Kamala Harris Relies on Coastal Elite Donor Base to Fund 2020 Campaign

Despite her attacks on the top one percent, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) has relied primarily on an elite group of coastal donors to fund her 2020 Democrat presidential campaign.

Harris, who has attempted to adopt the anti-elite rhetoric deployed by President Trump, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), is almost exclusively being funded by California residents and specifically those working for major law firms, multinational corporations, and Silicon Valley tech conglomerates.

Detailed donor-base maps created by the New York Times reveal that Sanders’ left-wing populist campaign, for example, has nearly three times as many individual donors as Harris’s. And when Sanders is excluded, Harris still only dominates with donor funding in California’s elite coastal zip codes, while Warren has the most across-the-country support from individual donors.

Less than 40 percent of Harris’s funding has come from small-dollar donors giving $200 or less. The majority of her donations, more than 56 percent, have come from large-dollar donors giving $200 or more.

More than 30,000 of the roughly 99,000 donations listed to Harris’s campaign on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) database came from residents in either California, New York, Florida, Washington, D.C., or Virginia.

Harris’s top donors include lawyers from the Paul, Weiss, et al law firm, which has represented Citigroup, as well as American job outsourcers and offshorers such as the Walt Disney corporation; multinational communications services AT&T Inc., Alphabet Inc. which is the parent corporation of Google; as well as Apple Inc.

In May, billionaire Gordon Getty of the Getty Oil dynasty hosted a fundraiser for Harris at his mansion in San Fransisco, California with Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA). Campaign records find that the billionaire Getty family has contributed thousands to Harris.

Likewise, though Harris’s campaign has claimed that she does not accept funding from Big Pharma, a number of pharmaceutical executives have gifted the California Senator with campaign cash, The Intercept notes:

Donors include Therese Meaney, a vice president at Endo Pharmaceuticals, a company that manufacturers opioid painkillers, who has given $1,250 to the Harris campaign; Ted Love, the president and chief executive of Global Blood Therapeutics, a startup biopharmaceutical company, who gave $2,800; J. Dana Hughes, a vice president at Pfizer, gave $250; Damian Wilmot, an executive at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, gave $1,000; and Jeffrey Stein, the chief executive of Cidara Therapeutics, another drug startup, who gave $1,000.

Silicon Valley’s tech elites have been major contributors to Harris’s bid as she has campaigned against slapping tariffs on the foreign-made products of tech corporations.

Seven Facebook executives and employees have donated $1,000 or more to Harris’s campaign, while nearly 20 Google executives and employees have donated more than $1,000, four Twitter executives and employees have donated more than $1,000, and 71 Amazon executives and employees have donated anywhere from $5 to $2,000.

The Walt Disney Corporation’s Craig Hunegs, who heads Disney Television Studios, is one of Harris’s top donors, giving nearly $6,000 to her campaign. California real estate developer John Dinapoli, Coastal Healthcare Services President Quiana Mitchem, and New York Attorney Fraser Hunter Jr. have all donated more than $5,000 to Harris as well.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.