The TV Moment That Might Have Been Kamala Harris’ Biggest Mistake

Vice President Kamala Harris’ biggest mistake of the 2024 campaign may have come in some of the friendliest territory she visited.

The liberal hosts of the all-female morning talk show “The View” have been consistent boosters of both Harris and President Joe Biden. None of the questions when she appeared on the show on Oct. 8 should have tripped her up.

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

“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris responded. “And I’ve been part of most of the decisions that have had impact.”

The answer baffled Democratic strategists at the time and continues to do so now. While Harris faced a uniquely challenging political environment ― voters’ anger about inflation and hunger for change might have been insurmountable regardless of what she did ― her failure to more clearly separate herself from Biden, embodied by her response on “The View,” stands out as a key and obvious misstep, according to many Democrats.

“Distinguishing yourself from an administration you’re a part of is hard and you don’t have many moments to do it,” said Alyssa Cass, the lead strategist for Blueprint, a Democratic message-testing project that repeatedly encouraged Harris to distance herself from Biden. “But if you had any shot at doing it, you couldn’t just say, ‘We’re different in terms of our age or where we come from.’”

Harris would later develop an answer that showed she was at least prepared for the question, though it never progressed beyond a vague promise that her perspective, life experiences and relative youth would inherently make her different.

“I represent a new generation of leadership,” she told Fox News’ Brett Baier in an Oct. 16 interview.

And the exchange on “The View” already provided the Trump campaign with the video clip it needed for the attack ad, “Four More,” a 30-second spot that went up days later. “Kamala wouldn’t change a thing? Their weakness invited wars, welfare for illegals, while Americans struggle,” the narrator said after the clip appears.

The Harris campaign did not respond to HuffPost’s inquiry about how she positioned herself vis-a-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’s fiercely loyal. She loves Joe, and Joe loves her,” Sellers said. “She didn’t necessarily see the need for throwing him under the bus just for the sake of throwing him under the bus.”

“If it’s a negative attribute to be loyal, then so be it,” he added. “We need more of that in American politics.”

When Harris did break from Biden, it was generally by staking out more moderate ground on economic policy, a stance that some more populist Democrats say was a mistake springing from the influence of Harris’ brother-in-law, Tony West, who is general counsel for Uber. Harris suggested she would not raise taxes on the rich by as much as Biden had proposed, and avoided discussing her position on antitrust policy and the fate of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, whose ouster some of her high-profile donors sought.

Democrats critical of how Harris handled “The View” question were as dismayed by Harris’ apparent lack of preparedness for the line of inquiry as they were by the substance of the answer itself.

Brandon Dillon, a Michigan-based Democratic consultant and former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, believes Harris’ failure to convey a coherent and compelling economic message for working-class voters was a much bigger problem than her inability to create adequate space from Biden. Still, he conceded, “It probably wasn’t a very good answer, and it was kind of surprising that she didn’t have something prepared for that.”

A Democratic strategist active in congressional races characterized Harris’ approach to the issue as tantamount to surrender.

“Declining to make clear how you are different from an unpopular incumbent in a change election where people are unhappy with the direction of the country is kind of 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 distance herself from unpopular administration policies, like the response to the millions of asylum seekers crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in 2022 and 2023.

“Next time, maybe try, ‘Joe Biden generally did a good job, but sure, I wish we tightened the border sooner, as we have done now. And trust me, I learned my lesson, and that’s never going to happen,’” Maher said in an Oct. 18 episode of “Real Time.”

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

Sure enough, congressional Democrats who were able to create more distance from Biden ― either by virtue of not serving in his administration or by actively criticizing his approach to immigration or other topics ― outperformed Harris in states like Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona.

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

“I think there’s a lot of Democrats that don’t understand you can be for border security and for immigration reform,” Gallego said in an 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 disowning 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 tackling root causes of immigration in central America, which Republicans used to characterize her as Biden’s “border czar.” And there was no paper trail of Harris criticizing Biden’s policies while she served in his administration.

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