Michael Zhang

The blame game has begun inside Harris world. Harris-Walz surrogate @lindyli, a member of the DNC National Finance Committee and PA commissioner tells me: - Tim Walz was a bad choice of running mate, Shapiro would have carried the blue wall states. Li: "People are wondering tonight what would have happened had Shapiro been on the ticket. And not only in terms of Pennsylvania. He's a 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, but she went with someone actually to her left Minnesota....In the eyes of the American people, Walz was the governor who oversaw the protests," - Harris' positions were not clearly staked out: Li: "She knows was 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. That was 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. And she knew that she maybe should have were two things differently when in the next 40 minutes, she said I would appoint a Republican to the cabinet. So she walked that back a little bit." - The focus on fascism was not working: Li: "Future Forward, they were right." - Too many cooks in the kitchen led to muddled campaign messaging, poor staffing decisions in key battlegrounds: Li: "She heard us. We raised serious concerns about the Pennsylvania campaign's leadership. 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 team was expecting a protracted legal fight - even extended hotel rooms for big donors thru Thursday. Now they're going home. Li: "We were expecting Trump to declare victory, you know, regardless of the outcome...we probably can't win at this point just given all the factors"