Jeremy Green Eche took a chance and bought the website HarrisWalz.com for $8.99 in 2020 when then-California Senator Kamala Harris was seeking the Democratic nomination for president.
“I just tried to write down her name and all the governors from the heartland that I could think of,” he told The Associated Press in an interview Monday.
Four years later, if Harris chooses Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mateEche could be looking for a payout. He’s willing to sell it — and a list of more than a dozen other Harris websites — for $15,000, he says.
This is not a new scenario for the 36-year-old trademark attorney in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. Eche is a cybersquatter, a person who buys a domain with someone else’s name or brand on it for very little money, hoping to sell it to that person or brand for a large profit in the months or years that follow. It’s also called domain investing, because it can yield significant rewards.
In 2011, five years before Hillary Clinton selected Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine as her running mate in the presidential race, Eche — then known as Jeremy Peter Green, before he got married — bought ClintonKaine.com. After the former secretary of state made the selection, the squatter offered it to the campaign for a hefty fee. They refused, so he sold it for $15,000 to a digital marketing firm that turned out to be the Trump campaign. The website promoted anti-Clinton news with “Paid for by Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.” underneath.
Harris spent the weekend interviewing half a dozen potential running matesincluding Walz, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, according to two people with knowledge of Harris’ selection process. The people spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private campaign deliberations.
It is said that they make her decision soon and has a number of events planned with her running mate this week.
Eche told the AP that he had not been contacted by anyone connected to the Harris campaign. In 2016, it took a week after Clinton selected Kaine for him to contact anyone from the Clinton campaign, and that was because he had a connection to the operation.
He is skeptical that Harris’ campaign will contact him before they make the choice official.
“Hopefully (Harris’s) people are a little smarter than Clinton’s people,” he said.
Eche owns at least 15 websites tied to Harris and her selection of a potential running mate. In addition to Walz, he also owns HarrisPritzker.com, a nod to the Illinois governor; HarrisEvers.com, for Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin; HarrisFetterman.com, for Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania; HarrisWarnock.com, for Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia; HarrisPeters.com, for Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan; and several others.
But Eche does have a favorite among her potential vice presidents.
“Walz is my favorite,” he said. “Of the people she thinks of, Walz makes the most sense.”
He also owns 10 websites that list Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and other Democrats, with an eye toward a possible run for president in 2028.
Eche’s Walz website is now just a blank chartreuse with the governor’s name in small black letters, a reference to the artist Charli XCX calls Harris a “kid” in a tweet shortly after President Joe Biden ended his campaign, allowing the vice president to take over his company.
That was his wife’s idea, he said. But the site links to the website of his startup — Communer, a site for buying and selling domains and trademarks — where he’s offering the Harris slate for $15,000.
Eche supported Clinton in 2016 and is backing Harris this cycle. Still, his experience in 2016 — when his website morphed into a pro-Trump site — doesn’t make him reluctant to sell Harris’ sites this time around.
“The Harris campaign has hundreds of millions of dollars, so if they don’t buy their own domain, that’s their own responsibility,” he said. “I have to sell it to someone. I know I could just donate it, but that’s not really how it works. People who have billboards don’t donate their billboards to the campaign. It’s basically just property.”
A Harris spokesperson declined to immediately comment on whether the company plans to buy the domains.
