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In September,
the day after the debate between Harris and Trump,
I spoke again with the lobbyist #Ed #Rogers.

“You know, I’m a Trump voter, a Trump donor,” he said,
“but I think Harris is going to win.”

Another Republican told me that, after Trump’s poor debate performance,
he had seen similar hand-wringing from other major donors:

“Can I stomach giving money to this guy and he keeps blowing it?”

In at least one notable case,
Harris managed to regain a major donor who had defected to Trump,
the Silicon Valley venture capitalist
#Ben #Horowitz.

Horowitz and his business partner, #Marc #Andreessen, who are both longtime Democratic givers,
had stunned the tech world in July by endorsing the ex-President,
citing, in part, Trump’s newfound support for the crypto industry.

But, in October, Horowitz announced that he and his wife planned to make a “significant donation” to Harris,
saying that, though the Biden Administration had been
“exceptionally destructive on tech policy,”
he had spoken personally with Harris, a friend from California,
and was “hopeful” that she would take a different approach.

“There was no real engagement by the Biden world with the business community,”
a Democratic donor who has spoken with the Vice-President told me.

“Harris has been very intentional about engaging.

She’s saying all the right things.”

Harris’s success with the moneyed class infuriated Trump.

“All rich, job creating people, that support Comrade Kamala Harris,” he wrote in a social-media post in September,
“you are STUPID.”

A couple of weeks later, he posted the
false claim that
Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan C.E.O., whom Trump had also mused about as a candidate for Treasury Secretary,
had endorsed him.

Not only was this untrue, as JPMorgan swiftly announced;

it turned out that Dimon’s wife had donated more than $200,000 to the Democratic ticket
and attended a dinner this summer with Harris.

As if to rebut the doubters,
Trump appeared in early October at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania,
the scene of the first assassination attempt against him,
alongside his wealthiest benefactor, Musk.

Trump had outsourced much of his campaign’s turnout operation
—the traditional preserve of the political parties and the candidates
—to Musk’s America pac.

Musk, whom the Times called “obsessive, almost manic” in his backing of the ex-President,
had all but relocated to Pennsylvania to oversee an effort to swing the crucial battleground state.

In Butler, he leaped around the stage in a black maga hat,
as the former President grinned with delight.

If Trump does not win, Musk told the crowd, “this will be the last election.”

A few days later, Harris’s campaign made a stunning announcement:

she had raised $1 billion in a matter of weeks,
the largest sum ever collected for an American politician in such a short amount of time.

Harris more than doubled Trump’s contributions in September alone.

Will it matter?

During the past two decades, the winner of the Presidential election has always been the better funded of the two candidates
—with the notable exception of Hillary Clinton, in 2016.

♦ By Susan B. Glasser
October 18, 2024