Oprah Winfrey is shutting down claims that she was paid $1 million to host a town hall on behalf of Kamala Harris‘ presidential campaign, debunking the reports.
While Winfrey refused to comment on the election results, she made it clear that she didn’t accept any money to hit the campaign trail on behalf of the Vice President, despite several claims.
“Not true. I was never paid anything—ever,” Winfrey told a reporter who questioned her outside a home.
Harris spent lavishly on seemingly non-essential elements of her presidential campaign, plucking down six figures to build a set for a seven-minute podcast interview and $1 million to Winfrey for producing the star-studded fundraiser, according to reports.
Altogether, Harris reportedly spent roughly $1.2 billion on her truncated bid for the Oval Office, raising an unprecedented sum in just three months. Just how she spent so much will be the subject of many campaign post-mortems to come, with donors questioning how she got so little bang for the buck.
Comparatively, Donald Trump, who was never known for his thriftiness, spent about $750 million, according to The Financial Times.
“The truth is this is just an epic disaster, this is a $1 billion disaster,” Democrat Party fundraiser Lindy Li told “Fox & Friends Weekend” on Saturday.
A Politico reporter tweeted last week that all that’s left is about $20 million in debt. The president-elect took notice of the Harris campaign’s financial woes, posting the following message Saturday on X:
“I am very surprised that the Democrats, who fought a hard and valiant fight in the 2020 Presidential Election, raising a record amount of money, didn’t have lots of $’s left over. Now they are being squeezed by vendors and others. Whatever we can do to help them during this difficult period, I would strongly recommend we, as a Party and for the sake of desperately needed UNITY, do. We have a lot of money left over in that our biggest asset in the campaign was “Earned Media,” and that doesn’t cost very much. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN”
It should be noted that Trump, through X and its owner, Elon Musk, had the world’s largest social media platform at his disposal. False or misleading claims by the world’s richest man, who donated $132 million to Trump and other Republicans, have generated two billion views on X this year, according to a report by the non-profit group Center for Countering Digital Hate.
While it’s difficult to contend with that, Harris did maintain a significant fundraising advantage; FT reports that the campaign — which took over the Biden campaign and its war chest in late July — and affiliated PACs and the Democratic National Committee collected more than 2.3 billion in contributions — about $500 million more than Trump.
Collectively, the two major candidates raised a whopping $4.2 billion, with $3.5 billion going to the 2024 race, making this the most expensive election ever held.
“How did you spend $1 billion and not win? What the f***?” an unnamed former Joe Biden staffer told The Daily Mail.
While a more comprehensive picture will be available in 30 days, when the Federal Election Commission mandates complete spending reports from the candidates, the recriminations have already begun.
Harris seemed to hemorrhage money in the campaign’s closing days; as of Oct. 16, she still had $118 billion in the bank.
So where did it all go?
Chasing celebrity endorsements was a costly undertaking; one most political observers say yields a negligible if not negative, outcome. There was the $1 million paid to Winfrey, who produced a fundraiser featuring some of the biggest names in showbiz.
Federal Election Commission records show that Winfrey’s production company, Harpo Production Inc., received two payments of $500,000 each on Oct. 15. Winfrey alleges it was for production costs and equipment.
“My time and energy was my way of supporting the campaign. For the live-streaming event in September, my production company Harpo was asked to bring in set design, lights, cameras, microphones, crew, producers, and every other item necessary (including the benches and chairs we sat on) to put on a live production. I did not take any personal fee. However, the people who worked on that production needed to be paid. And were. End of story,” Winfrey wrote in an Instagram comment.
Another $15 million went to event production companies that facilitated celebrity appearances from the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Lady Gaga.
She spent $3.9 million more courting well-known social media influencers, though she rarely consented to on-air appearances with them. Trump, meanwhile, sat down with some of the medium’s biggest names, focusing on personalities such as Logan Paul and comedian Theo Von, who appeal to the same young male demographic that turned out in big numbers for the president-elect.
Conversely, the Washington Examiner reports Harris spent six figures building a set for the “Call Her Daddy” podcast that closely resembled host Alex Cooper’s Los Angeles set. Harris’ brief interview was actually conducted inside a Washington hotel room.
In it, the candidate hammered home her message on ensuring support for abortion rights. Harris and her advisors emphasized that issue above all others, spending $500 million on pro-choice messaging. Exit polling shows Harris badly miscalculated, as abortion trailed “democracy” and “the economy” as issues most important to voters.
In the end, exit polls revealed it was the third-most important issue behind ‘democracy’ and ‘the economy’, with just 14 percent of respondents calling it the most important issue.
Harris’s campaign is still soliciting donations, though at least a portion of that money is directed to a vote recount effort, Newsweek reports.
Located on her fundraising platform, donors are receiving, in fine print, this message: “The first $41,300/$15,000 from a person/multicandidate committee (“PAC”) will be allocated to the DNC. The next $3,300/$5,000 from a person/PAC will be allocated to Harris for President’s Recount Account.”
With Trump receiving 312 electoral votes and winning all seven “battleground” states, there’s no realistic chance a recount could swing the election in Harris’ favor.
Li, the Democrat Party fundraiser, said she and other donors were “misled” about Harris’ chances by party leaders, singling out campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon.
“I was promised… Jen O’Malley Dillon promised all of us that Harris would win,” Li said. “She even put videos out saying that Harris would win. I believed her, my donors believed her, and so they wrote massive checks. I feel like a lot of us were misled.”
Harris’ team has declined comment on their spending, but in a letter to staffers, O’Malley Dillion wrote there was little they could’ve done differently.
“You stared down unprecedented headwinds and obstacles that were largely out of our control. We knew this would be a margin of error race, and it was,” she wrote.
