‘That’s good, you all pass,’ said MSNBC moderator Jonathan Capehart
Candidates to lead the Democratic National Committee unanimously agreed at a forum Thursday that Kamala Harris lost the November election in part due to “racism and misogyny.”
Eight candidates gathered at Georgetown’s Institute of Politics and Public Service for a final forum before DNC members vote for a new chair on Saturday. The MSNBC anchors who moderated the event, which was interrupted repeatedly by climate change protesters, peppered the candidates with a series of litmus tests throughout the forum, including whether they would commit to appointing more transgender officials at the DNC or creating a subcommittee for Muslims.
“How many of you believe that racism and misogyny played a role in VP Harris’s defeat?” MSNBC anchor Jonathan Capehart, a co-moderator of the event, asked the candidates.
All eight contenders quickly shot up their hands in agreement, with Ben Wikler, one of the frontrunners, narrowly beating other candidates to the punch. Quintessa Hathaway, the only black woman in the race, ended up raising both hands in response to Capehart’s query.
“That’s good, you all pass,” Capehart said after the show of hands.
Their assessment of Harris’s loss contrasts with most post-election polls—and even senior Harris campaign officials—that show Harris’s weakness as a candidate and voters’ discontent with the economy and direction of the country were the main reasons the electorate voted for President Donald Trump.
The candidate forum proved chaotic, mirroring the disarray that Democrats have been in since the dramatic losses in November. Protesters derailed the event at least five times, yelling at candidates about climate change. It sparked an outburst from MSNBC host Symone Sanders, a forum co-moderator.
“We are going to ask the questions from this stage. We’ll ask that you please take a seat,” Sanders shouted at a protester from Sunrise Movement, a climate change group.
Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, and Ken Martin, who leads the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, are considered the frontrunners of the race. The winner will take over for Jamie Harrison, the former Senate candidate from South Carolina who spent $100 million in 2022 in a race he lost by 10 points to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.).
Harrison told the Associated Press on Thursday the party should have stuck with Biden, but that Harris would have likely performed better if she’d had more time to campaign.
“That’s my normal default, is that you stick by your people, right, particularly people who have worked hard on behalf of the party.”
“Had [Harris] had more runway, it would have been probably easier for her and for the campaign. We were building a race for Joe Biden,” he said.
