Politico Playbook has a fascinating batch of memos that our sister site Townhall has reported on from a Democratic operative giving the Kamala Harris team some confidential advice. The problem was that Harris didn’t take the advice or couldn’t pull off what they were suggesting.
I wrote earlier about the backstory behind her bad judgment in picking Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as a running mate. That’s from the new book, “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and Democrats Lost America.”
READ MORE: New Book Reveals the Backstory on Harris Picking Walz – It’s As Bad As You Would Think
The memos are revealed in the book.
The Kamala Harris campaign was presented with a series of memos in its final stages setting out a clear strategy for winning over independent and “soft” Republican votes — but chose a strikingly different path, a new book out today on the 2024 campaign reveals.
The confidential documents, written in the final weeks of the campaign by Dem official Maria Comella, warned the current strategy was not working. “It doesn’t give reason to vote for Harris,” she said in one of a series of memos to campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon. Comella encouraged Harris to appeal to Republicans by differentiating herself from President Joe Biden and acknowledging where the Democratic Party had been wrong, such as “missing the mark” on urban crime, transitioning too quickly to electric cars and neglecting border security.
And there’s more: The memos urged Harris to get herself onto the Joe Rogan podcast, and warned her not to make Jan.6 the final focus of her campaign with a speech at the Ellipse. (So much, as they say, for that).
So what did she do? Pretty much the exact opposite. Now, admittedly, it’s difficult to paint herself as the “change candidate” as one memo suggested she do, when she’s the one who has been in power for four years. But she never differentiated herself from Joe Biden or admitted any of their many, many mistakes.
Matt Vespa at Townhall cited an instructive part of one of the memos that advised Harris to go on Joe Rogan’s show and acknowledge where their focus should have been.
– Admit the Biden administration should have focused on border security from day one.
Don’t waste time defending what has happened. Acknowledging what people feel about this
(even if the reality is more complicated) allows you to look forward.
– Messaging:
– Looking back it’s clear that…the Biden administration was too slow to recognize and get ahead of the problem. We should have been focused on the border from day one.
She certainly didn’t acknowledge their failure at the border — one of the few things that she was supposed to be involved in. So people naturally would figure: Why should we vote for the same mistakes?
One memo warned about the use of celebrities and Never Trump people. So what did she do, but hang out with Liz Cheney and Beyonce.
She also never offered any concrete plans on the issues that truly concerned people like the economy. She never seemed to get beyond attacking President Donald Trump. And that didn’t satisfy people who wanted answers.
Encouraging her to go on Joe Rogan’s show was a smart idea to reach people, but given how she wasn’t able to even enunciate basic policy in a controlled situation, how would she ever have handled a freewheeling conversation like he has on his show? That ultimately was the problem here. You can give her good ideas, but if she can’t pull it off, they’re not going to help, she’s just going to sound like a struggling robot, and that was the problem. She ultimately didn’t do the interview.
You can check out the memos: memo 1, memo 2, memo 3, and memo 4.
Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.
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