Kamala Harris Paid Millions for Celebrity Endorsements and Lost Big

Now we know where the billion dollars went.

As campaign finance reports emerge we’re getting a better picture of just how the Harris campaign was spending money and why they’re left holding $20 million in debt.

What about all those celebrity endorsements? Clearly, these were genuine people concerned about Donald Trump as an existential threat to democracy so they would’ve crawled over backward to lend support to Kamala Harris, or so they would have you believe.

Despite all the rhetoric and complaining about what a Trump victory would mean for the country, most of the Harris-endorsing celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey, were paid to appear with her, reports the New York Post:

Vice President Kamala Harris paid Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions $1 million, just one example of millions the campaign spent on various entertainers during the vice president’s failed bid for president.

The Harris campaign paid $1 million to Winfrey’s company on October 15, according to a report in the Washington Examiner, coming after a star-studded town hall that Winfrey hosted for the vice president in September.

Winfrey also appeared at Harris’ final rally in Philadelphia on the eve of Election Day, with the talk show star offering a rare endorsement of a presidential candidate.

“We’re voting for values and integrity,” Winfrey said at the rally. “We’re voting for healing over hate.”

The faux outrage of celebrities who claim that Trump is a million times worse than Hitler and everything bad combined yet still needed to be cajoled with cash to appear alongside Kamala Harris is the peak of hypocrisy. What it really demonstrates is just how unserious the “Trump is Hitler” narrative truly was. Even the people saying it didn’t believe their own moronic words or at least they needed to check to clear first.

As if giving Oprah a million dollars for a widely panned town hall event wasn’t bad enough, the Harris campaign apparently spent hundreds of thousands to construct a set for one of her few podcast appearances:

But Winfrey wasn’t the only star the Harris campaign spent big money on, with the Washington Examiner report also revealing that the campaign spent big on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast.

“A source familiar with the matter told the Washington Examiner that the Harris campaign spent six figures on building a set for Harris’s appearance on the popular Call Her Daddy podcast with host Alex Cooper,” the Examiner wrote. “The interview came out in October and was reportedly filmed in a hotel room in Washington, D.C.”

Near psychotic levels of control hovered everything the Harris campaign touched. What does it say about the advisors and strategists around her that they viewed the optics and what color chair she sat in as the most likely ways to swing voters? Maybe it was her terrible cackles and non-answers they should’ve been more concerned with.

What we learned through all this is that celebrity endorsements, when constantly piled on and clearly bought and paid for, do not equate to winning voters in the end. Some would argue that Donald Trump has plenty of celebrity endorsements of his own such as Kid Rock or Jason Aldean, to name a few. That’s true but there’s arguably a difference. When they speak for Trump you can tell it’s coming from a heartfelt place couched in their core beliefs. They didn’t need to be paid or prodded to voice their opinion and speak up on behalf of Trump, they wanted to support him simply because they could clearly and articulately explain why they felt he was the better option.

In other words, it’s different when celebrities take risks to stand on their principles compared to celebrities who cash a paycheck to deliver a three-minute speech off their phone written by a staffer to hit all the right buzz words.

Just like in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump raised and spent a fraction of what Democrats spent and made it look easy in the end.

Money can’t buy everything when voters don’t like the product you’re selling:

 

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Nate Ashworth

The Founder and Editor-In-Chief of Election Central. He's been blogging elections and politics for over a decade. He started covering the 2008 Presidential Election which turned into a full-time political blog in 2012 and 2016 that continues today.

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