Vice President Kamala Harris talks to her campaign staff in front of Air Force Two as she prepares to depart from Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Friday. (Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
By Jack Davis November 6, 2024 at 8:00am
The blame game is under way after Vice President Kamala Harris took a humiliating shellacking in Tuesday’s presidential election.
Hours after former President Donald Trump capped his years-long campaign to return to the White House by making the electoral college map a study in red, fierce finger-pointing was taking place among Democrats, Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich posted on X.
“The blame game has begun inside Harris world,” she wrote, sharing the perspective of Lindy Li, a member of the Democratic National Committee’s National Finance Committee and Pennsylvania commissioner.
The post-mortem began with the selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as Harris’s running mate, Heinrich wrote.
Walz ran into headwinds amid allegations of fabricating his National Guard record.
The blame game has begun inside Harris world.
Harris-Walz surrogate @lindyli, a member of the DNC National Finance Committee and PA commissioner tells me:
– Tim Walz was a bad choice of running mate, Shapiro would have carried the blue wall states.
Li: “People are wondering…— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) November 6, 2024
“Tim Walz was a bad choice of running mate, Shapiro would have carried the blue wall,” Heinrich wrote, referring to the states of Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that have often carried Democrats to victory.
“People are wondering tonight what would have happened had Shapiro been on the ticket,” Li said, speaking about Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro who was not selected by Harris.
Did Trump’s performance exceed your expectations?
“And not only in terms of Pennsylvania. He’s a famously a moderate. So that would have signaled to the American people that she is not the San Francisco liberal that Trump said she was, but she went with someone actually to her left Minnesota. … In the eyes of the American people, Walz was the governor who oversaw the protests,” Li said.
Heinrich wrote that “Harris’ positions were not clearly staked out.”
Heinrich quoted Li as saying that Harris “knows [what] a mistake [it] was to say on ‘The View’ that she couldn’t think of a single thing that she would do differently from the Biden administration”
The Harris fixation on branding Trump as a fascist failed, Heinrich wrote.
“Too many cooks in the kitchen led to muddled campaign messaging, poor staffing decisions in key battlegrounds,” Heinrich wrote.
Li told Heinrich that the campaign made changes in Pennsylvania “in the final weeks of the campaign, but I fear it was too late.”
Kamala Harris lost this election when she pivoted to focus almost exclusively on attacking Donald Trump.
Voters already know everything there is about Trump – but they still wanted to know more about Harris’ plans for the first hour, first day, first month and first year of her… https://t.co/uCCl4WCykh
— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) November 6, 2024
Writing on CNN, Edward-Isaac Dovere said Harris’ refusal to paint herself as an agent of change cost her.
“A country crying out for change got a candidate who, at a crucial moment as more voters were tuning in, decided to soft-pedal the change she knew she represented,” he wrote.
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