It’s literally 2016 but worse somehow.
One source close to the Harris campaign tells Rolling Stone they reached out to several staffers in and around the campaign to voice concerns about the candidate embracing Dick and Liz Cheney.
“People don’t want to be in a coalition with the devil,” says the source, speaking about Dick Cheney. They say a Harris staffer responded that it was not the staff’s role to challenge the campaign’s decisions.
A Democratic strategist says they warned key Harris surrogates and top-level officials at the Democratic National Committee that campaigning with Liz Cheney — and making the campaign’s closing argument about how many Republicans were supporting Harris — was highly unlikely to motivate any new swing voters, and risked dissuading already-despondent, infrequent Democratic voters who had supported Biden in 2020. The strategist says they also attempted to have big donors and battleground state party chairs convey the same argument to the Harris campaign.
Another Democratic operative close to Harrisworld says they sent memos and data to Harris campaign staffers underscoring how, among other things, Republican voters, believe it or not, vote Republican — and that the data over the past year screamed that Democrats instead needed to reassure and energize the liberal base and Dem-leaning working class in battleground states. “We were told, basically, to get lost, no thank you,” says the operative.
I don’t think Cheney cost Harris any voters because the vast majority of people who didn’t vote for Harris probably don’t know and don’t care who Cheney is. But celebrating the Cheney endorsement is a symptom of a campaign that is thoroughly unexciting and establishment. People who don’t follow politics aren’t word-of-mouth’d into being excited for something new and hopeful. Instead of democrats’ excitement about the promises of a new candidate, the only word on their lips was Trump, which won’t work a second time if the apolitical person’s world didn’t change negatively the last time trump was president.
I agree. I think the early complaints about Harris not having a solid platform on her website were fair. On the one hand I think giving her a little bit of a break given the speed she had to put things together would be reasonable. On the other hand we only had a few months until the election and she needed to get on it and get on it FAST. Once it was up I was surprised how little focus it got.
For example take legalizing marijuana. She put out a proposal in mid October with little fanfare and has an Instagram post the day before the election. However in reading the article about a NH woman named Kamala Harris being unsure who to vote for she said, “Kamala supports abortion which I really like. Trump says that he supports weed which I really like.” This may be an anecdotal story but you CANT have people not know your message. Sure she got half the message, but Trump, who hasn’t said shit about marijuana, somehow got to be the marijuana guy?
Now part of this is a result of such a short campaign, but honestly our campaigns are long enough as it is. It’s clear Harris had issues getting her message out there. (And yes, we could blame the uneducated voter, but if you’re the candidate, that’s on you.)