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.
The DNC thought appealing to republicans and moderates instead of motivating the base to turn out would work. It didn’t. It never has, it didn’t work in 2016 or 2020 either. The entire DNC should be fired
Oh I agree the DNC fucked up, and have fucked up for so many years in a row. My assumption, which was wrong, is that the base was already covered. If we’re reaching out for Republicans it’s because the base is a given.
After seeing what looks like 10 million or so Democrats sit this election out (pending the full results and an investigation of those results) it’s clear Democrats didn’t have the base locked down.
Locked down like a prisoner?