Kamala Harris' 62 Biggest Hollywood Donors
Most Likely to be Sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom? A list of who's poured the most cash into their hometown candidate's record $1B coffers
“Let me be clear,” Vice President Kamala Harris told the packed crowd of 1,500 at the JW Marriott downtown in late September. “We are going to win.”
Harris had returned home to Los Angeles for the first time since she became the Democratic nominee for President, and after spending the night in her Brentwood home, she raised a reported $28 million during a Sunday afternoon fundraiser featuring speeches by Keegan-Michael Key and Sterling K. Brown and music from Alanis Morissette and Halle Bailey. Local luminaries, including Donna Langley, Jessica Alba and Damon Lindelof, dotted the crowd.
As I wrote in late July when Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, the Vice President has a “Hollywood love story” — one that goes back to her earliest days as an aspiring San Francisco district attorney. By 2010, when she ran for her first statewide office, attorney general, “There were a lot of movers and shakers in the entertainment industry that, I think, identified her early on as somebody who had great potential,” Brian Brokaw, who ran her campaign for AG, told me in July, “and I distinctly remember people saying, ‘She could be president one day!’”
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Harris counts among her friends CAA CEO Bryan Lourd, co-chairman of Disney Entertainment Dana Walden and Reggie Hudlin and his wife Christine, who set her up on a date with entertainment lawyer Doug Emhoff, who’s now of course her husband.
When President Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, some in the industry had already given his campaign the contribution maximum of $926,300 or close to it. (Campaign co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg, whose self-promotion and agewashing of Biden I chronicled as Biden’s campaign imploded after his disastrous debate performance, is one such person who maxed out, as are Casey Wasserman and David Ellison.)
But most of Hollywood, energized by Harris’ ambitious fight against former President Donald Trump, stepped up for their hometown candidate. When the Harris Victory Fund reported its third-quarter fundraising last week to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), it revealed that it had raised a staggering $633 million, bringing her overall haul to $1 billion. (Last quarter, Trump and the Republican Party raised $430 million.)
Hollywood is but one small part of what has been a national outpouring of enthusiastic financial support for Harris after what had been a moribund early campaign between Biden and Trump. But who’s supporting her — and how much — offers a telling peek into the town’s bet on who could be the first-ever Democratic president from California, and who may be sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom come 2025.
I combed through the FEC report, which lists almost 3 million individual donations to the Harris Victory Fund, to identify the 62 biggest donors with ties to Hollywood. Some had already given five- or six-figure sums to what was then the Biden Victory Fund, but those donations now count towards Harris’ capital.
One name you won’t see here is Walden’s: She donated $20,000 to Biden’s PAC last November, which has carried over to Harris. Due to her oversight of ABC — and ABC News, which hosted what appears to be the one and only debate between Harris and Trump on Sept. 10 — she’s remained on the sidelines.
MAX CONTRIBUTIONSAri Emanuel, CEO, Endeavor; CEO, TKO: $926,300
Haim Saban, chairman and CEO, Saban Capital Group: $923,000
$500K AND UP