Democrats are facing a painful reckoning over Kamala Harris’s drubbing at the hands of Donald Trump in the United States (U.S.) presidential election, as shock gives way to anger and recrimination in the aftermath of a devastating repudiation.
Lawmakers and strategists looking for someone to blame for Tuesday’s wipeout have so far been more likely to target President Joe Biden than Harris, who is regarded as having done a decent job with the short time she had to campaign, according to Punch.
The election night disaster, Trump’s triumph was accompanied by a Republican “red wave” in the Senate, has proved to be a Rorschach test, with rival factions each offering reasons for the defeat informed by their particular brand of Democratic politics.
The circular firing squad began with progressive senator Bernie Sanders arguing in a scathing statement that a party that had forsaken the working class should not be surprised to “find that the working class has abandoned them.”
That prompted an angry rebuke from Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison, who dismissed Sanders’s thesis as “straight up BS” and posted a long list of Biden’s achievements for low income families.
New York congressman Ritchie Torres hit out at what he sees as smug political correctness on the left, insisting that Trump had “no greater friend” than activists alienating voters with “absurdities like ‘Defund the Police’… or ‘Latinx.’”
Harris has escaped the harshest criticism, as she is regarded as having had insufficient time to campaign thanks to Biden’s initial insistence on running again at 81, despite having promised to be a bridge to the next generation.
The ageing president’s sluggishness in bowing out after a disastrous debate performance against Trump deepened the challenge, as Harris had to start her campaign in July as a relative unknown, despite being the vice president.
Billionaire former Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg, who feels that Biden’s campaign should never have gotten as far as the June 27 debate, attacked the president’s team in a commentary for Bloomberg for covering up his shortcomings “until they became undeniable on live TV.”
Other Democrats blamed the ongoing economic reverberations of the coronavirus pandemic, which caused governments to fall across the globe amid anger over soaring inflation.
Biden himself heaped praise on his vice president in a televised White House address Thursday.
“She gave her whole heart and effort, and she and her entire team should be proud of the campaign they ran,” he told the nation.
While there is little she could have done about post-pandemic price hikes, many congressional Democrats told reporters behind the scenes that Harris’s team overestimated abortion access as an election winner and dropped the ball on the economy.
Another criticism is that Harris failed to distance herself from Biden once she was handed the torch, despite his approval ratings being underwater at 40 per cent.
This was exemplified in her answer that “not a thing comes to mind” when she was asked on a daytime talk show how she might have governed differently from her boss.
