US Vice President Harris starts 2024 campaign with fundraisers in Georgia

By Nandita Bose

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris will kick off fundraising for her 2024 re-election campaign in the swing state of Georgia on Friday as she and President Joe Biden tap donors for contributions to a ticket that raised over $1 billion in 2020.

Harris will be headlining the Democratic Party of Georgia’s Spring Soiree fundraiser – a gathering expected to have hundreds of attendees. She will also attend a private fundraiser hosted by the Democratic National Committee, a White House official said.

The events come a day after Biden began his 2024 fundraising spree and attended two events in New York hosted by wealthy donors, where he addressed concerns about his age and said the upcoming campaign could be “a pretty ugly” one. The president launched his re-election bid in April with a promise to protect personal freedoms.

Georgia, which was considered safely Republican just a decade ago, has since seen significant change as Black voters, college-educated suburban women and young adults become more politically active.

Harris played a key role in mobilizing those voters ahead of the midterms with a focus on abortion rights to help boost turnout for Democrats. Biden won the state by a narrow margin in 2020.

Biden and Harris face significant political headwinds in their bid for a second term, including low approval numbers and concerns about Biden’s age. Political strategists have said Harris’s appeal as a fundraiser for the re-election campaign will be tested in the coming months.

Harris’s 2020 campaign ‘Kamala Harris for the People’ raised over $40 million, with nearly 57% coming from large contributors, according to campaign finance records.

Harris cited a lack of “financial resources” when she dropped out of the 2020 presidential campaign but had a bundler donation list that spanned from Wall Street to Silicon Valley that was considered among the most valuable in the 2020 field. She is expected to tap those resources in 2024.

In April, Biden and Harris met 150 high-dollar donors and fundraisers in Washington, who will tap their networks to help fund their campaign over the next 18 months.

Biden’s campaign in 2020 was the first presidential campaign in history to raise over $1 billion. Campaign officials say it may need well more than $1 billion this time to re-elect Biden, hold the Senate and regain control of the House of Representatives, which Republicans took in the 2022 midterm elections.

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