Kamala Harris Needs to Put Arrogant Plutocratic Donors in Their Place

Kamala Harris has replaced Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee in a remarkably smooth fashion. Shortly after he announced that he was withdrawing as a presidential candidate on Sunday, July 21, Biden endorsed Vice President Harris to succeed him. The Democratic Party quickly coalesced around Harris, with scores of major elected officials and party elders echoing the endorsement within hours. By the following day, a majority of pledged delegates to the Democratic convention had endorsed Harris and her campaign was setting fundraising records.

Prior to Biden’s withdrawal, one of the stronger arguments for his staying on was that the process of selecting a new nominee in the few weeks before the Democratic convention could produce chaos. That fear proved unfounded with the quick acceptance of Harris by Democrats.

The quick ascension of Harris is indeed an impressive display of party unity. But Democrats remain divided behind the scenes, with very wealthy donors clearly trying to use the uncertainty of the current moment to flex their power. Before Biden’s withdrawal, wealthy donors such as Florida lawyer John Morgan were among the loudest voices in the party in their calls for an open primary in the Democratic National Convention because they disliked the prospect of Harris as the nominee, seeing her as too liberal and unprepared for a national campaign.

Now that Harris is very close to a done deal, some wealthy donors are trying to pressure her and the Democrats at large to abandon some of Joe Biden’s economic populism, particularly in the areas of antitrust regulation and the regulation of cryptocurrency.

As Reuters reported on Friday, “Billionaire Democratic donors Barry Diller and Reid Hoffman said in interviews this week they hope Kamala Harris will replace Federal Trade Commission [FTC] Chair Lina Khan if she becomes U.S. president, openly rejecting a pillar of President Joe Biden’s antitrust policy.” In her tenure as FTC Chair, Khan has been among the most effective and polarizing Biden appointees, using long-standing but neglected laws to go after corporate monopolies, earning along the way the enmity of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

The following day, the Financial Times suggested that this new attitude of aversion to regulating big business was finding adherents in Harris’s inner circle, reporting that “Kamala Harris’s advisers have approached top crypto companies to ‘reset’ relations between her Democratic party and a sector that has come out as an important backer of Donald Trump, her rival for the US presidency.” The newspaper added, “People advising the Harris campaign on business matters said the decision to reconnect with the crypto industry had little to do with attracting new electoral contributions. They said the objective was instead to build a constructive relationship that would ultimately set a smart regulatory framework that would help the growth of the entire asset class.”

On Friday, 14 Democratic members of the House of Representatives signed a letter calling for a friendlier regulatory approach to cryptocurrency. Most of the lawmakers were centrists, but one signer was the progressive Ro Khanna of California, who of course represents a district rich in tech money.

This new push against antitrust action and regulating cryptocurrency represents a reversal of hard-won gains under Joe Biden that had been achieved due to the activism of progressives such as Senator Elizabeth Warren; it is also a politically risky move that threatens to blur the distinction between Democrats and Republicans.

Democrats already have egg on their faces from their earlier willingness to take money from a major figure in the world of cryptocurrency who turned out to be a fraud: the now-convicted Sam Bankman-Fried (whose cryptocurrency exchange FTX went bankrupt in 2022 and turned out to have engaged in massive scam). The only saving grace of the Bankman-Fried fiasco was that it turned out he had covertly donated to Republicans while also being a big bankroller of the Democratic Party.

As with Bankman-Fried, the current surge of political support for cryptocurrency is turning out to be a bipartisan affair—indeed, even transpartisan, since independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is also in on the game. Over the last few days both Kennedy and Republican nominee Donald Trump lavished praise on cryptocurrency at a Bitcoin conference in Nashville. In the past, when he was president, Trump had been a crypto skeptic, describing Bitcoin as a “scam” and a “disaster waiting to happen.”