AMONG DEMOCRATS, POST-HARRIS RECRIMINATIONS HEAT UP. It’s been just three weeks since Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the presidential election. The news has been consumed with Trump’s Cabinet picks and plans for a second administration. But among Democrats, there is more than that to talk about. Recriminations and finger-pointing in the wake of Harris’s loss started on election night, of course, but now, they are rising to a new level.
Democrats are angry about a lot of things. But the three that have attracted some attention in the last few days are 1) the massive amount of money Harris spent and where it went, 2) the campaign role Harris gave to former Rep. Liz Cheney, and 3) the part the media played in Harris’s loss and Trump’s win. All have Democrats nearly gagging in disbelief and, in some cases, anger.
The Harris campaign’s incredible extravagance was first reported by the Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky here. The pace of spending was astonishing — the campaign spent $1.5 billion in a campaign that lasted only 15 weeks. That is $100 million per week, a sum that has campaign experts shaking their heads. Just look at the headline of this New York Times story: “How Kamala Harris Burned Through $1.5 Billion in 15 Weeks; Her frenzied spending has led to second-guessing among some Democrats and questions as she has pressed for more cash since the election.”
Harris spent far more than Trump, with way less bang for the buck. “Despite her significant financial advantage, Ms. Harris became the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose the national popular vote in two decades, ceding every battleground state to Mr. Trump,” the New York Times reported. “Her cash-rich campaign spared no expense as it hunted for voters — paying for an avalanche of advertising, social-media influencers, a for-hire door-knocking operation, thousands of staff, pricey rallies, a splashy Oprah town hall, celebrity concerts and even drone shows.” The money burn made Democrats wonder “whether investing in celebrity-fueled events with stars such as Lady Gaga and Beyonce was more ostentation than effective.”
Harris wrote a seven-figure check to Oprah Winfrey’s company for that town hall-style show. There was a six-figure expenditure to build a set for a podcast. And “around $900,000 to book advertising on the exterior of the Sphere venue in Las Vegas,” according to the New York Times. All this was financed, of course, by a flood of donations from Democrats who wanted to make sure Harris had the resources to defeat Trump. “We had so much money it was hard to get it out the door,” Bakari Sellers, an ally of Harris, told the New York Times.
Now, of course, the reckless spending seems like folly. And bitter feelings follow the realization that it was all for nothing.
Then, there was a certain angry former Republican congresswoman on a vendetta against Trump. Look at this headline from the leftist publication the Nation: “Liz Cheney Was an Electoral Fiasco for Kamala Harris.” In the article, longtime progressive writer and activist John Nichols noted that the stated purpose of enlisting Cheney in the campaign was to win more votes. But beyond the fact that Cheney hated Trump, why did Democratic strategists think adding Cheney would do that?
“Unfortunately, while many Democratic tacticians were enthusiastic about Cheney’s jumping on board as a Harris backer, Republican voters couldn’t have cared less,” Nichols wrote. “The Cheney strategy was an abject failure that added few if any votes to the Democratic total, alienated voters who have no taste for the former GOP representative’s neocon extremism, and stole precious time from an agonizingly short campaign schedule.”
Nichols, based in Wisconsin, went through the cities and towns in the state, large and small, in which Harris could not equal Joe Biden’s performance in 2020. Even in Ripon, the small town known as the birthplace of the Republican Party, where Harris first introduced Cheney as part of her campaign, Trump won more votes than he did in 2020, and Harris won fewer than Biden. The Cheney strategy was a bust. The Harris team miscalculated 1) how many Republicans would choose Trump over figures from the Republican past and 2) how many Democrats really, really don’t like the name Cheney and would not be persuaded by a Cheney’s support — both Liz and former Vice President Dick Cheney voted for Harris — in the showdown with Trump.
So, the recriminations go on. And add one more factor. Some Democrats are becoming angrier and angrier at … the media. All the coverage biased toward Democrats, all the celebrations of Harris, and all the condemnations of Trump — that apparently wasn’t enough. The current idea in Democratic circles is that the liberal media establishment — the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, plus Hollywood, the music industry, and academia — was too timid in reporting on Trump’s liabilities.
You, a member of what used to be called the reality-based community, might think that is crazy. Do they really think that? Yes, they do. In a new piece in the New Republic, longtime lefty journalist Michael Tomasky asked why voters could not see that Trump was so self-evidently horrible and Harris was so good in comparison. “The answer is the right-wing media,” Tomasky said.
“Today, the right-wing media — Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more — sets the news agenda in this country,” Tomasky wrote.
So, who sets the agenda? “Not the New York Times,” Tomasky continued. “Not the Washington Post. … Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake.”
The argument was echoed by the political comedian Jon Stewart, who told Vanity Fair that media outlets on the Democratic side need to get tough. “The media has to work more as a symbiotic organism, in the way that weaponized media does,” Stewart said. “One thing that the right-wing media does really well is work together as a unit.” The premise is, again, that the right-wing phalanx is always marching in formation, while poor little ole liberal outlets such as the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and the broadcast networks are just too small, weak, and dispirited to respond in kind.
Again, this is not a comprehensive list of today’s recriminations inside the Democratic sphere. Overshadowed by the formation of a new Trump administration, the finger-pointing is far more widespread than this newsletter has suggested. And it might well worsen when Trump takes power and Democrats fully realize what they have lost.