US election 2024: What went wrong for Kamala Harris
Democratic insiders have revealed the major failures that led to Kamala Harris’ stunning election loss.
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Kamala Harris didn’t connect with voters and “arrogant” campaign staff contributed to her stunning election loss, according to Democratic insiders.
US President Joe Biden also copped a serve for not announcing earlier that he would not run for the country’s top job at the election.
Speaking to The New York Post, a number of unidentified Democratic insiders didn’t hold back.
“She was a s**t candidate and Trump made her look worse than Hillary Clinton,” said one source.
“Biden didn’t deserve that treatment and he got pushed out for an empty pantsuit. At least Biden beat Trump and Hillary Clinton had more balls than either of them.”
Another source, who claimed to have worked on five presidential campaigns, conceded he knew the race would be hard after Mr Biden dropped out of the race in July, paving the way for Ms Harris to step in.
“Others acted like they knew they were going to win,” he said. “They were arrogant.”
Campaign chairperson Jen O’Malley Dillon, Obama campaign alums David Plouffe and Stephanie Cutter were also singled out, with critics saying they misjudged what issues really mattered to voters.
One said Ms Harris failed to win the election because “people didn’t connect with her”.
“I think broadly the staff of Democratic campaigns are not representative of the country,” said one source.
Ms Harris was noticeably silent and absent the day after Election Day, but she called Donald Trump to congratulate him on his win before jher concession speech.
Ms Harris called President-elect Trump some time on Wednesday, local time, to congratulate him on winning the election, a senior aide told The Hill.
Ms Harris “discussed the importance of a peaceful transfer of power and being a president for all Americans,” the aide said.
The Vice President earlier left her supporters stranded in the early hours of the morning as her watch party deflated from giddy excitement to the reality of defeat.
She remained silent and instead dispatched campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond to the stage to send supporters home for the evening, while refusing to concede defeat to Donald Trump.
“We still have votes to count, we still have states that have not been called yet, we will continue overnight to fight to make sure that every vote is counted, that every voice has spoken,” Mr Richmond said shortly before 1am.
“So you won’t hear from the vice president tonight, but you will hear from her tomorrow, she will be back here tomorrow to address her supporters, but to address the nation”.
The moment was a remarkable replay of Hillary Clinton sending campaign chairman John Podesta out shortly after 2am in 2016 to assure her supporters she was “not done yet”. She was, and Ms Harris is likely done too.
Both campaigned on being the first female president, and both were blocked from breaking the “glass ceiling” by Donald Trump.
“This can’t be happening again,” said Simone Marlow, who dropped the American flag she had been waving just moments earlier before joining the exodus of supporters flooding out of the watch party.
While Ms Harris hasn’t formally conceded defeat, her campaign stopped talking to the press soon after Mr Trump’s momentum in the sunbelt states of Georgia and North Carolina boxed her into needing the trifecta of blue wall states to win.
Campaign chief Jen O’Malley Dillon told her team in an internal memo that their campaign was built for a tight race in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
“This is what we’ve been built for, so let’s finish up what we have in front of us tonight, get some sleep, and get ready to close out strong tomorrow,” she wrote.
It was a far cry from the historic tone Ms Harris struck at the start of election day, as she recalled her first political campaign for “freshman class representative” of the liberal arts student council.
The then 17-year-old won that election, and she kept winning ever since District Attorney, Governor, Senator, and Vice President.
“To go back tonight to Howard University, my beloved alma mater and be able to hopefully, you know, recognise this day for what it is, is really it’s full circle for me,” she said.
Ms Harris was all but missing in action save for radio interviews in the swing state of Georgia.
The plan was to open a second path to victory by picking off either Georgia or North Carolina, which both went for Mr Trump.
There’ll be plenty of blame to go around when the post-mortem of the campaign is conducted, but nowhere more than the record of President Joe Biden.
Exit polls showed an insurmountable 72 per cent of voters were “dissatisfied or angry” with the direction of the country.
Inflation and illegal immigration were the two biggest issues of the election, both of which broke heavily in favour of Mr Trump.
Whether or not she was officially crowned the “Border Tsar”, the moniker stuck.
Her unwavering loyalty to Mr Biden made her reluctant to distance herself from the president, which made her pitch as the change candidate land flat.
And with just 107 days on the campaign trail, she ran out of runway to convince voters that she was not the incumbent.
So complete was the backlash to the past four years of the Biden-Harris administration, the Democrats lost control of the Senate and the House remained a toss-up.
With Mr Trump’s ultimate Pennsylvania victory placing him at 277 – seven points above what was required for victory – questions turned to how big Ms Harris’ loss could be.
If she loses in blue wall states like Michigan, it will be largely due to the Muslim population staying home in protest of the Biden-Harris administration’s support of Israel in its war against Hamas and Hezbollah.
Anti-Israel protesters posted up outside Howard University as supporters poured into the open-air watch party.
“The people demand. Stop arming Israel,” the demonstrators implored.
Jenna Nichols, from Virginia, said Ms Harris was an inspiration, regardless of the result.
“She had just weeks to campaign and she’s come so far,” Ms Nichols said.
Having cast a mail-in ballot to her home state of California days ago, Ms Harris remained largely unseen.
The one time she did break cover earlier in the day, she joined campaign volunteers at the Democratic National Committee making last-minute calls to motivate voters to the ballot box.
But an awkward moment became widely mocked as her so-called conversation appeared, like much of her campaign, to be with a voter that never existed.
“Have you voted already?” she asked before a long pause. “You did? Thank you,” she added as she held up her phone to reveal its camera app clearly open rather than a call with a real human.
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Originally published as US election 2024: What went wrong for Kamala Harris
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