Politics
Dem Party blame game: Accusations fly as to who is responsible for Harris' massive loss to Trump
The Democratic blame game is at a fever pitch after Vice President Kamala Harris was swiftly defeated by President-elect Donald Trump at the ballot box in an election that had been anticipated to drag out for days as polling indicated the match-up was razor-thin.
Trump sailed to victory in the early morning hours last Wednesday, after locking down key battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania and Georgia and clearing 270 electoral votes. He concluded the race with 312 electoral votes to Harris’ 226, and won the popular vote.
In the final days of the campaigning cycle, polling indicated that the results for the election would likely be very close, which could have resulted in state recounts and lawsuits before the winner was announced.
Following Trump’s clear victory, Democrats across the nation issued statements accepting the results and congratulating the president. Fallout from the devastating loss, however, has reverberated across the party as members point fingers at each other for the Trump win.
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Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi spar over claims Dems ‘abandoned working class’
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders pinned blame for the loss on the Democratic Party for “abandoning” the working class, sparking rebuke from former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change,” Sanders posted to X last week, accompanied by a press release on the election results. “And they’re right.”
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Pelosi responded that the party has not left the working class behind in favor of kowtowing to “big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party,” as Sanders had argued in his press release.
“With all due respect, and I have a great deal of respect for him [Sanders], for what he stands for, but I don’t respect him saying that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class families. That’s where we are,” Pelosi told The New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast on Saturday.
“Under President Biden, you see the rescue package, money in the pockets of people, the shots in the arm, children in school safely, working people back to work. What did Trump do when he was president? One bill that gave a tax cut to the richest people in America,” she continued.
Sanders doubled down on his remarks Sunday, telling NBC’s Kristen Welker that “the working people of this country are extremely angry.”
“Nancy is a friend of mine,” Sanders said. “But here is the reality. In the Senate in the last two years, we have not even brought forth legislation to raise the minimum wage to a living wage despite the fact that some 20 million people in this country are working for less than $15 an hour.”
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“Bottom line, if you’re a working person out there, do you really think that the Democratic Party is going to the max, taking on powerful special interests and fighting for you? I think the overwhelming answer is no,” Sanders said.
Harris, Biden campaigns pin blame on each other
The Harris campaign and Biden campaign have reportedly pinned blame for the loss on each other, Axios reported last week.
“The 107-day Harris campaign was nearly flawless. The Biden campaign that preceded it was the opposite,” one Harris campaign member told the outlet.
“We did what we could. I think the odds against us were insurmountable,” another individual involved with the Harris campaign said, referring to President Biden’s exit from the presidential race in July and his low approval ratings.
Biden dropped out of the race over the summer following his disastrous debate performance against Trump, where he frequently lost his train of thought and stumbled over his words. The debate opened the floodgates to both conservatives and traditional Democrat allies calling on the president to pass the torch to a younger generation as concerns mounted surrounding his mental acuity and his age.
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Many of those who worked on the Biden campaign also joined the Harris campaign following the president’s endorsement of his VP to take up the mantle as Democratic presidential candidate.
A person who worked on the Biden campaign shot back in comment to Axios that the Harris team was to blame: “How did you spend $1 billion and not win? What the f—?”
“The Harris team benched [Biden], and then they lost, so now the people who represent Biden are saying, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t have benched him,’” another person familiar with the dynamics between the teams said.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates told the outlet, “Anyone criticizing the vice president’s campaign is at odds with President Biden.”
Pelosi points to Biden for loss
Pelosi appeared to pin blame for the loss on the president, claiming that Biden had dropped out of the race too late in the game and that that hadn’t provided an opportunity for an open primary.
“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” she told the New York Times podcast.
“The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” Pelosi continued. “. . . Because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”
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Biden dropped out of the presidential race on a Sunday afternoon in July via a social media post. He endorsed Harris minutes later in a follow-up X post, sparking other Democrats to rally around the VP.
Pelosi did defend Biden in June, when the Wall Street Journal ran an article doubting Biden’s mental fitness as president.
”Many of us spent time with @WSJ to share on the record our first-hand experiences with @POTUS, where we see his wisdom, experience, strength and strategic thinking,” Pelosi wrote on X at the time. “Instead, the Journal ignored testimony by Democrats, focused on attacks by Republicans and printed a hit piece.”
Pelosi, as well as other high-profile Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, also notably called on Biden to run for a second term ahead of the 2024 cycle kicking off in earnest.
Obama to blame?
Other Democrats and insiders pointed to former President Barack Obama for the loss, after Obama reportedly worked in the background over the summer to encourage Biden’s ouster from the race.
A handful of Obama’s allies and former advisers helped lead the charge in calling on Biden to drop out of the 2024 race earlier this summer, including former Obama adviser David Axelrod saying that Biden was “not winning this race;” longtime Obama friend George Clooney calling on the president to drop out of the race in a bombshell op-ed; and Jon Favreau, who served as former director of speech writing for Obama, also calling on Biden to drop out of the race ahead of his eventual departure.
“There is no singular reason why we lost, but a big reason is because the Obama advisers publicly encouraged Democratic infighting to push Joe Biden out, didn’t even want Kamala Harris as the nominee, and then signed up as the saviors of the campaign, only to run outdated Obama-era playbooks for a candidate that wasn’t Obama,” one former Biden staffer told Politico.
DNC National Finance Committee member and Harris campaign fundraiser Lindy Li told Fox News this weekend that Obama’s seemingly delayed endorsement of Harris after Biden dropped out added to Harris’ defeat.
”I want to point out they waited three days – Michelle and Barack Obama waited three days to endorse Kamala Harris,” Li said on “Fox & Friends Weekend” on Saturday. “It was the silence heard round the world.”
“The truth is, this is just an epic disaster – this is a $1 billion disaster,” Li added during the interview.
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Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, with the Obamas endorsing Harris in a video message posted to social media on July 26, five days after Biden’s announcement. The silence was not lost on the media, as headlines spread across the nation on Obama’s “silence.”
David Axelrod says Dem Party morphing into ‘smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party’
Similar to Sanders, longtime Democratic strategist David Axelrod appeared to pin blame for the loss on the Democratic Party’s shift away from blue-collar, middle class voters.
“You can’t approach working people like missionaries and say, ‘We’re here to help you become more like us.’ There’s a kind of unspoken disdain, unintended disdain in that,” the CNN contributor said last week.
“The only group … Democrats won among were people who make more than $100,000 a year,” Axelrod said. “You can’t win national elections that way, and it certainly shouldn’t be that way for a party that fashions itself as the party of working people.”
“I think Biden has done programmatically some good things for working people. But the party itself has increasingly become a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party, and it lends itself to the kind of backlash that we’ve seen,” he continued.