On Sunday night, Vice President Kamala Harris finally published a policy agenda on her campaign website, nearly two months after she became the de facto Democratic nominee.
The problem, however, is that much of the source code on the page appears to have been lifted from President Joe Biden’s campaign website from when he was still running.
X user Corinne Green, described as a “queer, transfemme activist from New Orleans,” posted that the Harris campaign “copied and pasted the policy page code from biden’s website and couldn’t be a**ed to change it. ‘join our campaign to re-elect joe biden today!’”
they copied and pasted the policy page code from biden’s website and couldn’t be assed to change it. “join our campaign to re-elect joe biden today!” pic.twitter.com/cDlL8xn01Q
— Corinne Green (@gaynarcan) September 9, 2024
“very serious people deeply concerned with the situation we’re in and approaching the campaign with the focus and gravity it deserves,” Green said in a follow-up post.
The text didn’t appear on the website but was visible in its metadata, but that metadata is used by search engines, meaning the “re-elect Joe Biden” phrase was visible in searches for Harris’ policy issues page. It was also visible when links to the page were shared, The New Republic reported.
“All of this creates the impression that at least some of the Harris campaign’s policy language was copied and pasted from Biden’s documents,” the outlet noted. “That would be an embarrassing miscue from the Harris campaign, which partly came into being because of a perception that a refresh was needed to garner enthusiasm in the Democratic Party. It doesn’t help that the section on her website about her Israel-Palestine policy seems very similar to what Biden’s campaign was saying.”
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The copy-and-paste job has since been removed.
The website blunder comes as Harris’ initial momentum has evaporated, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro wrote. The latest New York Times/Siena College poll shows former President Donald Trump with a one-point lead over Harris nationally.
“This is a disaster area poll for Kamala Harris. I’ve been saying for a long time that she had hit her high watermark, that there was only receding to the mean from there, that she had had weeks and weeks and weeks of no serious questions asked of her, and eventually the vibes would run out,” Shapiro wrote.
The lead is with likely voters, a better measure of voting than polls that sample registered voters. But when looking at registered voters nationally, the same poll gave Trump a two-point lead. The poll also found that Trump had a one-point lead in terms of favorability over Harris. Forty-six percent of Americans said they had a very or somewhat favorable view of Trump, while 45% said the same of Harris.
A bigger gap came when voters were asked whether they already knew what they needed to know about the candidate to make a decision. Eighty-seven percent said they already knew what they needed to know about Trump, but only 67% said the same of Harris.
“It turns out the American people really do want Kamala to explicate who she is and what she believes in order for them to make her president of the United States,” Shapiro wrote.
