Vice President Kamala Harris’ biggest mistake in the 2024 campaign may have occurred in one of the friendliest territories she has visited.

The liberal hosts of the all-female morning show “The View” have been consistent supporters of both Harris and President Joe Biden. None of the questions asked during his appearance on the show October 8 should have made her stumble.

One of them clearly did. Co-host Sunny Hostin asked Harris if she would have “done anything differently” than Biden.

“Nothing comes to mind,” Harris replied. “And I was involved in most of the decisions that had an impact.”

The answer baffled Democratic strategists at the time and continues to do so today. While Harris faced a particularly difficult political environment – ​​voters’ anger over inflation and thirst for change might have been insurmountable no matter what she did – her inability to more clearly separate herself from Biden, embodied by his response on “The View,” stands out. as a key and obvious misstep, according to many Democrats.

“Differentiating yourself from an administration that you’re a part of is hard and you don’t have a lot of time to do it,” said Alyssa Cass, the senior strategist at Blueprint, a Democratic messaging testing project that repeatedlyencouraged Harris to distance herself from Biden. “But if you had a chance to do it, you couldn’t just say, ‘We’re different in terms of our age or where we come from.'”

Harris would later develop a response that showed she was at least prepared for the question, although it never went beyond a vague promise that her perspective, life experiences, and relative youth would make her intrinsically different.

“I represent a new generation of leaders,” she says said Brett Baier of Fox News in an interview on October 16.

And the exchange on “The View” has already provided the Trump campaign with the video clip it needed for the attack ad, “Four more” a 30-second spot that aired a few days later. “Kamala wouldn’t change anything? Their weakness has led to wars and social assistance for illegal immigrants, while Americans struggle,” the narrator said after the clip aired.

The Harris campaign did not respond to HuffPost’s inquiry about how it positioned itself vis-à-vis Biden.

Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative and Democratic strategist close to Harris, said Harris’ approach to Biden came down to personal loyalty to the president.

“She is fiercely loyal. She loves Joe, and Joe loves her,” Sellers said. “She didn’t necessarily see the need to throw him under the bus just for the sake of throwing him under the bus.”

“If loyalty is a negative attribute, so be it,” he added. “We need more of this in American politics.”

When Harris did split from Biden, it was usually by staking more moderate ground on economic policya position that some more populist Democrats say was a mistake due to the influence of Harris’ brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s general counsel. Harris suggested she would not raise taxes on the wealthy as much as Biden had proposed, and avoided discussing her stance on antitrust policy and the fate of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, whose some of his high-profile donors sought to oust him.

Democrats who were critical of Harris’ handling of “The View” question were as dismayed by Harris’ apparent unpreparedness for the line of inquiry as they were by the substance of the response itself.

Brandon Dillon, a Michigan-based Democratic consultant and former chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, believes Harris’ inability to deliver a coherent and compelling economic message to working-class voters was a far bigger problem than her inability to create a sufficient space compared to Biden. Still, he concedes, “it probably wasn’t a very good answer, and it was quite surprising that she didn’t have something prepared for it.”

A Democratic strategist active in congressional races called Harris’ approach to the issue amounting to capitulation.

“Refusing to clearly show how you are different from an unpopular incumbent president in a changeover election where people are unhappy with the direction the country is going is a bit like waving the white flag,” said the strategist, who requested anonymity for professional reasons.

Moderate Harris supporters like Bill Maher, host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” argued before Election Day that Harris should have used questions like the one on “The View” as an opportunity to distancing himself from the administration’s unpopular policies, as the response. to the millions of asylum seekers who will cross the US-Mexico border in 2022 and 2023.

“Next time, maybe try: ‘Joe Biden has generally done a good job, but of course I wish we tightened the border sooner, like we did now.’ And believe me, I learned my lesson, and that will never happen,” Maher said in a October 18 episode of “Real Time”.

Mike Mikus, a Pittsburgh-based Democratic strategist who works closely with unions, has a similar assessment. “She could have easily said, ‘I think we waited too long at the border,'” he said.

Indeed, congressional Democrats who managed to further distance themselves from Biden — either by not serving in his administration or by actively criticizing his approach to immigration or other issues — outperformed Harris in states such as Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona. .

For example, Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona is poised to win an open Senate seat in a state that Harris lost by more than five percentage points. Gallego was a first critic of the Biden administration’s failure to prepare for a surge in asylum seekers after lifting COVID-19-era rules that had made it easier to turn people away.

“I think there are a lot of Democrats who don’t understand that we can be for border security and for immigration reform,” Gallego said in a statement. August interview with Axios where he criticized Biden’s handling of the situation at the border. “Latino voters actually understand this.”

Other Democrats question whether Harris disavowing aspects of the Biden administration’s policy record was worth the risk of Harris simply drawing more attention to her own role in the administration. Harris, after all, was already struggling to explain her responsibility for addressing the root causes of immigration in Central America, which Republicans used to label her as “Biden.” “border tsar”. And there was no written record of Harris criticizing Biden’s policies while she served in his administration.

“The other problem she found herself in was that any criticism of Joe Biden and his administration would be de facto criticism of herself, because she was Joe Biden’s vice president,” said a close Democratic strategist from the Harris campaign who requested anonymity. speak freely. “So she was really in a no-win position as to how to handle Biden. »

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