Every presidential election brings with it a technological innovation or two: the Bill Clinton and Bob Dole campaigns’ first campaign websites, Barack Obama’s email list, Donald Trump’s candidacy-by-tweet.
For the weeks-old Kamala Harris campaign, it has been a Zoom window.
On Sunday night, former Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York was holding forth from one such window, swirling a glass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo in a restaurant in Baltimore’s Little Italy, trying to draw an Italian family dinner memory out of Robert De Niro at “Paisans for Kamala,” a livestreamed online fundraiser billed as an Italian Sunday Dinner hosted by the Italian American Democrats.
“Tell us a story!” de Blasio implored. “Tell us a memory! Tell us a dish!”
“I guess the closest thing I have is Marty Scorsese’s mother,” De Niro replied from a neighboring Zoom box. “She makes great pizza. She did. She passed away years ago.” He warned Democrats against complacency — “We know what’s coming, we see it coming” — and then excused himself to attend a Harris fundraiser with Nancy Pelosi, who popped up in her own Zoom window later in the evening.
The streamed fundraiser was the latest of several dozen similar efforts that have raised millions of dollars on behalf of Harris since the group Win With Black Women hosted the first on July 21. Subsequent events have included “White Dudes for Harris” (featuring actor Jeff Bridges, in character as the Dude from The Big Lebowski), "Cooking for Kamala" (hosted by Padma Lakshmi and featuring celebrity chefs like José Andrés and Giada de Laurentiis), “Deadheads for Kamala” (Ben and Jerry, inevitably), and many more.
The events are a very post-pandemic spin on the small-donor fundraising that powered the campaigns of Trump and Bernie Sanders in recent cycles, a sort of telethon adapted to the technologies Americans learned to know and tolerate during years of remote work and school. (On Sunday night’s stream, Leon Panetta, former secretary of defence and director of the CIA, and actor Steve Buscemi struggled briefly with the mute button.)
The relative ease of participating, as well as Democrats’ sense of urgency surrounding the election, have meant that even small groups have assembled significant wattage for their calls. Besides De Niro and Buscemi, Sunday night’s stream featured Marisa Tomei, John Turturro, Mark Ruffalo and Lorraine Bracco.
“It’s a much cheaper format, to just put together a group of people who might be interesting and fun to watch on Zoom, and have people come in and go, ‘Hey, I want to give $5 to this,’” said Lisa Ann Walter, comedian and actor on the ABC sitcom Abbott Elementary, who appeared on Sunday’s Zoom.
As the events have lost their novelty, they have lost some of their fundraising potency. The first few drew millions of dollars each, but more recent efforts have fallen far short of that.
The “Paisans for Kamala” event was billed as a virtual red-sauce Sunday family dinner. Some of the participants took the dinner theme more literally than others, including De Blasio, who defiantly ate a slice of pizza on-screen with a fork and a knife to the performative outrage of Tim Ryan, former Ohio member of Congress.
When Pelosi appeared in her own Zoom window later in the evening, the emcee, comedian Paul Mecurio, commended her for standing up to Trump over the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. “That’s an Italian right there,” he said.
“An Italian grandmother,” Pelosi said.