india

Updated: Jul 06, 2019 23:25 IST

Senator Kamala Harris’s take-down of former Vice-President Joe Biden at the first Democratic presidential debates gave her a sizable bump in polls and now, her campaign has reported, it brought in millions in donations as well, $2 million in the first 24 hours after their epic on-stage exchange.

Harris raised $12 million in the second quarter, however, which put her in a distant fourth position, behind Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who led the field with two-times more than her at $24.8 million, and Biden and Sanders, who collected $21.5 million and $18 respectively.

But Biden, who entered the race as a frontrunner with a double-digit lead in polls over others, raised more money per-day than anyone because his $21.5 million collection came in just 66 days since he launched his campaign on April 26, compared to Buttigieg’s, and all others, 90 days, the full quarter.

The second quarter — April May and June — ends July 15, but if the collections tell a story, candidates don’t wait. And Harris has a story to tell, from the first debate of the Democratic 2020 race on June 27. She had attacked Biden on his position on busing, a desegregation tool from the 1970s and 80s.

Biden had hit back, but Harris had won the exchange, and her campaign, had put out pictures of Harris, whose father is black and mother Indian, as a first-grader who was bused to school. And it raised almost half-a-million dollars from sale of T-shirts with that picture and a remark from the debate, “That little girl was me”.

Harris and Biden have continued their exchange. The former vice-president told CNN in an interview that aired Friday he had expected to be attacked as the frontrunner but not by someone who “knows me” and his elder son Beau Biden, who was attorney general of Delaware the same time that Harris held that office in California. He died of brain cancer in 2015.