In a recent campaign finance disclosure, Senator Kamala Harris of California, has more than doubled her previous-quarter spending in an attempt to boost her national profile beyond California.
Harris, the former Attorney General of California, is thought by many to be a strong contender for the 2020 race against Donald Trump. Her filing shows that she paid a DC-based media marketing firm $255,000 this last quarter – a surprising amount of money for a politician not facing reelection any time soon. Harris faces reelection in 2023.
In fact, Harris has been spending money on social media advertising at a breakneck pace, this year alone, the DC-based media firm, Revolution Messaging, has received more than $650,000 from Harris’ campaign.
Revolution Messaging was also responsible for successfully marketing Bernie Sanders, and fueling his upstart candidacy against presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton, in the 2016 election. Recalling their success, in a published study on the Sanders Campaign, the consulting firm wrote, “In the spring of 2015, before the campaign launched, we knew Bernie Sanders was a leader who stood on the right side of history. But Bernie was polling around 3 percent, had no establishment support, little name recognition, and was running against a popular and ‘inevitable’ Democratic primary opponent. We had our work cut out for us. With no offline fundraising team, no Super PAC, and no Wall Street money, we would have to raise almost all of the campaign’s money from small-dollar donations.”
Revolution Messaging helped Sanders raise a staggering $218 million online and also won a number of awards for the amazing work it had done for the campaign.
“She’s running for president, take it to the bank,” one donor had reportedly said at the time. “She’s absolutely going to run.”
Harris’s own campaign is renting an office space from a travel agency on the Capitol Hill itself, as it was previously reported. The California senator had also hired a number of former Clinton campaign veterans in her Washington, D.C., office.