When 300 top fund-raisers for Vice President Kamala Harris filed into Philadelphia’s Academy of Fine Arts on Sunday evening for a 10-to-a-table dinnernextbet, they got to hear from Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
The message from Ms. Harris’s surrogates to her top donors: Yes, you’ve raised a lot of money for us. Now, please raise even more.
The donors, dining on grilled cod and beef medallions, had good reason to chortle. Finance leaders had told them earlier in the evening that they had raised a staggering $1 billion for Ms. Harris’s campaign since she replaced President Biden as the Democratic nominee.
The next day, campaign officials told donors in a closed-door briefing that they had raised well over $100 million in September for the campaign’s major donor program, according to two people briefed on their remarks.
All of this success has had some unintended consequences. For starters, so much money has been raised that donors are occasionally reluctant to give more, according to several fund-raisers and finance professionals serving Ms. Harris. Why give $3,300 — the maximum legal donation — in mid-October to a candidate raising millions of dollars a day?
And could a big contribution so late in the campaign even be put to use?
“Yes, I understand we have done good work in the fund-raising space,” Rufus Gifford, the campaign’s top fund-raising official, said in an interview. “I will never say it’s enough. Because with the stakes as they are, with the amount of dark money on the side, we’re up against a behemoth.”
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