Via The Independent: Democratic strategists say their warnings about having Harris campaign with Liz Cheney were ignored.
Democratic strategists are now saying they warned key Harris backers and top executives at the Democratic National Committee that campaigning with Liz Cheney and making their closing argument about how many former Republicans were supporting Harris was a bad strategy.
“People don’t want to be in a coalition with the devil,” a source told Rolling Stone, referencing Dick Cheney, Liz’s father, who many Democrats despise from his time in the White House.
This kind of stuff amuses and annoys me for any number of reasons.
First, it strikes me as highly, highly unlikely this mattered on a mass level. Moreover, it is entirely possible it attracted some voters while it repelled others.
Second, so many people (especially pundits) love to argue that politicians need to be more “bipartisan” and to “appeal to the median voter.” It is all so lazy and silly to me.
Third, guess what? Most people were not paying attention to Liz Cheney (or to a lot of things Trump surrogates were saying and doing) in the waning days of the campaign.
I suppose the main thing I don’t like about this kind of reporting/”analysis” is that it presupposes that an electoral outcome is simply about how calibrated a campaign is. As if saying this word to that audience on one day versus another or that a specific endorsement/campaign event all mixed together is what determines the outcome.
I still think that if you are going to look for specific reasons, it has more to do with resentment over inflation and the election as part of a striking global trend. If that is the case, I am not sure what Harris, or any member of the Democratic Party, could have done to win. It certainly doesn’t boil down to Cheneys.
And let me note: I can understand why there were objections to the embrace of the Cheneys. But there i a pretty good argument for trying to create a cross-partisan, pro-democracy argument. Of course, on a broader scale, the situation of Liz Cheney underscores the core problem of our binary politics. She is rejected by her old party as being a traitor for going over to the other side, while she is not fully trying to be a Democrat, either. Again, it is a shame we don’t have a multi-party system, where she could go and then alliances between parties would have different resonances than the traitor/untrustworthy semi-defector dynamic we currently have.
