Kamala Harris criticized as 'billion-dollar disaster', in debt after election

"The truth is this is just a monumental disaster, a $1 billion disaster," Li, a member of the Democratic National Committee on Finance, commented on Fox & Friends Weekend.

Debt of tens of millions of dollars

"They owed $20 million or $18 million. It was unbelievable. I was part of raising millions of dollars of that. I had to take responsibility and explain what happened to some friends because I told them it was a race with a margin of error," she added.

The strategist said Ms Harris' campaign chair, Jen O'Malley Dillon, " promised all of us that Harris would win".

"She even put out videos saying Harris was going to win. I believed her, my donors believed her, and so they wrote big checks. I just feel like a lot of us were fooled."

After Mr. Trump’s landslide victory in the November 5 election, Democrats began to clash over their strategy and who should be held accountable for the outcome. Some argued that the party did not move left enough, while moderates argued that it moved too far left and scared off more moderate supporters in swing states. Ms. Harris lost all seven battleground states.

Some in the party say Democrats should reboot and start focusing more on messaging and better gauging voter temperature.

Li said that even on election night, she heard Democrats expressing confidence in victory . “I asked them, do you know internal numbers that I don't see, because I study this very carefully and I don't see any basis for that confidence."

Where did it go wrong?

A late start, failure to differentiate herself from Mr. Biden and the loss of key voter groups made a victory for Ms. Harris impossible.

More than two years ago, in 2022, a New York Times poll found that only 26% of Democrats wanted their president, Joe Biden, to represent the party again in the 2024 race. However, after the party's success in the midterm elections that year, Democrats decided to support Biden as their 2024 candidate.

Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign has been riddled with holes.

Biden only dropped out of the race after his unsuccessful debate against Trump in June 2024. Harris had just four months to prepare and run a campaign. Despite some calls for a primary to elect a new face of the party, most influential Democrats – including former President Barack Obama – quickly endorsed Harris.

Ultimately, she was nominated without a primary. Harris thus never competed against other presidential candidates from the same party.

In addition, while the vice president tried to separate her campaign from President Biden's in her campaign message, promising that she would "turn the page" and "not go back," Harris did little to differentiate herself. When asked what she would do differently from Biden over the past four years, Harris once replied, "Nothing has come to mind... but I have been involved in most of the decisions that have had an impact."

Finally, Ms. Harris also lost voters in several key constituencies that had supported the Democrats, losing the support of Arab and Muslim American voters because of the Biden administration's support for Israel's wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

Phuong Anh (Synthesis)

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