‘Her extraordinary origin story could help expand the base’: Diverse donors race to help Harris make history

By Fredreka Schouten, CNN

(CNN) — Kamala Harris stands on the threshold of history.

If elected to succeed President Joe Biden, Harris – the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother – would not only be the first woman, but the first Indian American, the first Asian, the first Black woman and the first person of Jamaican descent to ascend to the office.

And Democratic-aligned donors from all those worlds are eager to help Harris get there.

“Her multiple identities is actually her superpower in this moment,” said Glynda Carr, the CEO of Higher Heights for America, a group focused on growing Black women’s political power.

Carr, like Harris, is a part of the storied Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., whose members swiftly donated checks in amounts of $19.08 to Biden’s campaign in 2020 to signal their approval of his vice-presidential pick. That figure marks the year of the sorority’s founding at Harris’ alma mater, Howard University.

Her sorority sisters are messaging with their money once again: More than 1,500 contributions of exactly $19.08 each have hit the campaign’s accounts between Sunday afternoon – when Biden exited the 2024 presidential race – and Monday evening, according to a source familiar with Harris’ fundraising.

Carr suspects that “all the founding dates” of the Divine Nine – as the country’s historically African American sororities and fraternities are known – will be represented on checks this year.

Political fundraisers around the country say they’ve witnessed a breathtaking financial turnaround for Democrats since Biden’s withdrawal effectively ended a donor blockade in the aftermath of the president’s poor debate performance last month.

Harris’ campaign said it had collected a staggering $100 million between Sunday and Monday evening across all its fundraising committees – far surpassing the $53 million that Trump’s political operation touted raising after his May conviction in a Manhattan business fraud case. More than 1.1 million donors have contributed – with 62% of them first-time givers this cycle, Harris’ campaign said.

Alexandra Acker-Lyons, a Democratic donor adviser based in Denver, said she began her outreach to her network of women donors last Thursday as it became increasingly apparent that the turmoil around Biden’s continued candidacy would not let up. The floodgates are now open, she said.

Contributors are “just overwhelmingly excited” by Harris’ candidacy, said Acker-Lyons, who also serves as political director of the Electing Women Alliance, a network of political giving circles focused on supporting female Democratic candidates who support abortion rights.

“One donor said, ‘I didn’t have unbridled joy on my bingo card for 2024,’” she said.

‘She’s my DNA’

It’s not just women who are exulting at Harris’ rise.

Her ascent in national politics underscores that “as a community, we really have arrived in the United States,” said Ramesh Kapur, an Indian-American businessman and veteran Democratic bundler.

He said he held his first fundraiser for Harris at his Boston-area home during her successful 2016 Senate campaign. Now, Kapur is working to rally other people of Indian heritage to open their checkbooks for the roughly three-month sprint to Election Day.

“I’m really excited about her because she’s my DNA,” he said.

In Virginia, meanwhile, Shekar Narasimhan – an investment banker and chairman of the AAPI Victory Fund political action committee – said a broad array of Asian Americans “are coming out of the woodwork” for Harris.

He’s said he’s getting texts, emails and Signal messages from people who have never donated before but who see themselves in her story as the first generation born in the US to immigrant parents.

“These are people who don’t get the DNC emails,” Narasimhan said, raising his hopes that the surge of interest among first-time givers will translate into electoral results for the Democratic Party in November.

“This breadth of her extraordinary origin story could expand the base,” he said. “We always talk about how Trump expanded the base of the Republican Party. On a pure electoral side, this could be the first opportunity Democrats have had in a long time to expand the base.”

The Indian American Impact Fund has seen a nearly 90% increase in contributions from new donors within the 24-hour window since Harris announced she was running, according to its executive director Chintan Patel.

Patel said the group is planning a seven-figure investment to mobilize particularly South Asian and AAPI voters in battleground states.

Challenges ahead

If Black women turn out at higher-than-expected levels in swing states such as Michigan and Wisconsin – which Biden won by fewer than 21,000 votes out of 3.3 million cast in 2020 – that could well “be the margin of win” for Harris in November, said Carr of Higher Heights.

But for all the early enthusiasm, the groups supporting Harris say big challenges remain – both in sustaining her campaign’s early financial momentum and in helping blunt looming attacks on her race and gender.

Carr pointed to repeated and deliberate mispronunciations of Harris’ first name by her political foes as “whistleblowing to a population that doesn’t believe she can lead.”

Harris “has run, won and governed on every level of government,” she said. “If you had that resume without putting her name or her pronouns on it … People would say, ‘This person should be president.’”

Acker-Lyons said she is encouraging her network of donors to make even more financial investments, not just in Harris’ campaign but in outside groups that are prepared to defend her this fall and mobilize voters on her behalf.

“Some of the large donors gave in the moment, but, hopefully, they will give again and add a zero going forward.”

CNN’s Veronica Stracqualursi contributed to this report.

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