Kamala Harris’s campaign spent $24,000 on Uber Eats and ice creams, filings show, amid questions about how the party blew $1.5 billion on a failed election.
Democrats spent $14,974.31 on food deliveries from Uber Eats and DoorDash from July onwards, according to the Federal Election Commission.
Details of the Harris campaign’s spending decisions come amid party recriminations following the Democrats’ decisive election defeat on Nov 5.
“We didn’t emphasise the economy,” Ro Khanna, a California Congressman, told The Washington Post on Saturday. “Instead, we spent a billion dollars having concerts all over America. I mean, it was ridiculous.”
Filings show the campaign also shelled out $8,929.12 on ice cream pints and parlours such as Sweet Lucy’s Ice Cream and Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams after Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
A further $6,000-“site fee” was paid to the Arizona board game cafe Snakes and Lattes for a Tim Walz visit.
Tim Walz and his wife Gwen with Ms Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff on the campaign trail
Democrats also forked out a further $2.6 million on private jet travel in the final days of the campaign as part of a blitz of the battleground states.
As Ms Harris criss-crossed the nation between Oct 1 – Oct 17, her campaign spent nearly $2.2 million on south Florida-based firm Private Jet Services Group and a further $430,000 on Advanced Aviation Team in Virginia, the New York Post reported.
The late flurry of flights brought Ms Harris’s total spend on private jets to $12 million, the outlet reported.
The use of private jets, which can be up to 14 times more polluting than commercial flights, clashes with her calls on the campaign trail to cut back on carbon emissions.
Ms Harris has previously called climate change an “existential threat”, drawing a stark contrast with Mr Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” policy on fossil fuels.
Ms Harris used private jets to travel around the country during her election campaign – Jacquelyn Martin/via REUTERS
Despite the Harris campaign spending a record $1.6 billion, Mr Trump made gains in almost every state, notably picking up votes among blue collar workers who have traditionally made up the Democratic Party’s base.
Following the Democrats’ election defeat, reports have emerged that the Harris campaign has overspent, leaving it saddled with $20 million in debt and prompting concern that staff who worked for the operation will not be paid.
Bernie Sanders, the veteran Vermont Senator, said following the election that the Democratic Party “has abandoned working class people” and should not be surprised “the working class has abandoned them”.
Mr Sanders, an independent who previously ran to lead the Democrats, said multi-billionaires such as Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, and Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, held too much sway over the campaign.
“Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?” he said.
