Question: Where did Kamala Harris spend the billion dollars that she raised? It wasn’t used to build out a winning ground game, that’s for certain.
Of the many storylines exiting Tuesday’s election that returned Donald Trump to the White House in a blowout victory, few are as tantalizing as why Harris performed so poorly with every demographic imaginable.
You may have seen this clip already, but it’s worth replaying to set the context for the topic.
On CNN’s election night coverage, John King and Jake Tapper were having a jolly time playing with the big board of election info. At one point, Tapper asks King to show him counties where Harris overperformed Joe Biden. The resulting map? A big fat nothing burger of failure:
“Literally nothing” should have been Harris’s campaign slogan from day one. No ideas, no discernable policies, no real considered opinions on anything, literally nothing.
How did Democrats end up in a situation where they fell so badly from 2020 other than the obvious reasons? As noted, Harris spent a reported $1.4 billion whereas the Trump campaign spent a fraction of that total with obviously better returns:
In a record-setting election season, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, spent nearly $1.4 billion on political ads in their bid for the White House, according to a report from ad analytics firm AdImpact. This staggering figure means that the Harris-Walz campaign, along with Democratic allies, outspent former President Donald Trump and Republicans by almost $460 million, as per a Fox News report.
In short, the Harris ground game and momentum game was a mirage from the first day Biden was put down as the nominee and the Vice President was installed. She had no real following or constituency other than the Democratic Party base that will vote for any breathing thing with a D next to the name. She was uninspiring and underwhelming as a speaker or a leader, and the list could go on and on.
The truth is in the results, but it’s pretty clear the money flowing into the Harris campaign and adjoining groups was not being well-spent or well-managed. One example from the days leading up to Election Day paints a story of consultants getting wealthy without a single attempt to sway any votes toward Harris, as investigative reporter Lee Fang writes on Substack:
Democratic donors were spammed by text yesterday to donate to a political action committee called “Pro-Choice Majority 2024” throughout the election. The urgent demand for donations continued even moments before polls closed.
”So our generous donors UNLOCKED a 400%-MATCH on all donations to Pro-Choice Majority to help DEFEAT Trump & SAVE reproductive rights!”
The alarmist messages puzzled at least one recipient, who forwarded the fundraising demands. How could this PAC use money to defeat Trump on Election Day when voting was virtually over?
Pro-Choice Majority 2024’s website urges donations but provides no information on its leadership or origins or even a landing page with how to contact the group.
The donation demands to tip the balance of the presidential race appear to have been a bait and switch to fool donors. Pro-Choice Majority 2024, formed in January of this year, raised over $3.6 million yet spent most of its funds on a group of consultants and fundraisers. Federal Election Commission records show that the group spent zero dollars on independent expenditures opposing Trump or supporting the Harris campaign. The group did not make any transfers to the Harris campaign, either.
Instead, much of the group’s funds flowed to Mothership Strategies, a D.C. firm founded in 2015 by former Democratic Party staffers.
Consultants, staffers, and everyone around Harris was rolling in the dough without doing much to get voters to the polls on Election Day.
The result, as Jake Tapper and John King found, was “literally not one county” on the map where Kamala Harris outperformed Joe Biden compared to 2020.
You’d think somewhere she might make inroads, but the empty map is quite literally a wake-up call that Harris always was and always will be a third-rate politician swinging way above her batting average.
Even though Harris was handed the nomination and given a head-start in fundraising, her campaign is looking to point fingers and it’s Joe Biden getting the blame, according to Politico:
Democrats are directing their rage over losing the presidential race at Joe Biden, who they blame for setting up Kamala Harris for failure by not dropping out sooner.
They say his advancing age, questions over his mental acuity and deep unpopularity put Democrats at a sharp disadvantage. They are livid that they were forced to embrace a candidate who voters had made clear they did not want — and then stayed in the race long after it was clear he couldn’t win.
“He shouldn’t have run,” said Jim Manley, a top aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “This is no time to pull punches or be concerned about anyone’s feelings. He and his staff have done an enormous amount of damage to this country.”
According to interviews with nearly a dozen officials and party operatives, Biden squandered valuable months only to end in disaster on the debate stage. And by the time he decided to pass the torch, he had saddled Harris with too many challenges and far too little time to build a winning case for herself.
Newsflash, the same people complaining about Joe Biden now were the ones propping him up his entire presidency. They were all in on the lie and they got burned in the end.
Americans in general, including many Democrats, did not appreciate Kamala Harris being shoved down their throats as a fill-in for the deteriorating Joe Biden. Democrats put themselves in a no-win situation with no real options for success against a stronger-than-ever Trump campaign with a united GOP.
In the end, Harris got destroyed in every swing state and lost Nevada to a Republican for the first time since 2004. Let the party soul-searching commence.
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