Democratic strategist James Carville said that new audits are necessary to bring transparency to the Democratic Party’s fundraising efforts after Vice President Kamala Harris burned through a historic amount of money during her unsuccessful campaign.
The vice president’s campaign raised at least $1.5 billion during her roughly three-month-long bid for the White House. After losing the election to President-elect Donald Trump earlier this month, Harris ended her campaign with a reported $20 million in debt. The news had Democrats reeling.
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Carville suggested that the campaign could have drained as much as $2.5 billion in total resources during a Thanksgiving Day episode of Politicon's Politics War Room where he called for comprehensive audits to determine where the staggering amount of money went and said that Democratic candidates of the future were going to face trouble fundraising because of “burnt” donors.
Pointing to one of Harris’s top super PACs, Future Forward, Carvile said Thursday: “I’m telling you, without complete transparency, the campaign — we think — raised a billion and a half dollars. Okay, we know that Future Forward, the last we saw, was $900 million, so we can assume that they got to a billion before the election. That’s two and a half freaking billion dollars."
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Questioning if anybody has “any idea where that money went,” Carville said Democrats are first “going to audit everything.”
“We’re going to audit the campaign,” he continued. “We’re going to audit Future Forward. We’re going to audit the DNC so people can know.”
With top Democratic mega-donors such as John Morgan saying after the election that Harris’s rampant spending despite a subsequent loss “ disqualifies her forever,” Carville warned that the bad taste in donors’ mouths is around to stay.
“The resistance is going to have trouble raising money. These fundraisers are burnt,” he said. “They’re really pissed now, and the damage that the 2024 campaign has done, that the damage that this decade has done to the Democratic brand is almost unfathomable, almost unfathomable."
James Zogby, who is running to serve as the Democratic National Committee’s vice chairman, is among other Democrats who have also floated the idea of holding the Harris campaign and future candidates accountable by creating a financial oversight committee.
“I want to make sure we have a conversation about, where does the money go, and why don’t we know where it goes?” he told Politico.
A longtime Democrat who helped former President Bill Clinton's campaign surge to victory in the 1990s, Carville was a firm supporter of Harris during her bid for the White House this year.
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However, he emerged as a frequent critic of the way in which she conducted her campaign, urging it not to focus on identity politics and Jan. 6.
Carville also criticized Harris for reportedly refusing to go on the popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast due to opposition from progressive staffers, a move which top Democrats such as Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) warned alienated male voters.
The Democratic strategist said the staffers in question should be "fired" during a previous Politicon episode released earlier this month.
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"When you put a campaign together and you hire young people to do work, let me tell you exactly what you tell these people. What I would tell them: ‘Not only am I not interested in your f***ing opinion, I’m not even gonna call you by your name. You’re 23 years old, I don’t really give a s*** what you think,’" he said.
"And let me tell you another huge error, a huge f***ing error that was made is when people said, ‘Campaigns need to reflect progressive values.’ No, they don’t. No, they don’t," he continued. "I would find out who hired them and fire that person on the spot! I’m really not interested in your uninformed, stupid, jacka** opinion as to whether to go on Joe Rogan or not."