Democrats Begged Team Kamala Harris Not to Campaign With Liz Cheney
Democrats Begged Team Kamala Harris Not to Campaign With Liz Cheney
Democratic operatives say they told the Harris campaign appealing to Republicans wouldn’t win her votes — and could turn off disaffected Democrats.
It's literally 2016 but worse somehow.
One source close to the Harris campaign tells Rolling Stone they reached out to several staffers in and around the campaign to voice concerns about the candidate embracing Dick and Liz Cheney.
“People don’t want to be in a coalition with the devil,” says the source, speaking about Dick Cheney. They say a Harris staffer responded that it was not the staff’s role to challenge the campaign’s decisions.
A Democratic strategist says they warned key Harris surrogates and top-level officials at the Democratic National Committee that campaigning with Liz Cheney — and making the campaign’s closing argument about how many Republicans were supporting Harris — was highly unlikely to motivate any new swing voters, and risked dissuading already-despondent, infrequent Democratic voters who had supported Biden in 2020. The strategist says they also attempted to have big donors and battleground state party chairs convey the same argument to the Harris campaign.
Another Democratic operative close to Harrisworld says they sent memos and data to Harris campaign staffers underscoring how, among other things, Republican voters, believe it or not, vote Republican — and that the data over the past year screamed that Democrats instead needed to reassure and energize the liberal base and Dem-leaning working class in battleground states. “We were told, basically, to get lost, no thank you,” says the operative.
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God I am so tired of the post-mortems already. everyone is so obsessed to find the one little things that they did wrong. What was the one weird trick that could have shown america the correct path.
This time it was beyond obvious. This country simply wanted a rapist, a criminal, they wanted a man who praises dictators and has proclaimed that he is going to be one (good luck with that 1 day thing). Enough Americans looked at the two choices and the majority of this country decided to give fascism a try.
Or, an awful lot of Americans are angry, they see the world passing them by and they see a line of politicians that have all promised to do something and done nothing. So they are angry. They are pissed off at the establishment, at the status quo.
Donald Trump may be a liar and an asshole but he is definitely not establishment and definitely not status quo.
So they vote for him, hoping that maybe he will actually do a little bit of what he promises if only because when he speaks it doesn't sound like a PR department is talking.If Democrats want to win, they need a real message. Obama had a real message. Hope, change, yes we can. That was a real message. And he was, by and large, an excellent president. I don't regret my vote for him. But he made one big mistake. He ran on a platform of radical reform, and then delivered only moderate reform. Still a very successful president.
And who does the DNC put forward after him? Hillary. About as radical as soggy toast. And they shunt Bernie to the side, the one who actually could have won. Let's not forget that before this election started and Biden dropped out, Harris was polling in the single digits among Democrats.
If you want to win elections, you need a stronger message than 'I'm not Trump'. THAT is why Kamala lost. She did not have that strong message. To say otherwise is to deny reality and ensure that history repeats itself.
Glad you still have faith in the system. I don’t, doesn’t matter what the dems put forward, people are lazy and stupid and will not do any research. I mean, take a look at all the morons who are googling “what’s a tariff” now that he’s been elected.
Pissed is one thing, but we just did the equivalent of shooting ourselves in the head instead of taking a Tylenol for a headache.
People are stupid, lazy and selfish, they want the easy solutions, they want the one weird trick, they want the fix now instead of realizing that change is long and gradual. Well, we’re about to get drastic change, best of luck everyone. I’m not fan of dems, but we had the ability to pressure them, got Biden to drop out. Do you think for a second that trump will be able to be pressured into anything that isn’t his own self interest?
I was with you for the first election, but every last person who voted for him, or who felt like it wasn’t worth getting off the couch to prevent trump is responsible for this, full stop. I’m so goddamned tired of people acting like not a single person had any agency in this, like we had two equal but opposite choices. No, this one was easy and obvious and we just showed the world our true colors.
God I am so tired of the post-mortems already
lol it was literally not even a week ago
This country simply wanted a rapist
lmao yup. That's the issue that motivated voters
Enough were fine with it.
This country simply wanted a rapist, a criminal, they wanted a man who praises dictators
Voter participation was around 50% and some 12 million fewer people came out to vote this election. Both parties lost millions of voters, but Democrats lost more because they sold out to the donor class.
Americans don't like Trump, they have just lost faith in our broken two party system.
Right, so enough wanted the rapist, the rest were just ok with it. Lovely country, beautiful people.
When did this become rapist or not? The choice was between neloiberalism and populist reactionary conservativism.
I understand not making a choice let populist reactionary conservativism win. The established electoral system makes that the accepted narrative. I propose an equally valid choice is rejection of both political groups and the electoral system creating the duopoly of power.
I’m using it as shorthand for all the obvious criminality of the man. To elaborate, he’s a rapist, a 34 time convicted felon who steals from charity, cheats students, stiffs everyone he owes, a man who stole our national secrets, salutes and uplifts dictators, has expressed his desire to be one multiple times on the campaign trail, cages children and ran campaign focused solely on retribution and outright lies about immigrants, women and minorities.
This was an argument that could have been made during his first run; but this time, we all knew exactly what we were voting for.
Agreed. He is deplorable as an individual.
the real answer shines through when you step outside of US politics. The global recession had people in every country questioning the incumbent party. It doesn't matter if it was left or right, conservative or liberal, whoever was in office was being blamed - because the public in general has no idea how the world works and has the collective memory of a goldfish. The US is performing better than most countries [1][2][3][4][5] in regards to the impact covid-19 had on the world, but Americans are too uneducated to realize they had it good, as the road to recovery is never easy.
With the public angry at the incumbent government (globally, not just in the US), the Trump/Putin hate machine decided to to stoke fear, uncertainty and doubt in Americans. This clearly worked as people's views on the nations economy have been trending down [6], so now we're left to deal with the Magagenda, which all seem to align with everything Putin ever hoped for.
You would think people would learn that republicans tend to wreck the economy just for democrats to fix it, and republicans to shit all over any progress that's been made again, but just like dogs aren't smart enough to learn that a snake bite's venomous bite could kill them an hour later, Americans can't seem to grasp the concept of economic momentum and that changes made in one term may not be immediately fixed - especially if the previous guy smeared his shit all over the bathroom walls before he left. It's understandable it will take some time to clean up.
Anyways, Trump took advantage of these economic hard times by stoking fear and hatred with claims that the incumbent party is to blame, that it's all corrupt, and somehow immigrants and trans people are to blame.
In summary, we've got a known rapist/conman/cheater with a history of rape, conning, and cheating and we're supposed to believe he won fair and square? I don't buy it.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68203820
[3] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-us-recovery-from-covid-19-in-international-comparison/
[4] https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/the-us-economy-in-global-context
[6] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/05/23/views-of-the-nations-economy-may-2024/
friend, you and I are saying the same thing.
You would think people would learn that republicans tend to wreck the economy just for democrats to fix it, and republicans to shit all over any progress that's been made again, but just like dogs aren't smart enough to learn that a snake bite's venomous bite could kill them an hour later, Americans can't seem to grasp the concept of economic momentum and that changes made in one term may not be immediately fixed - especially if the previous guy smeared his shit all over the bathroom walls before he left. It's understandable it will take some time to clean up.
I totally understand why it happened, and yeah, I agree it was economic issues, and inflation and so forth. And I even agree it’s not an America thing. This is just a human thing, and humans by and large are kinda awful.
this is because people want easy, quick answers that make them feel good. An old comment of mine from this site sums it up:
as I have climbed higher in the corporate world, this is becoming clearer and clearer. people respond far better to a confident idiot than they do a pensive expert.