Vice President Kamala Harris’ performance at CNN’s Wednesday town hall with Pennsylvania swing voters underwhelmed the network’s journalists and pundits — as she left the more than hourlong forum with verbose and evasive answers to queries posed by on-the-fence residents.
“What I’m hearing from people who I’ve been talking to … if her goal was to close the deal, they’re not sure she did that,” CNN anchor Dana Bash said immediately after the event outside Philadelphia.
“Having said that, any time that she can be in front of an audience and interacting with voters is a win as far as her campaign goes — and they are very happy about that.”
Veteran Democratic operative David Axelrod, the chief strategist on Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaigns said, “The things that would concern me is when she doesn’t want to answer a question, her habit is to kind of go to Word Salad City.”
“And she did that on a couple of answers,” Axelrod said on a CNN panel following the town hall.
“One was on Israel — Anderson [Cooper] asked a direct question, ‘Would you be stronger on Israel than Trump?’ And, there was a seven-minute answer, but none of that related to the question he was asking.”
Axelrod argued that Harris, 60, also “missed an opportunity” when asked about immigration.
“She would acknowledge no concerns about any of the administration’s policies. And that’s a mistake,” he said. “Sometimes you have to concede things, and she didn’t concede much.”
“She just didn’t want to go there,” CNN host Abby Phillip said on the post-event panel, pointing out that the answers were light on policy.
The bleak reviews came after Cooper, who moderated the town hall, forcefully pushed Harris on policy matters — at times uncomfortably asking her the same question repeatedly when she failed to give a straight answer.
National Democrats have told The Post that they’re concerned about Harris’ standing less than two weeks ahead of Election Day on Nov. 5 — as former President Donald Trump leads in polling averages of all seven major battleground states.
‘Right thing’ on border
In one of the most-discussed exchanges, Harris insisted that she and retiring President Biden had done “the right thing” on US-Mexico border policy.
Harris defended her service as Biden’s point person on reducing illegal immigration, which instead hit record highs for the first three years of her role, as Cooper pressed her to admit that Biden’s June order to restrict the release of asylum seekers who enter illegally the US came too late.
The exchange began when a Republican Drexel University student, who said he was leaning toward supporting Harris, asked to describe the “benefits and subsidies” she would offer to new immigrants — a query the veep entirely side-stepped before Cooper picked up the line of questioning.
“America’s immigration system is broken and it needs to be fixed and has been broken for a long time,” Harris deflected, defaulting to familiar campaign talking points before blaming Trump for helping crush a bipartisan bill this year that conservatives said did too little to restrict the release of illegal immigrants who sought asylum after crossing the border.
“You talk about the bill that Donald Trump quashed. That was in 2024,” Cooper interjected, offering a fact-check of the timeframe. “2022, 2023 there were record border crossings.”
“Your administration took a number of hundreds of executive actions that didn’t stem the flow. Numbers kept going up,” Cooper noted.
“Finally, in 2024, just in June, three weeks before the last the first presidential debate with Joe Biden, you institute executive actions that had a dramatic impact, really shut down people crossing over. Why didn’t your administration do that in 2022, 2023?”
Harris at first deflected again by claiming that she and Biden were negotiating with Congress over an immigration reform bill they had proposed in January 2021 — even though that legislation saw no serious movement and was widely regarded as an un-passable messaging bill due to the fact that it called for a path to citizenship for nearly all illegal immigrants already in the US.
“First of all, you’re exactly right, Anderson, and as of today, we have cut the flow of immigration by over half,” Harris said, citing more recently monthly figures which reflect a swift plunge in apprehensions after border officials just last December notched an all-time high in encounters with migrants.
“But if it was that easy with that executive action, why not do it in 2022, 2023?” Cooper pressed.
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“Because we were working with Congress and hoping that actually, we could have a long-term fix to the problem, instead of the short-term fix,” Harris claimed.
“You couldn’t have done one and both at the same time?” the journalist followed up.
“We have to understand that ultimately, this problem is going to be fixed through congressional action. Congress has the authority and the purse. I hate to use DC terms, but literally, they write the checks. Part of the issue is in order to really fix the problem at the border,” Harris said.
“We need more judges to deal with asylum claims. We need more personnel down there to deal with processing.”
Cooper bluntly pressed again: “Do you wish you had done those executive orders in 2022, 2023?”
“I think we did the right thing,” Harris ultimately said.
“And — but, the best thing that can happen for the American people is that we have bipartisan work happening, and I pledge to you that I will work across the aisle to fix this long-standing problem,” she added.
The issue of immigration came up repeatedly in the forum — with Harris at one point mocking Trump’s effort to build a US-Mexico border wall during his term of office and saying, “How much of that wall did he build? I think the last number I saw was about 2%.”
In fact, Trump’s administration built new barriers across roughly 25% of the nearly 2,000-mile southern border, though much of the walling replaced existing barriers in heavily trafficked areas.
Harris at one point in the more than hourlong dialogue gave hints of regret when pressed on her evolving positions when asked about her support for decriminalizing illegal border crossings while she was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019.
“I never intended, nor do I will I ever allow, America to have a border that is not secure,” Harris said.
‘Fascist’ Trump ‘creating an enemies list’
Harris focused much of her appeal to swing voters on emphasizing that she is not Trump, whom she said she considers a fascist.
“Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” Cooper asked Harris shortly after the town hall began, citing the recent criticism of Trump by his former White House chief of staff John Kelly and former chairman of the joint chief of staff Mark Milley.
“Yes, I do. Yes, I do,” Harris said.
“In 13 days you will decide who is sitting in the Oval Office on Jan. 20,” the vice president said later in the event.
“You can look at Donald Trump in the White House after Jan. 20 sitting in that Oval Office plotting his revenge. He has talked about the enemies within … he’s going to sit there — unstable, unhinged — plotting his revenge, plotting his retribution, creating an enemies list.”
Trump has claimed during his campaign to retake power that he would bring “retribution” — but at other points has said that his revenge simply would be a successful second term.
