Inside The Kamala Harris Campaign: Did A Biden Loyalist Doom Her Presidential Bid?
Harris Was Forced To Run With A Biden Loyalist Who Had Stabbed Her In The Back
It can be hard to get political people to tell the whole truth but when they go off the record, they get really honest. After off the record conversations with five people with direct knowledge of the insides of the Harris campaign, there is a consensus on what really went wrong and the person who may deserve the most blame. The who is Jen O’Malley Dillon, the 48 year-old campaign chair of the Harris campaign. I was told, “She was essentially running the campaign.” The what-went-wrong of it all is obviously multi-faceted but one issue is that Harris was forced to run for the Presidency with a team that was constructed around someone else, Joe Biden, a team that included someone who was such a Biden loyalist that she had leaked negative stories about Harris in an attempt to hurt her political future. That person is Dillon.
In 2023 there were stories in the Washington Post and the LA Times that suggested maybe Harris should not be the VP in 2024. According to several people, those stories were planted by Dillon. Why? Many people said after the 2022 midterms there was considerable chatter in Democratic circles that Biden should step aside and let a primary happen. Some Biden insiders thought it would be helpful to Biden to dampen Harris’s prospects as if that could somehow help boost Biden’s dismal polling. But also, several people said, Dillon just seemed to dislike Harris. “We don't really know why Jen didn't like her,” one of them said. “I don't think she wanted her to be VP. I don't think she really wanted her on that ticket.”