Female donors mobilize for Harris, moving to stamp out opposition

For decades, Kamala Harris has been bolstered by a tightknit group of female donors who rose up with her in Democratic politics. And for weeks, even when she was still insisting that President Joe Biden would be the party’s nominee, these allies began to make moves to make sure her historic campaign would not be built on the fly.

Quickly and quietly, her biggest supporters worked to rally support around her, creating enough momentum to effectively stamp out any opposition. They collected money, cut ads in advance and worked their networks to monitor the moves of other hopefuls.

On Sunday, when Biden announced his exit from the race and endorsed Vice President Harris, all the behind-the-scenes maneuvering appeared to pay off. The nation’s highest-ranking female officeholder, Harris rapidly picked up pivotal endorsements without attracting a single serious challenger. Money started flooding in. Ads began moving. And although some major Democratic donors remained on the hunt for a non-Harris candidate Monday, their efforts were appearing increasingly futile by the hour.

Some Democratic donors who are not immediately supporting Harris — including former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Silicon Valley leaders such as Reed Hastings and Vinod Khosla — called for a competitive process, which Democratic donors and fundraisers have been interpreting as something of a code to say they are not eager to support Harris against former President Donald Trump.

“The decision is too important to rush, because the election is too important to lose,” Bloomberg said Monday.

The scale of the dissenters’ fortunes means that Harris’ team may not be able to fully ignore them, and now her allies’ task will be to silence — or at least muffle — remaining doubts. Donors and fundraisers on Sunday and Monday were racing to put together briefings and calls with other donors, and to get pro-Harris ads on television, to capture whatever momentum Harris might harness.

“I work with women from Chicago from every socioeconomic background, and they’re all really freaking psyched,” said Lauren Harper, who helps lead the Chicago fundraising chapter of what was called Women for Biden and is being renamed Women for Kamala.

Alexandra Acker-Lyons, a Democratic fundraiser with roots in the San Francisco Bay Area, began collecting pledges from prominent female Democratic donors in support of a Harris bid on Thursday, marking one of the earliest, most explicit pro-Harris efforts. Andrea Dew-Steele, a Democratic fundraiser who served on Harris’ National Finance Committee in 2020 and has been friends with her since 2000, said she had spent the past few weeks funneling donors to groups such as Emily’s List in preparation for any announcement.

“We were trying to make sure that we were ready for this moment,” she said. “I was just trying to prepare the ground.”

Should Harris win the nomination, her remarkable ascent would vault these California female backers such as Dew Steele and Acker-Lyons to the top of the heap in the Democratic campaign-finance industry — no small feat in a sphere dominated by men.

Some of the women behind Harris are already famous, both inside and outside Democratic power circles. For more than a decade, Harris has had a particularly close friendship with philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, one of the wealthiest women in the world, who hosted a fundraiser for Harris in her backyard in Palo Alto, California, in 2013. The Silicon Valley billionaire would most likely play a bigger role in a Harris campaign owing to their friendship, people close to Harris say. Powell Jobs has yet to publicly comment on Harris’ bid.

Major female donors such as Karla Jurvetson and Susie Tompkins Buell have pledged their support to Harris. Tompkins Buell said she is planning a Harris event. Jurvetson, vice chair of the board for Emily’s List, is not personally close to Harris, but she had worked for weeks to encourage Biden to step aside, according to people familiar with her moves.

Other female Harris boosters are perhaps less well known, but no less loyal. Key backers over the past two-plus decades, according to people who know her social circle, include Joyce Newstat, a bundler who also sits on the board of Emily’s List; Quinn Delaney, part of a power couple in the East Bay who is set to host a fundraiser for Biden later this week; and Stacy Mason, who has been among her biggest fundraisers over the years.

Mason, who now runs a fundraising platform for female candidates called WomenCount, said Sunday was the platform’s biggest fundraising day since Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020. Her organization was prepared with emails and links supporting the vice president, contributing to the sense of momentum that Harris has projected in the immediate aftermath of Biden’s shock decision.

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