Vice President Kamala Harris's failed campaign for the presidency ended up $20 million in the red, but apparently they have found a way to get the money to pay their creditors: the campaign has continued to charge donors for recurring donations even though the campaign is over and done.
The Harris Victory Fund continued the automatic withdrawals without seeking permission from the donors; instead emailing them that the donations would continue unless they took action to stop them.
In contrast, a former staffer for Mitt Romney said his campaign stopped collecting recurring donations a few days after Romney's loss to Barack Obama.
"These people didn't sign up to be paying bills in January," he said, calling the continued withdrawals "super shady" and "a kind of grift."
A Harris campaign official told Politico that the donations were not going to the Harris Victory Fund anymore because it is now defunct. Instead, they go to the DNC for future electoral efforts.
But that doesn't explain what will happen to the campaign's debt now that she can't collect donations anymore.
I guess when you think of it, $20 million is only a fraction of the $2.9 billion total that Harris collected in the roughly 100 days she was a candidate.
It's less than 1% of the total, but is still a vast fortune to most people.
Anyone who has gotten a campaign solicitation knows that the biggest push is for recurring donations because over time, they add up to more than one-time ones.
It's not really a surprise that Harris and Democrats would use such shady practices as continuing to collect money after the election.
With only a week until President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated, Democrats must be able to feel their grip on power slipping away.
We can expect a lot more of these shady tactics as they try to regain their power in two years during the congressional midterms.
To some extent, they do it because it works. Like many recurring payments, it will take people months, in some cases years, to realize they are still donating.
Hopefully the press coverage will shed light on what Harris is doing and people will put a stop to it, as they should.
