Holy Smokes. I knew it was bad, but this bad?

A few choice quotes:

1. Sounds like Harris really took the urban and black vote for granted...

in Philadelphia, many of the field offices “were filthy and lacked basic supplies like tables, chairs, cleaning products and printers, staff members said,” with city campaign staffers “being forced to raid the campaign’s better-stocked suburban offices or to raise money independently.” That is when they even had field offices, and in many predominantly Black neighborhoods “campaign staff members were operating out of public parks, grocery-store parking lots and church basements.”

Even when there were T-shirts, they could be slapdash (one box of them said “Harriz-Walz”). A “get-out-the-vote bus tour for [Pennsylvania’s] Black mayors” had its funding pulled without explanation. The head of a pro-Harris group “recounted frantic campaign staff members in Philadelphia, Detroit and North Carolina calling him in the final weeks of the race to say they did not have enough money to provide food or water to volunteers.”

In Georgia, a county party chair “said the Harris campaign’s get-out-the-vote operation had been nonexistent, even as he had pleaded for resources.” Black staff members reportedly felt that the Black vote was being taken for granted, and when they aired their complaints in a post-election call, Harris’s deputy campaign manager “told staff members that talking to the press would ruin their career prospects.

1. Lavish spending with little substance

“paying for an avalanche of advertising, social-media influencers, a for-hire door-knocking operation, thousands of staff, pricey rallies, a splashy Oprah town hall, celebrity concerts and even drone shows.”

“the campaign spent around $900,000 to book advertising on the exterior of the Sphere venue in Las Vegas.” YouTube host Roland Martin received $350,000 from the campaign for a “media buy,” at least part of which appeared to consist of an interview on his show that racked up under 130,000 views.

Democratic megadonor John Morgan says that consultants saw the giant pool of money as being like getting the “keys to the candy store,” and concludes that much of the money was essentially stolen, albeit legally.

Harris made the same error that Hillary Clinton did in 2016, deploying resources in states like Texas that she was clearly not going to win that could have instead been used in states she desperately needed to win. “We spent money in stupid ways because we had a really bad strategy,” a former DNC consultant told Puck. They even bought an expensive TV ad in Florida, a state Harris knew she wouldn’t win, just to “troll” Donald Trump.

Other aspects make the Harris campaign look like little more than a multi-level marketing scheme. For instance, they spent “$111 million in online ads seeking donations,” in other words ads asking for money to pay for more ads asking for money!

The article is pretty scathing, worth reading. Don't give money to grifters.

#harriswalz2024 #uspol #uspolitcs #harris #democrats #democraticparty #dnc

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