Democratic insiders are blasting Kamala Harris’s campaign strategy of highlighting the Republicans backing her and using Liz Cheney as her main surrogate in the campaign’s final weeks.
The campaign and Democrat voters are now left picking up the pieces and assigning blame after Harris’s election loss to Donald Trump. Trump is now poised to return to the White House as the liberal party tries to determine how it lost the support it had in 2020 and how to regain it in 2028.
That has led to many questions about Harris’s campaign strategy – though it was a unique campaign, only having 100 days as the head of the ticket after Joe Biden dropped out following a series of missteps and concerns over his age.
Democratic strategists are now saying they warned key Harris backers and top executives at the Democratic National Committee that campaigning with Liz Cheney and making their closing argument about how many former Republicans were supporting Harris was a bad strategy.
“People don’t want to be in a coalition with the devil,” a source told Rolling Stone, referencing Dick Cheney, Liz’s father, who many Democrats despise from his time in the White House.
Throughout the campaign, Harris used Liz Cheney on the campaign to speak about the dangers of Trump. Cheney served on the committee that investigated the riot at the Capitol on January 6, but lost her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives for turning on the president-elect.
Sources told Rolling Stone they voiced concerns with the risky move saying it was unlikely to motivate new swing voters and risked alienating Democratic voters who backed Biden in 2020.
Those with concerns about the strategy also said they spoke to top donors and state party chairs.
They claimed they sent data to the Harris campaign showing that Republicans were unlikely to change their vote and that the party needed to energize its base and target Democratic-leaning working-class voters in battleground states.
“We were told, basically, to get lost, no thank you,” the strategist told Rolling Stone.
A spokesperson for Harris did not respond to the outlet about the allegations.
Former Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki also criticized the strategy on MSNBC saying the party spent too much time praising Republicans who left Trump’s site.
“The people who left the Democratic Party are the people who are going to win in the future,” she said. “The people who left Trump, the Never Trumpers — who have important voices — that is not a winning coalition.”
