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Kamala wanted to run the country. In the end, she couldn't even run her own campaign.
Apparently, the Harris campaign is $20 million in debt despite spending at least $1 billion over the last 3 months. On the other hand, the Trump campaign was frugal - spending only about 1/3 or 1/2 as much as Kamala (quibble about the exact numbers all you want). Staffing in particular seems to have been a major difference with Harris spending perhaps an order of magnitude more than Trump. Harris hired high paid consultants while Trump relied on free labor from passionate supporters.
It gets worse.
The Harris campaign has been accused of paying celebrities for exposure. Surely, already rich celebrities like Beyoncé and Oprah would be happy to support their favored candidate for free. Right? Apparently not. Fox News has reported that the Harris campaign paid Oprah a million dollars to interview her. Lizzo and Cardi B have also been singled out as receiving payments.
Is it any wonder that these celebrity endorsements don't work when they are so fake?
Contra Scott's too much money in dark almonds piece, I think the reason that political campaign donations are relatively low is that it's really hard to buy an election. Bloomberg tried to back in 2020 and his campaign went nowhere. Money does matter, but the candidate matters a lot more. $1 to Trump makes a bigger difference than $3 to Harris. And Trump appearing on Rogan might have been worth $100 million, but he didn't have to pay a cent.
The debt isn't a bad thing: it's common for campaigns to end up with debt. 20M/1000M is 2%. When you're spending those kind of sums over a very short time period in a high stakes situation, with uncertain, variable income streams, it's almost inevitable. It will end up being paid off, and IIRC donation limits are reset after the election (though, if someone was a Kamala donor, I do not envy how much begging they're going to endure for the next couple weeks). Maybe Trump will magnanimously bail her out.
And, although she lost, I'm not sure you can say it was badly spent. As stupid as it is that paying Beyonce to fart in your direction can make voters want to vote for you, if you're flush with cash and you think it'll help, why not? What else would the campaign spend it on? Yet more clueless college grads to run social media accounts and spam Reddit with Kamala memes?
Final point: Kamala did much better in the swing states where the money was being spent than the country at large. A ~2% shift across every state would have resulted in Kamala holding the blue "wall" and winning the electoral college, while still losing the popular vote. Going into the campaign, the expectation was that Kamala would need to be running 2-3 points ahead of Trump nationally to have a shot at those states, but the campaign managed to eliminate this gap. This wasn't done through offering thoughtful policy proposals that addressed their specific regional concerns, or through her personal charismatic connection with white rust belt voters.
Money is good, and it's an edge Democrats will have for the foreseeable future, even if there are diminishing marginal returns to it. They just need a better product to market.
This is glossing over the miserable optics of paying (out of touch) celebrities to be your friends. Of course this wasn't known prior to the election results but it's another count amongst many in which the democratic are currently a laughingstock.
That indicates that Democrats are weak when it comes to earned media. That's a massive issue, but it's a separate one from "I have a giant bag of money and need to spend it." The latter is a good problem to have, even if you're chasing after increasingly marginal edges with each additional dollar.
Only if it's not also in direct conflict with your "get billionaire funding out of politics!" messaging.
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