By New York Post (U.S.) | Created at 2024-11-28 19:48:15 | Updated at 2024-11-28 21:28:20
1 hour ago
Data journalist Nate Silver criticized top aides to Vice President Kamala Harris as “non-player characters with no will of their own” after they appeared to shirk blame for the Democrat’s disastrous election loss.
Silver reacted on X to an interview that “Pod Save America” conducted with Harris campaign officials including Jen O’Malley Dillon and Stephanie Cutter, who insisted that the Democratic nominee granted interviews to the press after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race this past summer.
President-elect Donald Trump’s resounding victory earlier this month has Democrats and their supporters second-guessing Harris’ strategy, which was to largely shun media interviews in the initial stages of her campaign — only to pivot once she realized that she was losing ground in public opinion polls.
When Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama official and “Pod Save America” host commented that Harris “did more traditional media” than President-elect Donald Trump, Cutter, a senior adviser to Harris, agreed, saying: “Trump did none.”
“And got no sh-t for that,” O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair, said.
“We got sh-t,” O’Malley Dillon said. “I’m saying Trump got no sh-t.”
Cutter agreed, saying: “Oh, yes. We got tons of sh-t that she wasn’t doing enough media.”
Pfeiffer concurred, adding: “He got no sh-t.”
O’Malley Dillon decried what she called a “double standard.”
“Like, don’t even get me going on that,” Cutter said.
Silver, however, wasn’t having any of it, writing on X: “Harris didn’t do a solo network interview 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. That was the campaign’s choice, not some conspiracy,” the founder of the 538 prognostication and data news site wrote.
Silver described Harris campaign officials as “the most non-agentic people I’ve encountered in a position of comparable decision-making authority.”
“They don’t even see themselves as victims so much as Non-Player Characters with no will of their own,” he wrote.
Silver also reacted to a comment from O’Malley Dillon in which she lamented the fact that the Harris campaign had “two weeks f–ked up because of the hurricane.”
“There’s a lot going on here and whole thing worth reading but the idea the hurricane was some massive October surprise that specifically disadvantaged Harris is just so weird,” Silver wrote, noting that the states affected by the storm were easily won by Trump.
“Relatively speaking, NC/GA even showed less vote swing than other swing states.”
O’Malley Dillon and Cutter were not immediately available for comment.
