Staffers for Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden are pointing fingers at one another for President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive victory, Axios reported.
“How did you spend $1 billion and not win? What the f—?” a former Biden staffer said of the Harris campaign.
After an unprecedented campaign in which Biden passed the baton to his vice president late in the race, the Democratic Party suffered a crushing defeat that left the GOP in control of the White House, Senate, and, most likely, the House.
In the wake of their defeat, some of Biden’s team are calling out the Harris team for sidelining the president for much of the campaign.
“The Harris team benched [Biden], and then they lost, so now the people who represent Biden are saying, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t have benched him,’” a person familiar with the Biden-Harris inner workings said. He added that some staffers on Biden’s team resent Harris for not using the president more on the campaign trail.
The Harris team, however, blamed the octogenarian president for their loss, arguing his unpopularity and late exit from the race set them up for failure.
“We did what we could. I think the odds against us were insurmountable,” one individual involved with Harris’s team said.
“The 107-day Harris campaign was nearly flawless. The Biden campaign that preceded it was the opposite,” another person involved in the vice president’s campaign told Axios.
Top Harris aide David Plouffe posted on X that the campaign had “dug out of a deep hole” in a jab at Biden’s team. He later deleted his account.
Other aides blamed the Biden administration’s failed economic policies, which became voters’ top issue this election cycle.
“It’s very clear we got it wrong on economic policy. People feel squeezed, and when they do, they pick change. Our policy position and execution wasn’t palpable to voters,” one former Biden administration official said.
“The party was lied to about our candidate, and the leadership who lied were the same ones who never bothered to actually listen to voters and understand what was appealing to them about Trump—or why the Biden economy wasn’t working for them even if it looked good on paper,” another former Biden administration official added.
