Democrats Begged Team Kamala Harris Not to Campaign With Liz Cheney

www.rollingstone.com Dem Insiders Begged Team Harris Not to Campaign With Liz Cheney

Democratic operatives say they told the Harris campaign appealing to Republicans wouldn’t win her votes — and could turn off disaffected Democrats.

It's literally 2016 but worse somehow.

One source close to the Harris campaign tells Rolling Stone they reached out to several staffers in and around the campaign to voice concerns about the candidate embracing Dick and Liz Cheney.

“People don’t want to be in a coalition with the devil,” says the source, speaking about Dick Cheney. They say a Harris staffer responded that it was not the staff’s role to challenge the campaign’s decisions.

A Democratic strategist says they warned key Harris surrogates and top-level officials at the Democratic National Committee that campaigning with Liz Cheney — and making the campaign’s closing argument about how many Republicans were supporting Harris — was highly unlikely to motivate any new swing voters, and risked dissuading already-despondent, infrequent Democratic voters who had supported Biden in 2020. The strategist says they also attempted to have big donors and battleground state party chairs convey the same argument to the Harris campaign.

Another Democratic operative close to Harrisworld says they sent memos and data to Harris campaign staffers underscoring how, among other things, Republican voters, believe it or not, vote Republican — and that the data over the past year screamed that Democrats instead needed to reassure and energize the liberal base and Dem-leaning working class in battleground states. “We were told, basically, to get lost, no thank you,” says the operative.

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180 comments

I recall reading early on that DNC campaign advisers were recommending against continuing with the "weird" rhetoric, and the article mentioned some specific people who had worked on the 2016 campaign. It floored me that those people still had jobs. I guess they got their way eventually. I now have no expectation that they won't be doing the same shit in 2028.

DNC Leadership would rather lose with a neoliberal candidate than win with a progressive one.

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You know you're cooked when Bill Kristol is going around like, "Hey, shouldn't you be running a more progressive campaign to turn out more voters?"

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It only makes sense if you assume the Harris campaign was trying to lose, like in The Producers.

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The idea that democrats would abandon their base and try to flip republicans was idiotic beyond belief. The exit polls show that practically no republicans were swayed by this, as anybody with a functioning brain could've told the democrats. What they ended up doing was to alienate and demoralize the people who might've showed up to vote for them while having no impact on the republican vote.

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I'm really curious as to whose colossally dumb idea it was to campaign with Liz fucking Cheney?

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I agree, it was a colossal mistake for Harris to try and win over GOPers. But Harris’s policies remained those I listed.

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Let’s see, so we’re blaming Biden for stepping aside too late, his advisors for not encouraging him to step aside, the DNC for not holding a second primary, and Harris for trying to get voters by reaching across the aisle.

Let’s for once try Occam’s Razor.

Can we just accept that more than half the ~~nation is~~ voters are racist, sexist, and bigoted, or at a minimum comfortable supporting racism, sexism, and bigotry? Because that’s the simplest explanation.

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I don't know, y'all can point fingers in every direction, but the fact is - those voters who didn't show up to vote, voted 3rd party, or voted Republican knew who Trump is and what the outcome would be. Project 2025 was laid out in full right in front of us. We all saw his previous 4 years in office. We saw the repeal of Roe with a majority court. These (potential) voters just don't care about progress or people and want to speed up the burning of Rome. US Presidential elections have been binary in everyone's lifetime here.

There's no excuse other than simply "I don't care" regardless of which excuse you want to pick from the box. The House, Senate, and Supreme Court are all lost - they have absolute free reign to do whatever they want in the next 4 years. The best case scenario is that it's not as bad as last time. The worst case scenario is the US becomes reclusive, regressive, and more corrupt akin to other dictator run countries. Just like those other dictator run countries, in the worst case scenario, there will be no revolution if/when things go "too far" because they hold the power and have the support to stomp down any opposition to dust.

It's certainly a sad state of affairs, and in no sane world should DJT have won a 2nd term, but here we are, watching the circus erect their tents while we whisper in the stands.

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I had no issue with Harris campaigning with Cheney. Cheney and I disagree on 99% of things, but we agreed that Trump is a corrupt piece of shit. Cheney and Kinzinger sacrificed the easy Republican win to go against Trump. As did Romney to a slightly lesser extent.

To me campaigning with Cheney was a way to signal to dissatisfied Trump Republicans that an alternative exists. That your could vote for Harris and still be a capital R Republican.

I've met (e.g. was raised by) these people. I thought it was a large part of the voting population.

Clearly I was fucking wrong. Clearly this was a niche. But I understood the strategy. I see people complaining that Harris moved too far to the right but I can't think of a single right wing policy she picked up. Sure she picked up/was always following neoliberal policy, which aligns with neocon policy, but that was a given. We already had Biden, Harris was an extra step towards progressive, but not a leap. In either case I was happy enough.

Suffice to say I don't buy the argument that Cheney cost Harris any voters.

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God I am so tired of the post-mortems already. everyone is so obsessed to find the one little things that they did wrong. What was the one weird trick that could have shown america the correct path.

This time it was beyond obvious. This country simply wanted a rapist, a criminal, they wanted a man who praises dictators and has proclaimed that he is going to be one (good luck with that 1 day thing). Enough Americans looked at the two choices and the majority of this country decided to give fascism a try.

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