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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I recall reading early on that DNC campaign advisers were recommending against continuing with the "weird" rhetoric, and the article mentioned some specific people who had worked on the 2016 campaign. It floored me that those people still had jobs. I guess they got their way eventually. I now have no expectation that they won't be doing the same shit in 2028.
DNC Leadership would rather lose with a neoliberal candidate than win with a progressive one.
DNC Leadership would rather lose with a neoliberal candidate than win with a progressive one.
That's because they're paid by big money donors to prevent any movement to the left.
Has been the case since 1992. Blame Clinton and his triangation DLC Reagan-lite bullshit
Blame capitalism. Capitalism creates massive wealth disparity and since you can't detangle wealth from political power, it creates massive power disparities. Those power disparities are used by the rich to slowly ratchet the government and society further and further to the right.
Oh, I do. But also we need major campaign finance reform as a constitutional amendment banning private money in politics so even the Republicans won't be able to take big money.
Not enough. As long as massive wealth disparities exist, as long as billionaires exist, they will always find a way to use their wealth to ratchet the country further and further to the right
I think in addition to that, we should force all corporations to be worker-owned cooperatives in order to bring demcracy to the workplace.
"DNC Leadership would rather lose with a neoliberal candidate than win with a progressive one."
I think I had this exact revelation during or right after the 2020 primaries and it has deeply impacted my approach to voting ever since.
I had that same revelation back in 2016
Bernie could have won.
in 2016, WOULD have
It was all Hillary people. Why the DNC keeps hiring hillary and her people? Well Hillary owns the DNC. It's a private corporation that has private share-holders and their product is ballot access for the Democratic party.
If you want to run as a democrat for almost any office in the entire country you have to go through the DNC.
The same progressives that didn’t show up to vote?
They didn’t vote because Harris ran as a republican. Run as a progressive if you want those votes.
Harris did not lose because she didn't pull left enough. Lefties had nowhere else to go. She lost because Trump lied better
Lefties had nowhere else to go
See, you're working under the idea that everyone votes for the candidate that's ideologically closest to them.
By that understanding, running against the furthest-right candidate possible, and triangulating yourself to be 1 inch to the left of them should get you the entire electorate, except for the tiny percent of people who are more rightwing than Donald Trump.
This is observably false, hence why democrats eat shit when they move to the right as they did in 2016 and 2024 (and in most midterms).
In reality, every time you compromise a position or means-test a policy, you lose votes. "New parents will get $5,000" will always perform better than "new parents who fill out a this form and are making less than $50K and whose SSN is a prime number may be eligible for a tax break up to $5,000"
Anybody who likes the idea of parents getting money will support the first, and anybody who opposes it will oppose both. But there's a big chunk of people who will like the first, and won't care about the second.
Same reason "Free healthcare" will always perform better than "subsidies for health insurance for pell grant recipients who open a business in an minority neighborhood that operates for at least 2 years"
So account for the people who didn’t show up. Harris lost because no one was enthusiastic about her enough to show up. Biden had millions more votes than Harris.
Trump got the same votes as last time. He convinced no more people. Meanwhile Harris got 10M less votes than Biden. She lost because she couldn't convince those 10M to vote her. When she courted Dick Cheney, it becomes obvious why. The people who would have voted for the Ds saw them correctly as now right of Reagan.
She lost because Trump lied better
Harris lied?
Hahahaha....oh wait you're serious....BAHAHAHA. Harris didn't run as a Republican and you know it. And no permutation close to it either. And either you know it or you didn't actually pay any attention beyond "I saw her on the same stage as Liz Cheney so they must be pulling right". If you had paid any attention you would see that those last minute inclusions of Republicans was around the threat Trump posed to the country. They got up on stage and literally said that they didn't agree on most positions, but that the need to keep trump out of office overshadowed party alliance.
And given all that if you were actually progressive (and you know wanting to make progress) and being realistic you would look at the actual options and have seen which was as close as you could get to your preference and votes to move the needle in the right direction. Enough people didn't do that (or didn't agree with what I assume are our positions and preferences...very to the left of Trump for myself and presumably many others here) that we ended up with this mess.
There is plenty to learn but "HaRiS RaN As A RePuBlIcAn" is not one of them.
Maybe you were born yesterday, but I’ve been politically aware since the beginning of the neoliberal era. I remember Reagan & Thatcher, and I remember Bill Clinton’s triangulation and every rightward lurch the Democratic party has made since.
Scooby Doo style:
The boogeyman is a centrist who is neither left, nor right!Pull mask off
oh it was a right-winger all along.
She fucked up. I thought oh shit she might be listening to Bernie when she picked Walz. Then she never looked left for another moment. She played center right and tried to, in the words of another comment, "scrape shit off a fascist's boot". I voted for her, harm reduction etc.
They fucking blew it. If we ever have a real presidential election again they better run progressive hard.
Can you believe her dad is a Marxist economist? I can’t imagine what Thanksgiving dinner would be like.
I imagine it would go like:
"Honey if you would have just...."
"I was vice president of the fucking country!"
"And even with that you fucked it up".
I voted for her. I’m just dxing the problem, which is enthusiasm. Stop apologizing for their shitty campaign. They should have continued to attack Trump and co a weird. Keep Walz at the front of the campaign. And run on ending the Genocide and improving people’s lives.
I felt my enthusiasm drop for Harris every time she made it clear that she didn’t give a damn about progressives. I still voted, but it is obvious that the electorate didn’t buy her bipartisan and it in fact depresses the electorate. The results speak for themselves.
Harris didn’t run as a Republican and you know it.
She touted an endorsement from Dick Cheney, said she'd put a Republican in her cabinet, and said she'd pass Trump's immigration bill.
The Harris campaign was further to the right than Ronald Reagan was. She brought the Neoconservative movement into her campaign. She literally said the only difference between her and Biden would be that she would have a Republican in her cabinet. She's a prosecutor focused on "law and order" and huge supporter of cops. She said there were no conditions she would ever put on Israel. Her campaign mocked Trump for not building enough of a wall, and that she would be tough on immigration, without saying anything about child separation, solitary confinement for toddlers at the border, and violence against the most downtrodden at the hands of border patrol.
She absolutely ran a campaign that was nearly indistinguishable from a Republican campaign from 20 years ago.
That’s the latest talking point fresh from lemmy.ml
How does it feel knowing Lemmy.ml was right and .world was wrong?
Voters chose the right most option. Was lemmy.ml saying we needed to go further right?
Yes we said democrats need to unconditionally support a genocide. And yet somehow despite .world and the democrats being literal Nazis they still lost. We are astouded.
And the republicans that “unconditionally support genocide” won.
They also supported deporting all immigrants. For people looking for Fascism Republicans did a better job at it. Democrats ran Nikki Haley against Donald Trump when voters were asking for Bernie Sanders.
Never mind us, she won, despite us warning that she might lose.
Republicans won. But now I know the lemmy.ml talking point
Republicans would have won regardless of which faction won. That's the point. Harris was further Reich than w bush.
Her campaign was further right than Reagan!
Yes. The lesson here is you can't win without progressives, and if you try they will punish you.
You seem to be trying to imply that progressives aren't important, but the reality is exactly the fucking opposite.
Polls made it clear voters were motivated by inflation and immigration. Everyone I know voted. No one I know irl felt democrats didn’t go far enough left.
That is a talking point being repeated a lot on lemmy.ml though. Which is telling considering its reputation.
Polls made it clear voters were motivated by inflation and immigration.
Well no shit, when those are only things in the multiple-choice response anywhere close to what voters are really feeling, of course that's what they're gonna measure!
But you have to read between the lines, interpret and understand what the data is telling you. Why are they worried about immigration? Why are they worried about inflation? The answer is because they're economically insecure, falling behind while the rich get richer, and seeing the inequity do nothing but expand day by day. They fucking want leftist economic reforms because those are the things that would actually help fix their problems, but they're never gonna be allowed to express it on a goddamed survey made by neoliberals who are more interested in huffing their own confirmation bias to pimp themselves to their corporate donors than actually helping the citizenry!
Who said there was multiple choice questions? Read between the lines? What are you rambling about?
You said:
Polls made it clear
If you don't know that polls are almost always multiple-choice, you have no business trying to cite them.
almost always
So you acknowledge that they aren’t alway multiple choice but in the same comment you pretend that I have no business citing polls that aren’t multiple choice because it makes you wrong. Got it.
Everyone I know voted. No one I know irl felt democrats didn’t go far enough left.
Yeah, if they thought Democrats were too far right they probably were among the 11 million who voted for Biden but stayed home this time.
Fuck your HOA suburb.
lol wut
I mean I didn't think they went far enough left. I still voted for them, but certainly I wasn't enthused. I don't know who would be.
I haven’t met anyone with that sentiment irl. Everyone I know either wanted Kamala to win or felt Biden and Kamala was radical left extremist and his progressive policies were the cause of inflation.
The polls reflect that.
This narrative that democrats didn’t go far enough left is something I’ve only seen on lemmy.
Get out your rich ass bubble white man!
Lemmy.ml is the bubble. lol @ your attempt at race bait
It’s not about”progressives” it’s about the average Joe voter who (in some ways rightly) couldn’t see a difference enough to make voting (an unnecessarily difficult chore) worthwhile.
The second problem, is that there is no collective class consciousness. At best there is maybe a collective unconscious feeling. Progressives often ascribe a much greater awareness than is warranted to the proletariat. Ironically after likely doing no organizing other than debating each other in closed left wing YouTube and Reddit threads.
No one knows the political lean of who didn't vote.
They think saying the dnc went too far right is Russian propaganda...
No that's pretty easy to know, more centrist or leftwing than the available options.
Tell that to OP for their comment:
DNC Leadership would rather lose with a neoliberal candidate than win with a progressive one.