The sun rises, the songbirds sing, and another cadre of anonymous Democratic operatives blames their campaign loss on somebody else.
It‘s a normal, daily part of nature at this point, nearly a week out from Vice President Kamala Harris' loss to President-elect Donald Trump.
The latest gripers are a dozen disgruntled Harris campaign staff who complained to non-profit news site NOTUS that they were left by President Joe Biden—who dropped out of the race in July—with an organizational apparatus that was “broken since the beginning.”
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While “nearly all” acknowledged the biggest factor that led to the Democratic nominee getting routed by Trump was an electorate upset with post-pandemic inflation that “few, if any” could have overcome, they proceeded with recriminations that, naturally, pointed everywhere but at themselves.
The sources who spoke to NOTUS reiterated the prevailing line: Biden stayed in the race too long and shouldn’t have run again.
Moreover, they claimed that he asked Harris to “take care of his people” when he finally did back out of the race. That meant hanging on to campaign chair Jen O‘Malley Dillon and her deputy Rob Flaherty, who the anonymous Dems said were micromanagers too focused on analytics, often to the point where important organizational needs were neglected.
In one example, they said the Biden holdovers had built up an infrastructure that wasn‘t ready for the enthusiasm Harris’ ascendance would bring to the campaign.
Apparently, online donors who gave through fundraising platform ActBlue weren‘t prompted with a volunteer registration form to capture Democratic interest.
On the day Harris officially entered the race, this meant the initial surge of donors weren’t prompted to sign up to help, though a link to a volunteer form was added hours later and, NOTUS reported, captured 170,000 volunteers that day.
Volunteers didn‘t have talking points or literature until late in the campaign, over 1.5 million lawn signs weren’t printed until October, and state organizations didn’t start meeting their voter contact goals until five weeks out from the election.
Biden’s team also apparently signed up for too many pricey TV spots and consultant contracts, which left the Harris operation—despite its record cash hauls—short of fundraising goals.
“We can’t lie to people,” a confused Harris told aides at one point, according to one source who spoke to NOTUS, when she was given a campaign script that said “we missed our fundraising deadline.”
They had to explain to her that they had missed their goals, despite the gargantuan war chest.
Another point of contention was the city of Wilmington, Delaware, where Biden had headquartered the campaign Harris inherited. No one wants to move to Delaware, some of NOTUS' sources claimed, leaving the head office filled with inexperienced staff who they claim weren’t up to the job.
Harris herself tapped a bunch of campaign gurus who helped former President Barack Obama win in 2008 and 2012 campaigns, namely David Plouffe, but the Dems said they were just as myopic as O’Malley Dillon, another Obama alum.
“There was no one who had a different viewpoint. And anybody who had a different viewpoint was always sidelined,” one operative told NOTUS.
Plouffe, they said, focused too much on white suburbanites and moderates who didn‘t break for Trump. That led to events like Harris holding town halls with former Republican Representative Liz Cheney and touting the endorsement of her neocon father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, a man who proudly bragged about green-lighting acts of torture and was a key architect of the disastrous Iraq war that killed hundreds of thousands.
When Harris brought her brother-in-law Tony West, not an Obama alum, as a key advisor, O’Malley Dillon was initially warm to him, NOTUS reported. Then she allegedly tried to cut him out of the loop by choosing his chief of staff and sending him around the country as a surrogate, away from the campaign brain trust.
On the other hand, The Atlantic reported, in one of its own surveys of finger pointing among Democrats, that West—a well-heeled Uber executive—is the one who told Harris to stop campaigning against the Wall Street elites and Big Business that reaped a massive windfall from the inflation nightmare dogging everyday Americans.
In another case where this latest act of Democratic blame game doesn’t quite hold up to scrutiny, senior allies to Harris claimed to NOTUS that they tried to get the DNC to have a Palestinian speaker at the party’s August convention. That would have been a sign of goodwill towards Arab Americans concerned about tens of thousands of Palestinians, including 17,000 children, killed in the war in Gaza.
But the claim beggars belief since Harris had months afterwards to create daylight between herself and Biden on Gaza—or any other issue—and didn’t.
Even in friendly interviews, such as on The View, where she was offered the explicit opportunity to state what would be different between her administration and Biden’s, she stayed mum.
