Harris Hits Major Fundraising Milestone as Momentum Keeps Surging

Fundraising for the Democratic National Convention has gone through the roof, shattering previous Republican and Democratic fundraising efforts with a whopping $94 million, according to the host committee, Development Now for Chicago.

“Today’s announcement is a reflection of the unified love for our city, and we couldn’t be more grateful for the broad coalition of partners who came together to ensure Chicago could put its best foot forward at this convention,” Christy George, the host committee’s executive director, said Wednesday in a statement obtained by the Chicago Tribune.

The announcement listed AT&T, Invenergy, and United Airlines as major investors, according to the Tribune, though a more comprehensive picture of donors will be available after the convention ends next week.

All in all, the committee raised $9 million more than the Republican National Convention in July, which brought in $85 million, according to Milwaukee’s host committee.

The milestone arrives alongside a Monmouth University poll illustrating skyrocketing momentum behind Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign. There were significant boosts in enthusiasm among Democrats—which leaped from 46 percent to 85 percent now that Harris is the nominee—as well as independent voters, who similarly jumped from 34 percent when President Joe Biden was in the race to 53 percent with Harris.

“This is clearly a different ballgame. The nominee change has raised the ceiling for potential Democratic support in the presidential contest by a small but crucial amount, at least for now,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, in a statement.

A former aide to Donald Trump doesn’t predict good things coming out of his campaign’s latest strategy.

In an effort to keep the Republican presidential nominee from making more childish ad hominem attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris and her crowd sizes, the Trump campaign has reportedly discussed holding smaller “messaging events.” Those will replace his boisterous, multi-hour rallies, which he won’t resume until after the Democratic National Convention, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told CNBC.

But although the intention of the micro events is to keep Trump focused on the issues that actually matter to voters, former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham believes that the events will be short-lived as the campaign discovers Trump doesn’t thrive in smaller crowds.

“I imagine he will do some of them, and maybe for a week he’ll, you know, attempt to stay on message,” Grisham said on a CNN panel Tuesday. “It depends on how tough his staff is being with him, but he will get bored. He doesn’t like those small events; he never has. And he will be demanding to do a large rally sooner rather than later.

“They want him to be a fake version of himself,” she added. “Donald Trump is a bombastic narcissist, and he loves attention.”

Conservatives have been less than enthused about Trump’s performance in recent weeks, as the typically bombastic populist had floundered to find an appropriate political response to Harris’s nomination outside of mocking her race, her personality, or her intelligence. Even some of Trump’s most ardent supporters have abandoned ship. Last week, notorious white supremacist Nick Fuentes announced a “groyper war” on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, believing that Trump’s current campaign staff are setting the party up for a “catastrophic loss.”

Gun rights activist and charged Kenosha, Wisconsin, shooter Kyle Rittenhouse publicly withdrew his support from Trump earlier this month, announcing in a video statement that he felt Trump wasn’t a true champion of the Second Amendment and that he intended to write in former Representative Ron Paul. (Though less than 12 hours after making the post, Rittenhouse was approached by Trump’s team and subsequently changed his tune.) And users on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, got the hashtag “#TrumpIsACoward” trending after the Republican nominee backed out of a prearranged September 10 debate with Harris on ABC News. (Trump has since agreed, again, to the debate.)

But despite Trump’s inability to adapt and change to the new race, Grisham doesn’t believe he’ll be able to keep up the mini rallies—even if they’re for the good of his campaign.

“Look, we did this a million times,” Grisham told CNN. “We did it in 2016. We did it throughout our time in the White House. We were all trying to keep him on message. Everybody was frustrated all the time.”

Donald Trump attempted to blame Kamala Harris for inflation in the wake of a new economics report, but its findings actually showed a crucial decrease in inflation.

A new report published Wednesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that in July, year-over-year inflation dropped to 2.9 percent—marking the first time that inflation has slipped below 3 percent since March 2021. The report makes way for the Federal Reserve to cut rates in September.

However, consumer prices rose: The price of food increased by 0.2 percent in July, according to the report. The data was still in line with a significant slowdown in the rising price of food, which actually went down in June. Shelter was an outlier, with the price of rent increasing by 0.5 percent.

The report represented a huge win for Democrats, who have been consistently slammed by Republicans over inflation, and the price of groceries. A recent Cato Institute poll found that a whopping 40 percent of American voters surveyed listed inflation/prices as one of their top three issues in the upcoming presidential election—placing it above any other issue in terms of voter priorities.

In light of the good news for Democrats, Trump’s campaign attempted to reframe the conversation around high prices but incidentally cited “Kamalanomics” as the cause for what is ultimately an improved economic situation.

“Under Kamala Harris, everything costs 20 percent more than it did under President Trump,” said Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt in a press release about the Labor report.

“America cannot afford another four years of Kamala’s failed economic policies,” Leavitt said, citing increases in the price of baby food and the price of gas.

Meanwhile, a new survey conducted by the Financial Times found that Harris had blunted Trump’s edge on the question of who voters trusted to handle the economy.

Donald Trump was just denied again in his hush-money trial, and predictably, he’s not happy about it.

Trump requested for a third time that Judge Juan Merchan step aside in the trial, claiming that Merchan has a conflict of interest due to his daughter’s political consultancy work, and Merchan declined yet again.

“Defendant has provided nothing new for this Court to consider. Counsel has merely repeated arguments that have already been denied by this and higher courts” and were “rife with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims,” Merchan wrote in a decision posted Wednesday. Merchan also denied similar requests from Trump’s legal team in April and August 2023.

The former president and convicted felon immediately went to Truth Social to complain.

“Judge Merchan just ruled that I, the Republican candidate for President, and leading in the Polls, am still under a Gag Order CONCERNING VERY IMPORTANT THINGS WHICH MUST BE BROUGHT TO LIGHT. I AM NOT ALLOWED TO ANSWER REPORTERS QUESTIONS. Can you believe this?” Trump posted, seemingly complaining that his partial gag order remains in place.

“The New York Courts refuse to act. This is happening right before the voting begins on September 6th. Suppression and manipulation of the vote. Voter interference. This is the real Fascist ‘stuff,’ the old Soviet Union! So much to say, and I’m not allowed to say it. Must get U.S. Supreme Court involved. New York is trying to steal the Election!” The post continued.

In May, Trump was found guilty in his hush-money trial on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. His sentencing was originally scheduled for July 11, but that was delayed to September 18 thanks to the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. To the high court’s credit, earlier this month, they rejected an attempt to delay Trump’s sentencing, paving the way for Trump to maybe face accountability.

Minnesota Senate candidate Royce White won the state’s Republican primary on Tuesday, defeating Navy veteran Joe Fraser and setting White up to run against Senator Amy Klobuchar in November.

But White, a former NBA player who had been an outspoken advocate for mental health in sports, has cultivated some disturbing positions since befriending Steve Bannon in 2021. Those include becoming an ardent Trump supporter with an affinity for antisemitic, misogynistic, and homophobic conspiracies—all of which will only make it that much more difficult for him to unseat the incumbent Democrat, who has maintained the seat since 2007.

After dozens of appearances on Bannon’s show War Room (which a February study crowned as the chief spreader of misinformation among political podcasts), White turned his attention toward women, arguing in May that “women have become too mouthy.”

Minutes later, White claimed that women’s schedules were “too busy,” while elevating a conspiracy that there was an “economic incentive” to the inception of World War II insofar as it related to introducing women to the workplace.

The conservative populist has also been caught cooking up his own misinformation. In June, White shared a map of Minneapolis awash in green, yellow, and red dots, claiming that each data point symbolized crime in the City of Lakes. But a quick fact-check by a reporter for the Minnesota Reformer showed that the map didn’t depict any lawlessness, but rather the distribution of drinking fountains across the city’s public parks.

That same month, a nonpartisan nonprofit filed a complaint against White for allegedly illegally spending tens of thousands of dollars from his failed 2022 congressional campaign on luxury dinners, vacations, and other eyebrow-raising expenses, including a $1,200 night at a Miami strip club.

But White’s character doesn’t look any better beyond his political stunts to appeal to fringe, reactionary voters. In response to an NBC News report on ignoring his child support obligations, White claimed that “liberals really just want to shame people with kids” because they’re “anti-human as fuck.” But financial statements obtained by The Daily Beast from the mother of one of White’s children indicated that the wannabe MAGA politician owed her at least $100,000 in “child support payments for a daughter with whom he is barely involved.”

“Thank God I don’t rely on his support or it would be impossible,” the woman told The Daily Beast.