Prominent election analyst Nate Silver appeared unconvinced after Harris staffers tried to explain away their candidate’s lack of interviews along the 2024 campaign trail.
During a Wednesday appearance on “Pod Save America,” campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon claimed that President-elect Trump got “no sh—” for his small number of traditional media interviews—while Vice President Kamala Harris received significant criticism.
O’Malley Dillon would go on to call the critique a “double standard.”
A transcript of the staffer’s comments quickly drew the attention of Silver—who attempted to throw cold water on the narrative pushed by the Harris campaign.
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“Harris didn’t do a solo network interview until late September. Which who cares, fine, the networks don’t matter so much,” he said. “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 Harris campaign folks are 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 added.
A non-playable character is a video game term that references characters not controllable by the player. Instead, they are directed by software programming.
The Harris campaign aides have faced widespread backlash from both sides of the aisles—with some suggesting they took no accountability in the post-election podcast interview.
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“Pod Save America” host Dan Pfeiffer spoke with O’Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks and Stephanie Cutter in the Harris campaign’s first major interview since the vice president’s loss to President-elect Trump. Online progressives sharply criticized the questioning and the defensive posture by the guests.
The Harris aides complained about media coverage and repeatedly cited their time crunch of just over 100 days to put together a campaign, which was due to President Biden going effectively unchallenged in the Democratic primary and not dropping out until three weeks after a disastrous June debate with Trump.
CNN’s Bakari Sellers, a Harris supporter, said during an interview on the network on Wednesday that the podcast interview was “disappointing at best,” panning “their lack of self-awareness, their lack of self-reflection.”
“It was reminiscent of a Kamala Harris interview: nothing is actually said. No one answers the question. No interview push back,” Tricia McLaughlin, a Republican strategist, wrote of the Harris campaign aides’ interview.
Fox News’ Hanna Panreck contributed to this report.
