate.
- The influence of money on politics has long been a major issue in the United States.
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Election campaigns in the USA are extremely expensive. Only those who have the necessary finances can stay in the race in the long term.
Finances: How much does an election campaign cost in the USA?
That amounts to billions. According to the organization Open Secrets, more than 14.4 billion US dollars (12.76 billion Swiss francs) were spent on the 2020 election. Of that, around 5.7 billion went to the presidential election campaign and 8.7 billion to the vote for seats in the US Congress.
Donald Trump was almost killed two weeks ago. – keystone
This means that the election campaign was more than twice as expensive as the race four years earlier (around $2.4 billion), when then-President Donald Trump was defeated by his Democratic challenger Joe Biden.
How does the financing of a US election campaign generally work?
Direct donations to candidates and parties are limited. Large donations are usually made to Super Pacs, organizations that accept unlimited amounts of money and use it to promote specific candidates or political causes.
The abbreviation “Pac” stands for “Political Action Committee”. This is how the candidates finance, among other things, expensive television advertising. It is not always transparent who is behind the donations. But there are also many small donations from private individuals.
Finances: What has been collected so far in the 2024 election campaign?
For all presidential candidates, Open Secrets and the US Federal Campaign Finance Commission (FEC) both report revenues of 660 million US dollars to date, of which around 215 million went to Biden and 196 million to Trump.
Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the race for the US presidency. – keystone
The donation amounts will certainly increase as the election date approaches. In the last vote in 2020, Biden raised around $1.1 billion, according to FEC data, and Trump around $790 million. For all presidential candidates combined, the total was more than $4 billion.
What will happen next with Biden’s donations?
Recently, there was a discussion in the USA about whether the millions in donations that Biden had already collected together with the new Democratic hopeful, Kamala Harris, before his withdrawal from the presidential race could simply be passed on to someone else.
Harris could probably access the campaign apparatus and probably also the donations collected by Biden, because she was part of his re-election campaign as his vice president.
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More on the subject:
Kamala HarrisDonald TrumpVoteJoe BidenDonationsDollarFinancesElection campaign
