Add stats guru Nate Silver to the growing list of people who’ve grilled Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign advisers over their sit-down interview with Pod Save America this week.
Silver specifically took issue with the group’s complaints that Harris was the victim of a “double standard” when it came to criticisms over her lack of media appearances compared to President-elect Donald Trump.
Harris’ campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, remarked on the show that Trump “got no s--t” for doing less traditional media than Harris, who, she said bluntly, “got s--t.”
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Senior adviser Stephanie Cutter concurred, adding, “We got tons of s--t that she wasn’t doing enough media.”
O’Malley Dillon then added, “Double standard.”
Silver, 46, didn’t buy those claims. He said it was the Harris campaign’s choice to limit her traditional media appearances, which were notably absent for the entirety of her campaign’s first month-and-a-half.
“Harris didn’t do a solo network interview until late September,” he tweeted. “Which who cares, fine, the networks don’t matter so much. Then she did a bunch toward the end of the race. But she was legit not doing a lot of traditional media. That was the campaign’s choice, not some conspiracy.”
Silver, who infamously had his own flub on Election Day when he abandoned his prediction model before the race was called, then got personal in his criticism of the Harris team.
“The Harris campaign folks are the most non-agentic people I’ve encountered in a position of comparable decision-making authority,“ he added. “They don’t even see themselves as victims so much as Non-Player Characters with no will of their own.”
That comment wasn’t the first from Silver about the podcast. Previously, he suggested he was baffled that Harris’ team blamed a hurricane as part of the reason they faced an uphill battle in addition to the shortened campaign they were forced to run because of President Joe Biden’s late summer bow out of the race.
“The idea the hurricane was some massive October surprise that specifically disadvantaged Harris is just so weird,” Silver wrote. “Relatively speaking, NC/GA even showed less vote swing than other swing states.”
Silver was far from the only person to criticize the Harris aides for their podcast sit-down. Many piled on the adviser David Plouffe after he gave a brief lecture on what Democrats need to do moving forward.
“I think as we look ahead to ‘26 and ‘28, particularly where you have seen drift amongst non-college voters generally, particularly those of color specifically, we obviously have to get some of that back,” he said. “We can’t afford any more erosion there. The math just doesn’t f---ing work.”
Many progressives didn’t appreciate Plouffe’s analysis so soon when he was a central figure in Harris’ losing team.
While it was the cause of much ridicule, the podcast did reveal some newsy nuggets previously unknown about the campaign. Most notably, that included the revelation that Harris’ internal polling never showed her up on Donald Trump in key states and that Harris had an interview offer to Hot Ones rejected by the show.
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