this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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Kamala Harris has launched her campaign for the White House, after President Joe Biden stepped aside Sunday under pressure from party leaders.

The vice president has Biden’s endorsement, and is unchallenged as yet for the Democratic nomination, which will be formally decided at the Aug. 19 convention in Chicago.

“I am honored to have the President’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination,” Harris said in a statement. “I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party—and unite our nation—to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda. We have 107 days until Election Day. Together, we will fight. And together, we will win.”

In her statement, the vice president paid tribute to Biden’s “extraordinary leadership,” saying he had achieved more in one term than many presidents do in two.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Does the New Zealand system have a restricted 3 month official campaign period the way the UK does? A lot of Kiwi government shares similar structure with the British system.

The US doesn't, and normally campaigning spans a substantially longer period of time.

kagis

Yeah, this sounds like they do. Three months.

https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/historical-events/2023-general-election/key-dates/

Friday 14 July

Regulated period for election advertising expenses begins

Friday 13 October

Regulated period ends. All election advertising must end. Signs must be taken down by midnight. 

Saturday 14 October

Election day.

https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2023/09/04/how-did-the-us-presidential-campaign-get-to-be-so-long/

Four hundred and forty-four days prior to the 2024 presidential election, millions of Americans tuned into the first Republican primary debate. If this seems like a long time to contemplate the candidates, it is.

By comparison, Canadian election campaigns average just 50 days. In France, candidates have just two weeks to campaign, while Japanese law restricts campaigns to a meager 12 days.

You can argue whether the US should or shouldn't restrict the campaigning period (though I'm almost certain that doing so would violate the First Amendment and thus require a new constitutional amendment permitting it to put into force).

But the thing is, Trump doesn't have that restriction, the American system doesn't normally expect it, and Harris is going to be trying to run a British-length campaign with no lead time for prep in the American system when her opponent has no such restrictions. She is gonna have to hit the ground running.

Also, American presidential campaign spending and fundraising is very large compared to the European levels I've seen. Dunno what things are like in New Zealand, but I remember that when Hillary ran against Trump in 2016, each campaign spent about a billion dollars.

EDIT: I don't know if this is directly comparable, because it sounds like Kiwi rules don't have parties declare donations under $1,500 (and I don't know if these aggregate figures include individual contributions that don't have to be reported individually). I think so, because this is measuring spending, not donations. The Kiwi system is parliamentary rather than presidential and so the race for the executive is the same as the race for the legislature, whereas the spending above is only for the executive race in the US, excludes all legislative campaign spending. And I'm not clear on whether this includes donations to individuals, which apparently can differ from party donations, though the Westminster system is more party-centric than the American one, where candidates need to do a lot more of their fundraising and spending thenselves. But without my digging much more, some Kiwi numbers:

https://www.thepost.co.nz/politics/350220141/labour-spent-1m-more-national-lose-2023-election

Labour spent $1m more than National to lose the 2023 election

The ACT Party spent more than National, declaring $2.77m in expenses. NZ First spent $1.51m on a campaign which returned them to Government alongside National and ACT, whereas the Green Party spent $1.33m on a campaign that achieved wins in key electorate seats.

Also, those are Kiwibucks, not American dollars, so the USD numbers are only something like 60% of that. Accounting for that, if the numbers are comparable, that'd be the largest-spending Kiwi party doing $1.6 million USD across all of their seats compared to the US presidential campaigns alone doing about $1 billion.

Harris has got to raise some -- or all, not sure whether she can get funds from the Biden-Harris campaign warchest -- of that in the time remaining, which means that she's gotta convince people that she is who they want to be president enough to pitch into the war chest so that she can spend that to sell herself to the public. She has to build a campaign, plan to spend the money, and do so to target voters. Not much time to iterate doing that.

And keep in mind that the first Republican presidential debate mentioned above, 444 days before the election, isn't when those people started campaigning, and certainly isn't when they started planning their campaign. It's just an early milestone in the campaign. Harris is gonna have to pull all of this off in about three and a half months.

The US presidential election is an awfully large and expensive marketing fight for voter minds.

EDIT2: One positive sign for her: this person says that she believes that Harris most likely can get access to the funds that the Biden-Harris campaign has, so that'll help get her some of the way there:

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/21/kamala-harris-fundraising-surge.html

Harris can likely get immediate access to the Biden campaign’s roughly $96 million donation pot, according to Anna Massoglia, an investigations manager at the campaign finance research center, OpenSecrets.

“The general consensus among most people that I’ve spoken with is that she can use the funding,” Massoglia told CNBC in an interview.

And she picked up a little more after announcing:

But it wasn’t just the big donors who responded to Biden’s announcement: The progressive donation platform ActBlue initially said it raised $27.5 million from small-dollar donors in the five hours after Biden endorsed Harris. Later, the company announced it raised over $45 million.

[–] HappycamperNZ 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Lucky for her she also has a significant national and international threat as her opponent. She isn't an unknown going in to try take 50% - she's already got all the votes for those who see what Trump is.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

she isn't an unknown

I mean, that's true. But she's a not-terribly-high-profile veep. The regular crowd has been campaigning for over a year. Hell, Trump served as President, and he's got the visibility from that; he started campaigning for Trump-for-President like a decade ago.

Yeah, okay, Harris ran for Senate and California Attorney General, maybe they can draw some material from those campaigns or something, though running for President and targeting specially the Midwest isn't quite running to be a senator for California in terms of what material will work best, but they're gonna have to start getting people to put together a lot of content and to get it out there.

Harris has no campaign website, no volunteer network, no...like, I'm assuming that she has to be expecting to get at least a substantial chunk of the Biden-Harris campaign infrastructure, and hoping that Biden's endorsement will result in his volunteers volunteering for her.

checks

It looks like Biden's 2024 campaign website, joebiden.com, just redirects to ActBlue, a Democratic donations website, with a plain text message put up by him. They don't even have a graphic, campaign logo, anything. Like, they didn't have all this lined up and ready to go hot, or I expect that it would have redirected to a Harris campaign website.

looks further

They haven't even taken down the old website's content, just had the main page redirect.

Well, this is gonna be a historic campaign, win or lose.

[–] davidagain 1 points 5 months ago

She can campaign on access to abortion, healthcare and if she wants to really get radical, weed.