How Kamala Responded When Her Team Told Her There Was No Way She Could Beat Trump
We know how Vice President Kamala Harris reportedly reacted when she was told that she wouldn’t be the next president of the United States. It’s part of a new book written by Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple in Uncharted, which details the former vice president’s ascendency to the top of the ticket via an internal coup to her brutal crash on Election Day, where voters told her and the Democrats, they weren’t interested in them continuing this insane agenda that had destroyed the country.
Excerpts were published, and it’s a little interesting how this campaign came together on the kitchen table at Naval One Observatory. Harris had top talent from the Obama operation. Still, not even they, with their exceptional political acumen, could save this woman who was flat-out unqualified and unprepared to be president. Everything seemed to be a struggle for her; Harris was ahead of her skis, but the deed was done. The open primary option that Barack Obama had hoped for quickly died, as Joe Biden endorsed Harris shortly after he stepped down from the 2024 ticket. Was it revenge for the ouster? Who knows, but every call Harris made to the top Democrats didn’t make opposition overtures; she wouldn’t face a primary challenge. The Democrats wanted to avoid a coronation but chose one anyway.
It ended up being a $2 billion-plus boondoggle. What kills me is this feeling of elation on election night. Was drug use rampant, or was this crew so deep in the bubble that reason got squeezed out of this atmosphere? I think it’s the latter. There also appears to be a defined split between the on-air talent and the pollsters, the latter of which thought the former was insane for saying they were winning the race. Reality slammed into Harris when campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told her that she was going to lose the blue wall states (via Vanity Fair):
Though Harris was behind in the battleground states, her spokespeople were oddly upbeat. Appearing on MSNBC back on October 27, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon had declared, “We are very confident we’re going to win this thing.” On Friday, November 1, senior adviser David Plouffe posted on X that late-breaking undecided voters were going for Harris by more than 10 points.
A campaign has a gravitational pull, and chief of staff [Lorraine] Voles was feeling it. “You get sucked into the momentum,” she said. “Like you believe it. I’ve been on winning ones and losing ones, and this felt more like [Bill] Clinton’s [in 1992] than [Michael] Dukakis’s [in 1988].” Voles wasn’t talking poll numbers or analytics, but intangibles. “The rallies were so big and so enthusiastic. People were lining the streets.” But Harris’s pollsters didn’t share the kumbaya cohesion. One ex-Biden campaign official couldn’t understand all the heady talk. “They still had consistent polling results that showed her down by two in every state,” she said, “and Trump always overperforms. How the hell were they going to make that up?”
(Read more from “How Kamala Responded When Her Team Told Her There Was No Way She Could Beat Trump” HERE)
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr
