On Monday morning, Rufus Gifford hopped on the phone with me to discuss the remarkable past two weeks in the life of Kamala Harris. Gifford, who is Harris’s finance chair, was fresh off an astounding fundraising blitz, in which he and his colleagues raised some $310 million for her presidential campaign. When we spoke, Gifford said that he had been enjoying a momentous birthday weekend in Nantucket, where he has a house with his husband in the Shawkemo neighborhood, and where he spent a lot of time growing up. With a “number of really wonderful moments” coming up for the Harris campaign—on Tuesday, Harris would announce Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, and then there’s the Democratic National Convention in 10 days—Gifford said he was enjoying a brief respite before the sprint to the finish line. 

It’s no exaggeration to say that money is in Rufus’s D.N.A. His father is Chad Gifford, the legendary Boston banker and C.E.O. of Bank of Boston, and the former chairman of the board of Bank of America. And he’s not new to politics, either. Before Harris tapped him, Rufus was the finance chair of Biden’s reelection effort, and he held a similar job during Obama’s 2012 campaign. After that successful race, Obama named him the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, an appointment he held until January 2017, when Trump was inaugurated. Upon his return from Europe, Gifford ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in Massachusetts, then joined Biden’s 2020 campaign as deputy campaign manager. After the election, Gifford was named chief of protocol for the United States, a diplomatic advisory post he held until around a year ago, when he moved over to the Biden reelect.