Did $100 Cost Kamala Harris the Election?

Kamala Harris raised a billion dollars for her campaign. She then blew through it all, to no avail. And yet the election may have been decided for $100. Yup. Just a hundred bucks.

To understand what I mean, we have to go all the way back to 1916.

Woodrow Wilson, Charles Hughes, and the “Forgotten Handshake”

The 1916 presidential race pitted incumbent Democrat Woodrow Wilson against Republican Charles Hughes–a former governor of New York who was at that time serving as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

At the time, the Republicans were split into two factions: progressives and the conservative Old Guard. California Governor Hiram Johnson was part of the progressive wing, and was also running for the Senate. When Hughes visited California in August 1916, historian Paul F. Boller, Jr. records, he kept his distance from Hughes and the progressives. “Hughes,” Boller writes in Presidential Campaigns, “was anxious to avoid getting into any interparty fights.”

This decision would prove highly damaging.

Then came what was later dubbed the “forgotten handshake.” On August 21, both Hughes and Johnson happened to be staying at the same hotel in Long Beach. Yet, they did not meet. Upon realizing, after the fact, that Johnson also had been staying there, Hughes reached out. However the damage was done.

Feeling snubbed, the powerful and influential Johnson didn’t lift a finger help Hughes win the critical swing state of California. Hughes did so little, in fact, that Wilson won the state, which secured his victory.  

Former New York Gov. Charles Evan Hughes

A New York congressman named John W. Dwight argued that Hughes lost the election because of a single dollar.

Hughes would have won California — and thus the election — Dwight said, if

a man of sense, with a dollar, would have invited Hughes and Johnson to his room when they were both in the same hotel. He would have ordered three Scotch whiskies, which would have been seventy-five cents, and that would have left a tip of twenty-five cents for the waiter. That little Scotch would have brought those men together, there would have been mutual understanding and respect, and Hughes would have carried California and been elected.

Fast forward to 2024.

The Snubbing of Robert Kennedy, Jr.

After being pushed out of the Democratic Party, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched an independent bid for the presidency. He was garnering enough support for his presence on the ballot to make an impact on the election.

According to a Washington Post story from August (ironically enough), Kennedy reached out to Kamala Harris’s campaign for a meeting, with the idea of promising his support in exchange for a cabinet position. But Harris couldn’t be bothered to sit down with him. According to several outlets, Harris’s campaign never even called Kennedy back.

Doh!

What ended up happening? Kennedy instead walked into the welcoming arms of Donald Trump. Kennedy not only formed an invigorating, inspiring partnership with Trump – adding Make America Healthy Again to the Trump line-up — but his presence drew the attention of admirers such as Joe Rogan, to say nothing of disenfranchised voters who otherwise couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Trump.

The partnership also meant that Kennedy loyalists — from running mate Nicole Shanahan to campaign workers who were ticked off by the way Democrats treated him — began busting their tails for Trump.

Also, having the son of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the nephew of John F. Kennedy (and hence the most prominent living child of the Kennedy Democratic dynasty) leave the party to join Trump helped make it okay for Democrats to vote for the Bad Orange Man.

Kennedy joining the likes of Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, and Vivek Ramaswamy created a perception of a unified movement that was not Democratic or Republican, but American. For Americans.

All that added up to Kennedy stoking the engines of the Trump Train, which only accelerated from there.

This may well have cost Harris the election.

So borrowing from Congressman Dwight: If some man or woman of sense anywhere in Harris’s wide orbit had just gotten her to sit down at a table with Kennedy over a nice $75 bottle of wine, plus a $25 tip for the waiter, the course of the 2024 election may have gone much differently.

A billion dollars didn’t do anything for Harris. But one Benjamin might have.

Al Perrotta is The Stream’s Washington bureau chief, coauthor with John Zmirak of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration, and coauthor of the counterterrorism memoir Hostile Intent: Protecting Yourself Against Terrorism.