President-elect Trump’s historic victory over Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday has surrogates of the Democratic candidate pointing fingers and laying blame for the defeat – even before Harris officially concedes.
Harris-Walz surrogate Lyndi Li spoke to Fox News Senior White House Correspondent Jacqui Heinrich at Howard University, Harris’ alma mater, in Washington, D.C., saying that the Harris team wasn’t “expecting a blowout at all.”
“The blame game has started,” said Li, a member of the DNC National Finance Committee and Pennsylvania commissioner.
Li said that Harris’ pick for vice president, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, may not have been the right choice to carry the “blue wall” states against the Trump-Vance ticket.
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Harris looks at a monitor of the event from backstage, just before taking the stage for her final campaign rally on Monday in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
“One of the things that are top of mind is the choice of Tim Walz as vice presidential candidate,” Li said. “A lot of people are saying tonight that it should have been Josh Shapiro. Frankly, people have been saying that for months.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is being blamed by one surrogate as a possible factor in Harris’ loss to Trump. (AP/Paul Sancya, File)
“I know a lot of people are probably wondering tonight what would have happened had Shapiro been on the ticket,” Li continued. “And not only in terms of Pennsylvania. He’s famously a moderate. So that would have signaled to the American people that she is not the San Francisco liberal that Trump said she was.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro campaigned around the state with Harris to shore up support for the Democratic candidate. (Hannah Beier/Bloomberg via Getty Images, File)
Li added that she was “not sure how much Tim Walz contributed to the ticket” as the campaign was forced into “cleaning up” the governor’s “laundry list” of gaffes.
“In the eyes of the American people, he was the governor who oversaw the protests in Minnesota and probably let it go on longer than he should have. So that has been seared in the minds of American people,” she said.
“And also, ideally, you don’t say on national TV that you’re a knucklehead,” Li said, referring to a moment during the Vice Presidential Debate in which Walz was forced to correct a misstatement that he had been in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989. “I just think that’s his very baseline stuff, like politics 101.”
Harris has yet to address the results of the election as of Wednesday morning. She was expected to speak later in the day. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Li noted that Harris’ attempt to present herself as “a unifier” may have “undermined her goal” of getting Biden supporters “who were maybe still understandably upset that their leader was unceremoniously, basically pushed aside.”
Harris appearance on ABC’s “The View” may also have been a missed opportunity to show how a Harris administration would not have just been a repeat of Biden’s four years, according to Li.
“She knows a mistake was to say on ‘The View’ that she couldn’t think of a single thing that she would do differently from the Biden administration,” Li said. “That was the opener for her to show Americans that she’s going to get tough on the border, that she’s going to take drastic measures to bring down inflation. That was her chance.”
President-elect Trump claimed victory at the Palm Beach Convention Center early Wednesday in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Evan Vucci/AP)
Li also pointed to concerns about the leadership of Harris’ Pennsylvania team making poor staffing decisions that ultimately led to muddled campaign messaging.
“[Harris] heard us. We raised serious concerns about the Pennsylvania campaign’s leadership,” Li said. “She actually installed someone on her own people in the final weeks of the campaign, but I fear it was too late. …We should have people who deeply understand, intimately understand the contours of the state rather than out-of-state operatives who move from campaign to campaign.”
Harris did not speak to supporters who gathered at her alma mater overnight. She is expected to speak later Wednesday.