Kamala Harris charges $50,000 for a signed photo
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Kamala Harris is charging five times more for a signed photo than Joe Biden as part of a fundraising drive ahead of November’s election.
The vice-president, 59, has seen a major increase in support from big-ticket and small-dollar donors since she took over the party’s nomination last month.
Her team, redubbed the Harris-Walz campaign, charges $50,000 (£38,500) for a signed photo with the candidate – five times the $10,000 charged by Mr Biden’s team when he was the nominee.
The Democratic campaign has attracted more voters from various demographics, including black and Latino Americans who had begun to drift away from the party under Mr Biden’s leadership.
A new “White Dudes for Harris” campaign, which takes the unusual step of targeting the majority ethnic group in the US, has raised more than $4.5 million since it launched on a video call with Mark Hamill, the Star Wars actor, at the end of July.
Ross Rocketto, the group’s founder, told The Telegraph: “There’s a silent majority of people who are not MAGA.
“They don’t ascribe to far-Right ideology, and they’re gettable – we just have to go out and try.
“We have to go out and meet them where they are, from a place of dignity and respect and have real conversations with them.”
The fundraising drive has included several appearances by Doug Emhoff, Ms Harris’s husband, and a star-studded event with the vice-president herself in San Francisco which raised $13 million in an evening.
That same event saw her campaign selling the $50,000 pictures with Ms Harris.
Donald Trump, her opponent, had more money at the end of the first six months of this year, but provisional figures suggest Ms Harris has erased that advantage.
Her campaign said it had raised $310 million in July, with $377 million in cash. The Trump campaign said it raised $138 million and had $327 million in cash.
The cash boost comes ahead of this week’s Democratic national convention in Chicago, where Ms Harris, Mr Biden, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will address supporters.
On Sunday, Democrats projected messages of protest on to the Trump Hotel in Chicago. A message lit up on the side of the building read: “Trump-Vance – weird as hell”.