After former President Donald Trump’s decisive win over Kamala Harris, her campaign team is quickly analyzing what went wrong, with Harris’s vice-presidential pick, Tim Walz, emerging as a key point of contention.
Harris notably overlooked Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a significant figure from the battleground state, as her running mate. Reports suggest Harris may have passed on Shapiro, who is Jewish, to avoid backlash from far-left factions.
“The blame game has begun inside Harris world,” Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich posted to X early Wednesday morning.
Lindy Li, a Harris-Walz supporter and member of the DNC National Finance Committee, told Heinrich that Walz, Minnesota’s governor, was an ineffective choice. She argued that Shapiro might have helped solidify Democratic wins in critical “blue wall” states.
“People are wondering tonight what would have happened had Shapiro been on the ticket,” Li remarked. “And not only in terms of Pennsylvania. He’s 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.”
Li also pointed out that Harris instead selected a running mate positioned further to the left, “who oversaw the protests” in Minnesota. The 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations following George Floyd’s death led to widespread destruction in multiple cities.
Additionally, Walz has faced controversies, including alleged connections with China, accusations of dishonesty, and questions surrounding his military service record.
Li further noted that Harris shifted her stance on several key issues compared to her 2020 campaign but didn’t clearly differentiate herself from President Joe Biden.
“She knows that it was a mistake to say on ‘The View’ that she couldn’t think of a single thing that she would do differently from the Biden administration,” Li told Heinrich. “That was an 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.”
Throughout the campaign, Harris, Democratic leaders, and some media allies reverted to a strategy used in 2016 and 2020, portraying Trump as a fascist and likening him and his supporters to Nazis—a move Li viewed as a misstep.
