More than $200bn: How Kamala Harris is winning the small donors battle

What is driving small donors to pledge record amounts of money in support of Harris’s bid for the White House?

Since Kamala Harris emerged as the Democratic presidential frontrunner – and then the party’s official candidate – following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race a little more than a month ago, donations for her campaign have been pouring in.

Harris’s campaign said this week that it had raised about $540m in that time – the largest amount raised by any political campaign in such a short period of time.

This fundraising milestone is significant, said Patrick Frank, former director of ActBlue, the largest online fundraising platform for the Democratic Party and outreach director for Lunda, a platform for small donors fundraising in Europe.

“It is definitely one of one. This is a unique amount,” he told Al Jazeera. The only parallel? “I would say that there’s probably some comparison out there to disaster relief funds that are able to generate just as much,” he added.

But in a country where political campaigns are often beholden to large fundraising machines known as super PACs, the Harris campaign also stands out for the dramatic flood of money it is receiving from small donors.