The numbers don’t lie — swiftly following President Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign raised $81 million in the first 24 hours of her candidacy, Axios reported. Sixty percent of donors were donating for the first time in this election cycle and nearly 30,000 new volunteers signed up to help her campaign efforts.
“First of all, those are just the numbers that are easy to quantify,” CNN commentator Von Jones told the anchor Pamela Brown on Monday. “There’s something happening that’s hard to quantify,” he explained, pointing to her newfound popularity on TikTok.
Calling it “extraordinary,” Jones detailed how the vice president has risen to the occasion, seemingly, overnight after Biden dropped out of the race. He credited content creators and voters for reframing what he described as Harris’ “cringy” aspects, such as her laugh or her coconut tree comment.
“She’s gone from cringe to cool in 24 hours as a whole generation has taken all the content and remixed it in all these incredible TikTok videos,” Jones told the panel.
“For three weeks after Joe Biden had that debate debacle, we were kind of sitting outside the ICU with a death watch for democracy, just imagining what it’s gonna be like to have Donald Trump back in charge, what he’s gonna do to us,” the CNN commentator said.
However, the minute Biden decided to step out of the picture, Harris “caught a rocket ship of enthusiasm and hop and just pent-up desire,” for Trump not to be President again, he continued, arguing that Democratic voters really needed to come face-to-face with what they considered the worst-case scenario to be able to support Harris as a candidate.
“We are passionate about stopping Donald Trump and she has pulled together an unbelievable movement," he said. “This is not a campaign, this a movement.”
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