The Harris-Walz Campaign team’s recent appearance on ‘Pod Save America’ shows how operatives who have spent their entire careers cycling through campaigns, corporate boardrooms, and consulting firms produced a campaign that failed to inspire or connect with voters.

From the Article:

For weeks following Joe Biden’s disastrous performance, his campaign publicly maintained the illusion that he was still well-positioned to defeat Donald Trump. Privately, they knew otherwise. As Pod Save America co-host Jon Favreau revealed days after the election:

After the debate, the Biden people told us that the polls were fine, and Biden was still the strongest candidate. They were privately telling reporters, at the time, that Kamala Harris couldn’t win. […] Then we find out, when the Biden campaign becomes the Harris campaign, that the Biden campaign’s own internal polling, at the time when they were telling us he was the strongest candidate, showed that Donald Trump was going to win 400 electoral votes.

The implications of this are staggering, and it should be treated as a massive scandal.

  • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
    0·
    6 months ago

    The campaign was fine. Americans are the problem. They’re too ignorant.

    If we’re going to blame this ignorance on anyone we might consider blaming the media. Odd how we aren’t seeing a lot of articles from the media saying the media failing to give information to people about how bad Trump is. But linked above is something from the media blaming a political campaign for not doing their jobs for them.

    Still not doing any introspection about waiting until after the election to explain why Trump’s “economic plan” will be a disaster, huh? Didn’t bother to explain anything about what causes inflation. Wouldn’t want people to think it’s something to do with it being a free market, and not caused by the government. Nope, it’s up to the campaigns to explain economics to people in 30 second TV spots.

    So the media will continue blame the Democrats for all the problems, while wondering “why couldn’t the democrats win the election”? Must be the democrats fault! It’s like we’ve always been saying, it’s always their fault! We should never think about what the effect of us blaming one party for everything might be.

    But mostly it was just Americans taking democracy for granted. Don’t know what you got until you’ve lost it I guess.

    • KidNamedLainah@lemmy.world
      0·
      6 months ago

      The campaign was complete garbage, though. In a Rolling Stone article, it details on how many advisors and Democratic party operatives were begging her campaign to not bring in Liz Cheney because any gains would essentially be eclipsed by other Democratic voters that otherwise stayed home.

      A Democratic strategist says they warned key Harris surrogates and top-level officials at the Democratic National Committee that campaigning with Liz Cheney […] was highly unlikely to motivate any new swing voters, and risked dissuading already-despondent, infrequent Democratic voters who had supported Biden in 2020

      I also understand that your main points are on how political commentators and news anchors on TV chose not to encourage Harris to tackle issues on the economy, but an Atlantic article essentially tells us that Harris torpedoed her anti-big business rhetoric when she brought in her brother-in-law into the campaign itself.

      While Harris was stuck defending the Biden economy, and hobbled by lingering anger over inflation, attacking Big Business allowed her to go on the offense. Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer

      Honestly, how big of a role does media have in swaying her campaign into talking about important issues (such as the economy, like you pointed out) if she willingly chose to ignore the easiest slam dunks her campaign had?