politics
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December 10, 2024
Democratic strategists are still blaming themselves for the devastating defeat.
Being angry all the time is bad for your mental health, but the world provides enough provocations for rage to overwhelm your efforts to remain calm. For those watching the 2024 presidential election and viewing Donald Trump’s victory as a colossal tragedy for the United States and the world, the great enemy of calm will be listening to interviews with Democratic strategists. The group is unwilling to accept responsibility for its second defeat in eight years to Trump, widely hated as a thug and a fraud.
Last Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris’ chief of staff, Sheila Nix, said: I participated She made the startling claim at a bipartisan meeting of presidential campaign staff this year. “I think she ran a pretty complete campaign and took all the necessary steps. [were] We need to be successful,” Nix said. “Of course we didn’t win, but I think we achieved all our goals.”
Trump campaign manager Chris Lacivita issued a natural rebuttal. “A perfect campaign never loses” LaCivita said new york times. “You can run a great campaign and you can run a great campaign and still lose. But you can’t run a perfect campaign and lose.”
The Knicks aren’t the only Harris staffer currently praising himself for a great job. The same notes of self-satisfaction and complacency become predominant. notable episodes of pod save america The podcast, which aired in late November, featured four senior advisers to the Harris campaign: Jen O’Malley Dillion, Quentin Fawkes, Stephanie Cutter and David Plouffe.
as washington post Columnist Perry Bacon Jr. sharply pointed outthese four strategists “continued to say they were not making excuses or blaming others, yet they were doing both.”
Bacon further observed:
What the four never did was directly admit the grave mistake they had made. “We should have pushed Harris to distance herself from President Biden.” “We may have spent too much time in Arizona.” (Harris lost) There is a difference of 6 percentage points.); “There should have been a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic National Convention.” There was no such blatant statement.
Instead, staffers repeatedly defended their work, noting that Harris lost less in the seven battleground states where she campaigned than in the rest of the country.
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The refrain that Harris overperformed in battleground states has often been used in defense of her campaign. But that turned out not to be true. as vox Author Eric Levitz, based on observations by strategist David Scholl, memo“Democrats’ overperformance in the swing states largely reflects how unusually bad the party has been in New York, Texas, Florida, and California.” In other words, Harris in the swing states Her performance was in line with her performance in the rest of the country, with the exception of solid blue states where support for Democratic candidates has declined significantly. This is a particularly revealing confession by Scholl. Senior advisor to external groups It did a lot of advertising in battleground states.
There are many other criticisms that could be made about the Harris campaign. Her strategy for hugging Liz Cheney and other far-right Republicans. Her use of wealthy agents like Mark Cuban undermined her economic message. Her closeness with Wall Street donors (along with Cubans) watered down any economic populism she had.
The original sin of the 2024 election was Joe Biden’s selfish decision to run again. So when he finally gave up the ghost over the summer, Democrats had to scramble to replace him with Kamala Harris.
Many of Harris’ strategists also worked for Joe Biden, but they remain unusual in holding their former boss accountable and explaining their own complicity in Biden’s pathetic egotism. be reluctant to do so.
As CNN memo About pod save america In the interview, “no campaign officials called Biden by name, but they repeatedly mentioned political “headwinds,” and said that Harris was the key to making the campaign competitive. They were shouting about how much they needed to bounce back.”
Quentin Fawkes said pod save america“Honestly, we were in crisis management mode to keep President Biden in the race.…As Plouffe said, Trump’s favorability numbers have been creeping up and I “We had to do something about that, too.” So it was a lot of walking and chewing gum at the same time, but at any point immediately after that debate or until President Biden definitively announced his resignation. However, there was actually no contingency plan for handing over the campaign to her. Please continue. ”
The fact that even after Joe Biden’s abysmal debate performance against Donald Trump in June, there was no contingency plan at all is shocking. Yet it is confirmed time magazine, that is report: “Biden informed executives on July 21 that he was withdrawing from the campaign. O’Malley Dillon said she and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez both cried that day, and that moment “Not one ounce,” O’Malley Dillon said. ”
These Biden supporters took over Harris’ campaign and continued to show the same lack of judgment.
Stephanie Cutter said pod save america “This convention showed a lot of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris, a lot of freshness, a lot of forward-thinking, and it brought together a diverse coalition: independents, Republicans, Democrats, business leaders, athletes, everyone, pushing for a new path forward. We came together and finally turned the page,” Cutter said. The Democratic coalition that benefits is not a multiracial coalition of union members, the broader working class, young people, civil rights activists, and feminist environmentalists, but instead is made up of “independents, Republicans, Democrats, business leaders, and athletes.” What I think is incredibly clear. , anti-war activist. Her view is a radically depoliticized view of the Democratic Party as an instrument of bipartisanship rather than a coalition fighting to change America. This depoliticized ideology permeated Harris’ campaign and led to its failure.
cutter gives equally revelatory answer “Biden Question” (Why didn’t Harris differentiate from Joe Biden? That’s what voters wanted pollsters to do.) According to the cutter:
[O]As for the Biden question, of course I saw that everywhere I went. And we knew what the data was. We knew we had to show her as her own person and point to the future rather than rehashing the past. But she also felt that she was part of the regime. And if we hadn’t said things like, “We would have done things very differently about borders.” We weren’t trying to please anyone. So we talked about the following: She’s from a different generation, most of her career came from outside of Washington, not within it. So she knows that many of the best ideas come from all over the country. Her career has been about reaching across the aisle and finding common sense ways to get things done. It is not based on ideological politics. All of this we were trying to tell the story and give the impression that she was different without pointing out any specific issues.
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The last sentence is telling: “We were trying to tell a story and give the impression that she was different without pointing out any specific issues.” In other words, the goal was an empty campaign without any concrete involvement in real politics. It was all about branding, not policy. But the story that Cutter and his colleagues wanted to sell was not one that the American public was enamored with. The people wanted real politics, but Harris was unable to deliver it.
If the Democratic Party is to recover from its failure in 2024, it will need fundamental reforms. The party needs to accept the fact that its loss to Trump was not a fluke that befell Democrats, but the result of bad decisions made. Joe Biden and his staff have put Harris in a nearly impossible position. But Ms. Harris went ahead and made a bad situation even worse by hiring Mr. Biden’s staff and following their advice to run a campaign without substance.
The Democratic Party will never get better unless the leaders who caused this disaster are held accountable.
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