Polling pundit Nate Silver on Wednesday ripped former members of Kamala Harris’ campaign after they claimed that there was a “double standard” for the media strategies employed by the vice president and Donald Trump, who beat Harris in this year’s presidential race.
“The Harris campaign folks are the most non-agentic people I’ve encountered in a position of comparable decision-making authority,” wrote Silver, the founder of the polling analysis website FiveThirtyEight, in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
“They don’t even see themselves as victims so much as Non-Player Characters with no will of their own,” he added, using video game terminology.
On a podcast episode released earlier this week, Jen O’Malley Dillon, the former Harris campaign chair, had said that Trump “got no shit” for making relatively few appearances in traditional media during the White House race.
O’Malley Dillon also claimed on “Pod Save America” that unlike Trump, Harris “got shit” for her media approach.
On X, Silver said that as a candidate, “Harris didn’t do a solo network interview until late September.”
He added: “Which who cares, fine, the networks don’t matter so much. Then she did a bunch toward the end of the race. But she was legit not doing a lot of traditional media. That was the campaign’s choice, not some conspiracy.”
Silver, who has called on President Joe Biden to resign and claimed that Biden did Harris “no favors” in this year’s presidential race, joined a number of critics who knocked her campaign team’s postelection analysis.
Wilmington College academic Keith Orejel went after David Plouffe, an adviser to the Harris campaign who also appeared on “Pod Save America,” for urging Democrats to “dominate the moderate vote” in his remarks on the podcast.
“We are listening to someone talk about how to win an election that they literally just lost,” Orejel wrote on social media.
Astead Herndon, a reporter for The New York Times, said the “Pod Save America” episode would be a “good ad for the importance of independent media.”
CNN commentator Bakari Sellers said that the episode was “disappointing at best,” pointing to the ex-campaign officials’ “lack of self-awareness.”
“I think everybody needs to take a moment of self-reflection, including myself, to figure out how we can get better for 2025,” Sellers said on Wednesday, adding that “people just need to stop wanting to hear themselves talk.”