Whom will Joe Biden choose to run his party? If South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn gets his way, it will be former South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison. Harrison, who just lost to Sen. Lindsey Graham, is now being promoted as the potential new DNC chairman.
Certainly, there’s no shame in losing to an established senator and committee chairman such as Graham, especially in a state that has gone so heavily Republican in recent years. Democrats practically owned South Carolina until the mid-1990s, but no Democrat has won a statewide election there since 2006. (One Democrat won that year, for superintendent of Education, and by only 455 votes.)
Still, Harrison’s loss was really something special. After convincing many pollsters, commentators, and especially donors that he was in a competitive race, Harrison lost by more than 10 percentage points — and only then after setting new records for campaign spending. Senate Democrats have to be wondering what they could have accomplished with the (at least) $132 million that Harrison spent while losing to Graham — $57 million of which, by the way, was raised in a single national record-setting quarter.
Harrison’s fundraising beat the record previously set by Beto O’Rourke in 2018, but Harrison did it in a much smaller state. As a consequence, he managed to spend (based on filings as of Nov. 23) $118 for each vote he won, all the while outpacing the Senate Judiciary chairman’s fundraising by a large eight-figure sum. That’s not quite Mike Bloomberg levels of waste, but at least the former New York City mayor was wasting his own money.
Harrison, having raised $71 million of that total take in amounts smaller than $200, surely has the best small-donor list in the Democratic Party right now. If there’s anyone out there ready to throw away money on lost causes, Harrison has a way of reaching him.
But surely, the appalling misallocation of resources to Harrison’s race cannot be lost on Biden or his party’s grassroots. It must make Democrats a bit sick to their stomach to imagine what just $10 million or $20 million of that could have done for them in much closer races in Georgia, Iowa, Maine, or North Carolina.
South Carolina was the Democrats’ worst campaign finance black hole in 2020. Perhaps it is a testament to the cynicism of modern politics in our country that the man standing at that singularity of waste might be rewarded with the post of party fundraiser in chief.
