By With the dust barely settled on the disastrous collapse of the Kamala Harris campaign, some of the vice president’s top advisers are still licking their wounds while others have begun launching recriminations, according to reports.
Rather than call for unity in the aftermath of defeat, Harris’ campaign manager sent an email to all of the staff, saying that “losing is unfathomably painful. It is hard. This will take a long time to process. But the work of protecting America from the impacts of a Trump Presidency starts now.”
Many on the Harris campaign, however, have identified the person to blame for their loss and that’s Biden, writes Politico.
It happened, simply, because Harris refused to make a clean break from the last four years when voters indicated that’s what they wanted. Worse, she hesitated to draw any daylight between herself and her boss on Biden’s biggest vulnerability — his stewardship over the economy — nor identify any specific way her presidency would be different from his tenure beyond naming a Republican to her Cabinet.
Some close allies and even a few aides privately questioned why she continued to hold him so closely, particularly because her campaign didn’t try to make extensive use of their record. Yet inside her campaign, there was little sense Harris should bear the brunt of the blame, with aides pointing to how she moved battleground numbers in her favor and held down Trump’s margins, and a pervasive feeling that Biden and broader anti-incumbent fervor put her in a difficult, even impossible position.
“We ran the best campaign we could, considering Joe Biden was president,” grumbled one Harris aide granted anonymity to speak freely. “Joe Biden is the singular reason Kamala Harris and Democrats lost tonight.”
Another Harris aide said it was clear Biden should have made a graceful exit much sooner, allowing Democrats to hold a primary they believed Harris would have won.
As CNN reported Trump’s victory on Election Night, CNN reporter MJ Lee relayed what one senior Harris officials told her that “there will be a lot of soul-searching and a lot of questions in the coming days about what, if anything, could Democrats and the Harris campaign have done differently.
One thing we are clearly already starting to see take place is finger-pointing and the blame game. A lot of that will be erected at President Biden… even coming from some folks inside the Harris campaign.
Remember back in 2020 when he was running, he initially said “I plan on being a transition and a bridge president.” Of course, he changed his mind ultimately and said “I am the only person that can defeat Donald Trump. I have more work to do.” And ended up seeking a second term…
Democrats are looking back on all of this and thinking about what about that parallel universe where Joe Biden had not sought a second term and there had been a full Democratic primary contest, where the party actually chose whoever they thought was going to be the strongest person to run a full campaign.”
Biden’s team did not take the criticisms in stride.
Obama staffers are trying to pin blame on Biden for Harris’ loss.
Reacting to Plouffe’s tweet, one Biden-world source called Plouffe a “Sanctimonious a**” – another said “I find this so unproductive. Joe Biden is the President of the United States and won with out you. He… https://t.co/cdJnlcmG0Q
— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) November 6, 2024
A former Biden spokesperson, MSNBC’s Symone D. Sanders went after the president’s critics.
MSNBC’s Symone D. Sanders (a former Biden spox) just NUKED the Democrat Party over their coup to remove Joe Biden:
“I do have an indictment of some of the strategy, and again, the people that said, ‘Joe Biden was the problem.’ Where’s my camera? … I will just note that it is… pic.twitter.com/INR8ank1vz
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) November 6, 2024
“I do have an indictment of some of the strategy, and again, the people that said, ‘Joe Biden was the problem.’ Where’s my camera? … I will just note that it is probably not the best idea that Democrats orchestrated a very public stab fest, a proverbial stabbing in the front of the sitting President of the United States of America, and then didn’t use him in his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania.”
Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania by over two percentage points. Harris had previously refused to choose popular Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro because doing so would upset the Democratic base.
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