It took President Joe Biden 27 minutes to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee after he announced he wouldn’t be running for a second term. Harris has renewed enthusiasm within the Democratic party and, it seems, among Brown University faculty and staff.
According to a Herald analysis of campaign finance filings, Brown employees have donated 226 times more to Harris’s and Biden’s campaigns than former President Donald Trump’s during the current election cycle.
Staff have donated approximately $41,000 to Harris, $20,130 to Biden during his campaign and a mere $272 to Trump since January 2023. This skew is unsurprising. Previous Herald reporting showed that Brown staff and students contributed 27 times more to Democratic campaigns than Republican ones in the past two decades.
With election day a little over a month away, Harris has received 189 donations from Brown employees. Trump has only seen three.
The effects of Harris’s growing popularity were immediately felt at the University, Rhode Island and across the nation.
On July 21, donations to the Democratic presidential campaign from University employees soared. When Biden dropped out of the race, he had accumulated $20,000 from Brown staff. By Aug. 1, Harris, who inherited Biden’s campaign earnings, was at $43,000.
Brunonian faculty donated thousands more to the Democratic National Committee. As of the last campaign finance filing in late August, that number has grown to over $61,000 — a whopping 206% increase in one month.
A similar phenomenon was seen in Rhode Island, though not as pronounced. As of July 20, Rhode Islanders had donated over $703,000 to Biden. On Aug. 1, it was over $1.1 million. The number stands today at $1.9 million.
This pattern was also reflected in Democratic donor circles nationwide.
In August, the Harris campaign out-raised Trump’s by a factor of three with $361 million. By the end of August, Harris also held a cash advantage with $404 million in her campaign’s coffers. Trump, by comparison, held $283 million.
While the University as a non-profit institution is prohibited from donating to political causes, individual employees have no institutional restrictions on their donations.
Owen Dahlkamp is a Section Editor overseeing coverage for University News and Science & Research. Hailing from San Diego, CA, he is concentrating in political science and cognitive neuroscience with an interest in data analytics. In his free time, you can find him making spreadsheets at Dave’s Coffee.
