What a difference a summer can make. Two short months ago, Democrats were in a place of deep political pain. The June presidential debate revealed the fact that the Joe Biden they got was not the one his campaign had sold them, and they faced the real possibility that Republicans could sweep them out of power across the country. Meanwhile, Uncle Joe showed no signs of walking away from a job he’d sought his entire professional life. Until he finally did, of course, and the party embraced Vice President Kamala Harris with a warmth and enthusiasm few would have guessed.
Labor Day and the start of the fall campaign are now upon us. With a new Democrat taking on Donald Trump, many of our political assumptions have been flipped on their heads, including those about the shape of the 2024 digital campaign. What should we expect for the next two months of our online lives?
The Race for Donor Dollars
Kamala Harris upended the 2024 race for political money. After lagging Donald Trump most of the year, the Democrats raised $540 million in Harris’s first month as the presumptive nominee. Far from falling behind, she now leads on the crucial measure of cash on hand. Independent expenditure groups on the Trump side have still raised more than their Democratic counterparts, but it’s likely that the margin will at least narrow in the weeks to come.
Along the way, Harris has brought in money from *a lot* of grassroots supporters — a couple of million of them, 70% of whom hadn’t donated to Biden’s campaign before he dropped out. At least 400,000 of those people had given to Biden in 2020 but had NOT come along this time around. A new nominee has brought them back aboard the Democratic donor train, just in time to help push it out of the station.
The majority of these folks gave relatively small amounts, too, which means they can still be called upon to donate more. As I put it in my digital campaigning ebook, a small-donor list is “a gift that keeps on giving, quite literally.” And once someone’s donated, they’re invested in a campaign’s success, again quite literally. Many will feel compelled to volunteer as well, or at least to advocate for Harris in their personal circles.
Perhaps not so surprising? Sixty percent of her donors are women. Perhaps more surprising? Just about every niche community in the Democratic orbit has held its own Zoom call by now, helping to raise money and sign up supporters.
Reshaping the Ground Game
As you might have guessed by now, Harris is reinvigorating the Democratic ground game as well. Tens of thousands of volunteers signed up on the day Biden dropped out and endorsed her, a number that was closing in on 400,000 a month later. When I looked at the competing field strategies of the Biden and Trump campaigns back in the spring, the Democrats were relying on volunteers, state parties and a web of turnout organizations to make up the margins in battleground states and far beyond. If anything, the new Democratic enthusiasm has super-charged their existing plans: grassroots supporters signed up for 200,000 volunteer shifts during the week of the Chicago convention alone.
Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign apparently still intends to rely heavily on independent expenditure organizations, many of which can take functionally unlimited amounts of big-donor money. They’ll employ a mix of paid canvassers and volunteers to turn out voters in battleground states, hoping to take advantage of new rules that allow more coordination between campaigns and IE groups. Compared with Harris, the Trump campaign has opened few field offices, even in a battleground state like Pennsylvania.
To put it mildly, paid canvassing has not always worked out well in the past, nor has trying to create field campaigns at the last minute and on the fly. As I put it in May, “the RNC’s current plan ignores pretty much everything we’ve learned about voter turnout in the past twenty years.” And that’s in areas where the national Republican ground game is even present, since Republican candidates outside of Trump-campaign priority areas may be on their own. If I were running as a down-ballot Republican, I might be building my own field program as fast as resources allow.
Who’ll Dominate the Digital Ad Wars?
Meanwhile, the Harris campaign is pouring some of its new-found wealth into paid digital media, which had been one of Trump’s strengths since his victorious presidential campaign of 2016. That year, he put around half of his media budget into digital channels rather than traditional television, with a particular emphasis on Facebook.
This time around, Trump’s actually fallen behind his own 2020 pace, while Harris has made what is surely the largest single investment in digital ads in political history. She’s putting some $200 million into streaming services and other digital persuasion channels, while also spending heavily on more-traditional online platforms like Google properties (I see a Harris fundraising ad just about every time I tune into YouTube, for example).
I would expect Trump to spend more money online as we get closer to Election Day, but the time for persuasion will run out soon. North Carolina will start mailing out some ballots in the first week of September! GOTV advertising can help turn out the faithful, but the window for reaching voters who are on the fence won’t be open forever.
About Those Coconuts
Finally, Democratic enthusiasm is encroaching on another of Trump’s traditional strengths: grassroots digital activism. From Reddit to 4chan to X, Trump supporters have been self-organizing online for almost a decade now. They’ve flooded Facebook and just about every other social channel with memes, and their “lighten up Libs, we’re just joking” mindset has seeped into the wider conservative world as well. Against the Trump stans, Democrats and the online left have generally struggled to compete, often hamstrung by their own stuffiness and sincerity.
But now that coconut tree and an army of Harris-loving memers are giving them a run for their money, and we have a Democratic campaign determined to give them a whole lot of help. Biden was already cultivating influencers last year, and the Harris campaign has kept the momentum going. Around 200 content creators joined the Democrats in Chicago, and one I spoke with on the sidelines talked about the space the campaign had set aside for them near the convention arena itself.
Harris’s digital team is also going straight to the perpetually online in the styles they’re familiar with, for instance by streaming the convention in Instagram/TikTok-friendly vertical video. Plus, they’re reaching out to specific communities via the digital channels they use the most, for instance connecting with Latino voters via YouTube and WhatsApp.
But I suspect that Harris’s individual activists will make the biggest difference in social-media spaces, just as conservative memers have blown away most institutional conservative voices online. Harris’s grassroots influencers are aware of it, too. As one of them told the Washington Post, she was engaged in “a modern-day version of guerrilla marketing.”
Predicting is Hard, Especially about the Future
Of course, none of this means that Kamala Harris is going to beat Donald Trump in 2024. Plenty of candidates have run fantastic campaigns and still lost, because the fundamentals were against them. But so far at least, the contours of our polarized political landscape suggest we’re in for a close election. And if the last eight years have taught us anything, it’s to not underestimate Donald Trump and the bond he has with his supporters.
Yet all things fade with time. I was struck by a recent line from James Carville, who said that “the most thunderous sound in all of American politics is the sound of a turning page.” This year, we’ve already seen the page turn on Joe Biden’s political career. If Harris and the Democrats have their way, America will close the books on Donald Trump this November.
Colin Delany is founder and editor of the award-winning website Epolitics.com, author of the new 2024 edition of “How to Use the Internet to Change the World – and Win Elections,” a veteran of more than twenty-eight years in digital politics and a perpetual skeptic. See something interesting? Send him a pitch at cpd@epolitics.com.
