Digging into federal data, the New York Times has revealed the scale of Kamala Harris’s financial advantage over Donald Trump in the presidential race. In August, Harris brought in around $361 million in campaign donations, while Trump’s team only mustered $130 million. That gap in fundraising is matched by a disparity in spending: her campaign organisation is much bigger, as is her advertising budget.

Harris’s campaign in some ways is an attempt to bring the model of California progressivism to the national stage. Democrats dominate the Golden State, where Republicans have not won a statewide office in almost two decades. As a result of this overwhelming partisan lean, California Democrats essentially act as the tribune for the state’s unified elite: big labour, high tech, finance, Hollywood, corporate law firms, and identity politics activist groups bargain for power within the framework of the Democratic Party.

One of the principal training grounds for California Democratic power players, San Francisco embodies this alliance of Big Money and progressive activism. It also served as the launchpad for Harris’s own career. Overwhelming fundraising dominance is part of that California legacy. In 2022, Gavin Newsom — another veteran of San Francisco politics — raised almost 10 times as much in his reelection bid as his Republican opponent did.

Whereas Joe Biden was in some respects a bridge to the fading memory of the Great Society coalition, Harris is instead an apt avatar for the new Democratic Party, which is increasingly attuned to the moneyed and educated elite. The explosion of her fundraising testifies to newfound enthusiasm among the progressive base.

Nor is this Democratic financial edge necessarily limited to the presidential race. According to financial numbers from earlier this year, Democratic candidates for open Senate seats in Arizona and Michigan also had an advantage over their Republican opponents. In some congressional battles, even Democratic challengers lead Republican incumbents in the fundraising race. While some dissident billionaires such as Elon Musk are prominent Republican allies, Democrats now seem particularly appealing to the highly engaged professional class who provide many small-dollar donations.

Harris has been able to use this financial advantage to dominate the airwaves and build a turnout machine. Like Biden, she has focused her electoral strategy on making November a referendum on Trump. The fact that Harris is not the incumbent president has been essential for that gambit, but being able to churn out an avalanche of anti-Trump ads obviously helps.

Yet her attempt to nationalise the California model might also have its limits. The pressures of coalition management — bringing together CEOs and social-justice activists — have kept her campaign very vague. As a recent New York Times essay noted, that strategy may have political costs. Many voters seem uncertain about where Harris stands on many issues, and that vagueness could cost her among voters still on the fence about a second Trump term. Attempting to file away populist policies so that they are palatable to corporate interests may also harm her among some blue-collar Americans, as the recent non-endorsement from the Teamsters indicates.

Polling for the presidential election is full of mixed signals. One set of polls found that Trump had an edge as the candidate of “change”, while another found that the “change” issue favoured Harris. By continuing to drive news cycles with controversial comments, Trump has aided the VP’s effort to keep the campaign a referendum on him.

Yet, despite a favourable media environment and this massive fundraising lead, Harris has — at best — a slim polling advantage in what many analysts consider to be a toss-up race. Trump has been massively outspent in two presidential races in a row, but he won in 2016 and only narrowly lost in 2020. As Hillary Clinton found to her own great disappointment, money is not everything in the race for the White House.

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Fred Bauer is a writer from New England.

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