Polling pundit Nate Silver ripped senior advisers to Kamala Harris’ failed presidential bid on Wednesday after a former top campaign official claimed that there was a “double standard” for the vice president and Donald Trump when it came to their media strategies.
“The Harris campaign folks are the most non-agentic people I’ve encountered in a position of comparable decision-making authority,” wrote Silver, founder of the polling analysis website FiveThirtyEight, in a post to X (formerly Twitter).
“They don’t even see themselves as victims so much as Non-Player Characters with no will of their own.”
Former Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, in an interview on “Pod Save America” that aired earlier this week, declared that the president-elect “got no shit” for doing less “traditional media” appearances than Harris.
O’Malley Dillion — who was joined by fellow advisers from the campaign David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks and Stephanie Cutter — later claimed that Harris, “got shit” for her approach compared to Trump.
Silver took to X on Wednesday to note that Harris didn’t do a solo network TV interview as a candidate until late September.
“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,” he added.
“That was the campaign’s choice, not some conspiracy.”
Silver, who has called on President Joe Biden to resign and claimed that he did Harris “no favors” after he dropped out of the 2024 race, joined a number of critics who have knocked the advisers’ post-election analysis.
Astead Herndon, a political reporter for The New York Times, got into it on X with “Pod Save America” host and former Barack Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau after he referred to a clip from the podcast episode as a “good ad for the importance of independent media.”
Wilmington College political history professor Keith Orejel also went after Plouffe, a former campaign manager to Obama’s 2008 presidential bid, for urging Democrats to “dominate the moderate vote” in remarks on the podcast.
“We are listening to someone talk about how to win an election that they literally just lost,” he wrote on X.
CNN’s Bakari Sellers told CNN that the podcast was “disappointing at best” as he heard the ex-campaign officials’ “lack of self-awareness” and self-reflection.
“So I think everybody needs to take a moment of self-reflection, including myself, to figure out how we can get better for 2025,” said Sellers on Wednesday.
“People are talking about 2028. If we get smacked in 2025, in New Jersey and Virginia, then you blow it up. But until then, people just need to stop wanting to hear themselves talk.”