Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) argued that former Vice President Kamala Harris was unable to distance herself from the “status quo” in the 2024 election, which ultimately cost her the victory against President Donald Trump.
Schiff was asked if he felt that former President Joe Biden’s aides and advisers had misled voters on Biden’s capacity to continue serving as president, as the former president suspended his reelection bid in July — just over 100 days before Election Day. In response, the senator contended he could only answer based on his own interactions with the president but that Biden made “the right decision” to withdraw from the race against Trump.
“The vice president — as the vice president, I think, ran a great campaign — but could not run away from being a representative of the status quo,” Schiff assessed on NBC’s Meet the Press. “And the fact is that people are hurting, and have been hurting for a long time. This is a, frankly, decades-in-the-making problem where people are working harder than ever and still can’t get by. What Donald Trump is doing right now is making that so much worse, but we have to address it.”
Schiff added that the current state of the U.S. economy and the Democratic Party’s “failure” to address it cost them the White House last year. He also predicted it would cost the Republican Party to lose control of Congress in the future, noting that “both parties” would have to address this issue.
The senator also contended that Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) had a point in giving Trump “a lane” in the country, as the Democratic Party was not “thinking big” or “acting big” when it had control of the White House. He argued that the Trump administration is able to move the country “far and fast” if one is bold enough, and that Democrats were not bold enough in its own ideas.
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Going forward, Schiff pointed to the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election as a shot-in-the-arm for the Democratic Party, and that the focus needs to be “pushing hard” on its own ideas to voters.
Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), Harris’s 2024 running mate, contended that Trump was able to identify the “angst” that voters had ahead of the election, adding that he is “very concerned with the folks who stayed home.” The governor also said that while Democrats do well in off-year and special elections, the voting group for presidential elections is “different.”