Did the Kamala Harris campaign spend almost $600 million on staff during the presidential election? Several viral posts claim that Harris’ campaign committee spent more than 50 times as much on staff as Trump’s campaign committee.
“Wonder who is painting a better picture for America?” reads the earliest version of the post, which was shared on X by podcaster Justin Blinson on November 8. The post lists fundraising and spending totals for both Trump and Harris, as well as the amounts they spent on campaign staff. In a response to his post, Blinson cites OpenSecrets—a non-profit that compiles campaign finance data—as the source of his information. As of November 20, the post had gained more than 4.6 million views on X.
Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman shared Blinson’s post on November 19, drawing an additional 4.2 million views. “How is it possible that the @KamalaHarris campaign spent $583 million, nearly $6 million per day, on her campaign staff in her 103-day campaign while @realDonaldTrump’s spending on staff was $10.4 million or $100,970 per day, 1/60th as much,” Ackman asks in the post. “The numbers don’t compute. This smells like fraud and/or corruption.”
While the figures for each campaign’s fundraising and for Trump campaign’s overall spending are accurate, the claim about Harris’ staffing expenses is false. Harris’ presidential campaign committee did not spend $582.53 million on personnel.
“The Harris staff number is not true,” Brendan Glavin, deputy research director at OpenSecrets, told The Dispatch Fact Check in an email. Using Federal Election Commission (FEC) data, Glavin found that Harris’ campaign committee—Harris for President—spent only around $22.2 million on payroll expenses, far less than the $582.53 million claimed in the posts. A majority of the Harris campaign’s expenditures went toward advertising buys and media production. “Media spending was responsible for about 75 percent of all the campaign’s reported expenditures,” Glavin explained. FEC data indicates that Trump’s campaign committee spent approximately $7.8 million on payroll.
According to OpenSecrets, the Harris presidential committee had raised $1.003 billion and spent $916.77 million as of October 16, 2024. These totals include fundraising and expenditures previously made by Biden’s campaign committee, which was renamed for Harris when she became the Democratic nominee. Donald Trump’s presidential committee—Donald J Trump for President 2024—raised $381.54 million and spent $345.32 million during the same period. Final fundraising numbers for both campaigns, including expenditures made in the weeks immediately preceding Election Day, will not be available until early December when each presidential committee files a final post-general election report with the FEC.
