Harris’ fundraising triples Trump’s in August, growing Democrat’s warchest, FEC filings show
(NEW YORK) — Vice President Kamala Harris raised more than triple the amount of funds that former President Donald Trump did in August, giving her team a massive financial advantage as the presidential race enters its final weeks, according to the latest disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission.
The Harris campaign and the Democratic National Committee entered the final two full months of the 2024 election cycle with $286 million in the bank, compared to the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee’s $214 million, according to the filings.
This comes after the Harris campaign and the DNC raised $257 million in the month of August, while the Trump campaign and the RNC raised $85 million the same month, filings show.
Earlier this month, both campaigns voluntarily released their total August fundraising figures that included the total figures from their joint fundraising operation with state party committees, revealing a major money edge Harris had maintained for the Democratic Party.
The Harris campaign and the DNC spent $258 million in August, almost exactly the amount they raised, and the Trump campaign and the RNC spent $121 million despite raising $85 million, the latest filings show.
Last month, billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk made his largest federal political contribution to date, giving a total of $289,100 to the NRCC, the committee dedicated to supporting House GOP candidates. He did not make any contribution to the RNC or the NRSC, which focuses on Senate campaigns.
Musk had in the past given $50,000 to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s joint fundraising committee for House GOP, and $36,000 to Obama’s 2012 campaign.
Some top Republican donors who had supported former Gov. Nikki Haley during the Republican primary season are apparently finally coming around in support of Trump, writing big checks to the main super PAC supporting Trump.
Hedge fund manager Paul E. Singer gave $5 million to Make America Great Again Inc., after serving as a vocal supporter of Haley earlier this year, according to filings. Investment banker Warren Stephens, who had given $1 million to a pro-Haley super PAC last year, gave the same amount to the pro-Trump super PAC, according to filings.
Trump’s Save America PAC’s new filing also shows that it spent nearly $2 million on legal bills in August, with one of Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche, receiving more than $1 million of that sum. Other top firms paid by Save America include James Otis Law Group LLC, Habba Madaio & Associates LLP, Rober & Robert PLLC and Richard C. Klugh PA.
Notably, the Trump campaign reported a handful of small security services expenditures paid to Apocalypse Arms and Military Surplus in late July, after an assassination attempt against the former president, the latest report shows. The total amounts to $555.
(WASHINGTON) — Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was tapped as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate on Tuesday — a choice that could potentially usher in a historic first.
If Harris and Walz win, prompting Walz to resign as governor, Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan would take over the position, according to Minnesota’s constitution — and would become the first Native American woman to ever serve as a state governor.
She would also be the first woman to serve as governor of Minnesota in the state’s history.
Flanagan, 44, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, is “currently the country’s highest ranking Native woman elected to executive office,” according to a biography on her office’s website. She was first elected to the lieutenant governorship in 2018.
In a social media post on Tuesday, Flanagan celebrated the news Walz had been selected as the vice presidential nominee.
“I’ve been friends with Tim Walz for almost 20 years. And for more than five years, he’s been my partner in justice at the Minnesota Capitol,” she wrote. “He has the grit and the grace to keep our country moving forward alongside Kamala Harris.”
As lieutenant governor, Flanagan worked with Walz and other members of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party to pass a laundry list of progressive legislation — including free school breakfasts and lunches, paid family and medical leave, legalizing marijuana, codifying abortion access and enacting stricter firearms laws — in what Walz called “the most productive session in Minnesota history,” according to the Star Tribune.
She also created the the country’s first Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Office, co-chairs Minnesota’s Young Women’s Initiative and chairs the Minnesota Interagency Council on Homelessness.
Flanagan was first elected to the Minneapolis Board of Education in 2004. An experienced organizer, she spent nearly a decade training progressive candidates on how to effectively run for public office — among those candidates was Walz himself.
She also served as executive director of the Minnesota branch of youth advocacy nonprofit Children’s Defense Fund, during which time she successfully campaigned to raise the statewide minimum wage.
Flanagan went on to serve in the Minnesota House of Representatives, where she led the Subcommittee on Child Care Access and Affordability and cofounded the state’s first People of Color and Indigenous Caucus.
Born and raised by a single mother in St. Louis Park, Flanagan still lives in the Minnesota city with her husband Tom, daughter Siobhan and dog, Reuben.
There have been two Native American men elected to be governor — Johnston Murray and Kevin Stitt, both in Oklahoma. Stitt is the current governor of Oklahoma.
In an interview with The 19th, Flanagan previously reflected on what her heritage meant to her as a public servant.
“I couldn’t have ever imagined being able to see elected leaders who look like me. And for my daughter, this is simply her reality,” she said. “That is how we build a strong organization. That is how we build a strong party.”
(WASHINGTON) — As many key battleground states prepare to send out mail-in ballots to voters for the November general election, former President Donald Trump has been escalating his false and unsubstantiated rhetoric on mail-in voting, most recently even floating possible court action in what could be a repeat of the onslaught of legal battles on election results that followed the 2020 presidential election.
But the former president’s messaging on mail-in voting has been anything but consistent with his allies at the Republican National Committee often cleaning up Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting and urging voters to embrace different voting methods as the party attempts to expand voter turnout for November.
Trump, during campaign rallies and interviews throughout this election cycle, often speaks about the need to “protect the vote,” repeating false and unsubstantiated claims that “cheating” or “fraud” occurs every time mail-in voting is involved.
“The elections are so screwed up. We have to get back in and we have to change it all,” Trump falsely said during a campaign rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, last month. “We want to go to paper ballots. We want to go to same-day voting. We want to go to citizenship papers. And we want to go to voter ID. It’s very simple. We want to get rid of mail-in voting.”
In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in July, he said, “the mail-in voting isn’t working. It’s corrupt. But until then, Republicans must win.”
At those very rallies, however, and at many other rallies over the last few months, his campaign has been actively promoting mail-in voting with staffers helping supporters register for mail-in ballots on site. Additionally, large screens at rallies show messages urging supporters to request mail-in ballots, update their voter registration or “pledge” to vote early in-person as a part of their voter registration effort.
He has also pushed mixed messaging on other forms of voting, sometimes urging voters to go out to vote during early-voting periods, while other times saying he wants to enforce same-day voting.
Trump himself voted early in the Florida Republican primary last month, casting his ballot at a polling location near his home in Palm Beach.
Most recently, Trump has more specifically directed his attacks on the United States Postal Service, making baseless statements that the agency is in a “bad shape” and is unable to process mail-in ballots ahead of Election Day in November.
“They are saying they’re in very bad shape, that they cannot deliver the mail well, and we’re relying on them,” Trump falsely claimed during an interview with a far-right outlet last week.
“We ought to go to court, bring a lawsuit, because they’re going to lose hundreds of thousands of ballots, maybe purposely, or maybe just through incompetence,” he continued.
On Thursday, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy dismissed claims from the man who appointed him to the job: “My response is like my response to everyone who says that we’re not prepared for the election — it’s that they’re wrong.
“We recognize that election officials are under an extreme amount of pressure, and will remain so for at least the next two months,” DeJoy said. “We also recognize that the American public will become increasingly alarmed if there is ongoing dialogue that continues to question the reliability of the Postal Service for the upcoming elections.”
“Let me be clear,” DeJoy continued. “The Postal Service is ready to deliver the nation’s mail-in ballots.”
DeJoy, who reiterated that the agency had been delivering ballots since 1864, said the Postal Service delivered 99.89% of ballots from voters to election officials in the 2020 election, which he called a “highly sensitive, sensationalized environment.”
At times, Trump himself has urged his supporters to go out and vote regardless of the voting method, including earlier this month, ahead of what was originally supposed to be the start of North Carolina’s mail-in voting.
“This will be the most important election in the history of our country. So whether it’s mail-in ballots, early voting, voting on the day, you got to get out and vote,” Trump told his followers in a social media video earlier this month, stressing the importance of this election.
Days later, Trump on his social media platform made a baseless claim that “20% of the Mail-In Ballots in Pennsylvania are fraudulent.” Without evidence, he also accused Democrats of cheating and called on the attorney general and the FBI to launch an investigation.
Lara Trump, the RNC co-chair and Trump’s daughter-in-law, the next day attempted to clean up his comments on CNN, saying he was referring to the 2020 election — while still not providing evidence of such fraud in 2020.
She then stressed that for this election, the party is focused on making sure voters can participate in any way they can, whether it’s by mail, early voting or in-person voting on Election Day.
“What I can tell you is we worked very hard on the ground at the RNC to make sure every voter in this country feels like when you cast a ballot, whether it’s via mail, whether it’s early voting in-person, or whether it’s on Election Day in an election office, around the country, your vote matters, and your vote counts,” Lara Trump said.
“And Donald Trump very much wants every Republican voter to vote however they feel most comfortable,” she continued.
But Republicans aren’t giving a carte-blanche blessing of the process, already launching a series of legal actions in key battleground states.
On Sept. 5, the RNC filed a lawsuit against North Carolina’s Board of Elections over a state law that governs mail-in ballot curing, claiming the state election board’s rules are “inconsistent with state law and diminishes protections for absentee ballots.”
“We have filed suit to uphold election integrity and ballot safeguards. State law lays out clear requirements, and the NCSBE must follow them — we will continue to fight for election integrity in the Old North State,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley wrote in a statement.
After a delay over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s legal battle to remove his name from the ballot, absentee ballots are finally set to go out in North Carolina next week.
The RNC this week also launched a petition to the state Supreme Court against Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State Al Schmidt, saying the state’s instructions for voters to cast a provisional ballot if they do not follow the instructions for completing and returning mail ballots is illegal.
Under the current Pennsylvania law, some counties have created procedures to notify voters if there’s any issue with their mail-in ballot to provide them the opportunity to fix that ballot or to cast a provisional ballot in person on Election Day.
“Secretary Schmidt’s policy ignores the law and has caused great confusion to Pennsylvania voters,” Whatley wrote in a statement. “This clearly undermines election integrity, diminishes fairness for voters, and threatens to erode public confidence in our elections. We have filed suit to force election officials to follow the law in the Keystone State.”
The RNC also recently sued the city of Racine, Wisconsin, claiming a lack of Republican election inspectors hired by the city, signaling a general election full of legal battles, as Trump and his allies continue to stress the importance of “protecting the vote.”
“As the president has said, it is great to vote early, it’s great to vote by mail, absentee, and it’s great to vote on Election Day,” Whatley said in June when asked about Trump’s disparaging comments on mail-in voting. “The key is you got to make a plan.”
“We are spending a very significant amount of our time protecting the vote,” Whatley said. “We are recruiting hundreds of thousands of volunteers that we’re going to recruit and train and make sure that we deploy to serve as observers, poll workers and full judges all across the country.”
“And we want people to have a comfort level knowing that their vote is going to be preserved and it’s going to be. We protect the sanctity of the vote,” he continued. “So when people have comfort that we’re going to have election integrity, they’ll feel more comfortable voting.”
Asked for a comment, Trump’s campaign pushed early voting.
“This election cycle, President Trump, the RNC, and our campaign have been consistent and clear: vote early,” Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said.
ABC News’ Lucien Bruggeman and Brittany Shepherd contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley pushed back against criticism from former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney on Haley’s support for former President Donald Trump despite previous comments saying she found him unfit for office.
In an exclusive This Week interview on Sunday, ABC News co-anchor Jonathan Karl asked Cheney about Haley saying she’s on “standby” to campaign for Trump after the former South Carolina governor openly opposed him in the Republican primaries.
Cheney, who last week endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, told Karl, “I can’t understand [Haley’s] position on this in any kind of a principled way. I think that, you know, the things that she said, that she made clear when she was running in the primary, those things are true.”
During the Republican presidential primary, Haley said Trump lacked focus and that “chaos follows him.” Months later, Haley said she would vote for Trump despite her disappointment with him.
Reacting to Cheney’s remarks, Haley told Fox and Friends Monday morning, “I respect her decision, but she can’t say my decision is not principled. It actually is.”
“We can either vote based on style or we can vote on substance. I’m voting based on substance,” she continued. “I’m looking at the fact we can’t live the next four years like we did the last four years. This is no contest.”
Seeking to contrast Trump with Harris on the economy, border and energy, Haley added, “We should be very clear, if you don’t like him, say you don’t like him, but you can’t say that his policies are worse than Kamala Harris’.”
Haley also directly criticized Trump and running mate Sen. JD Vance when asked about the “gender gap” with women supporting Harris more than Trump.
“I think it’s because Donald Trump and JD Vance need to change the way they speak about women. You don’t need to call Kamala dumb. She didn’t get this far, you know, just by accident — she’s here. That’s what it is. She’s a prosecutor,” Haley said. “You don’t need to go and talk about intelligence, or looks or anything else. Just focus on the policies. When you call even a Democrat woman dumb, Republican women get their backs up too.”
Last month, Trump said he’s “entitled” to the personal attacks aimed at Harris — because he doesn’t respect her and doesn’t “have a lot of respect for her intelligence.”
Haley reiterated that Trump should ditch those attacks to focus on substance.
“The bottom line is, we win on policy. Stick to the policies, leave all the other stuff. That’s how he can win,” Haley said.