Harris campaign leadership urges staffers not to speak with reporters: Sources
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(WASHINGTON, D.C.) — During an all-staff call earlier this week, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign leadership urged staffers not to speak with reporters and addressed concerns about the future after her loss to Donald Trump in the election, two people on the call told ABC News.
Campaign Chair Jennifer O’Malley Dillon and Deputy Campaign Manager Quentin Fulks implored staffers not to speak with reporters, with Fulks saying they still needed staffers “staying in this fight.”
One source noted that the call gave the same “gaslighty” feeling they received after President Joe Biden left the race in July. In an all-staff call following Biden’s departure from the race, staffers were caught off guard and were only given a one-minute heads up that he was exiting the race before he made it public.
ABC News has reached out to the Harris campaign for comment on the matter.
During the call, O’Malley Dillon told staffers that they ran a “very close” race. She said that state teams knocked on more than 50 million doors in the final days before Election Day and their field operation helped the Senate races in those states. O’Malley Dillon teared up toward the end of the call, a source confirmed.
Harris spoke on that call, noting that this moment “sucks,” a source told ABC News.
“We all just speak truth, why don’t we, right? There’s also so much good that has come of this campaign,” Harris said, according to the source.
Harris had a hopeful tone in her message to supporters at Howard on Wednesday, too, saying “sometimes the fight takes a while. … The important thing is don’t ever give up.”
During the call, leadership spoke about the next general steps for staffers and connecting with people for their next jobs.
Last month on the show, when asked what she would have done differently than Biden over the last four years, Harris said, “there is not a thing that comes to mind,” before citing, much later in the interview, her pledge to put a Republican in her Cabinet.
(WASHINGTON) — For the first time in four years, Democrats are leaderless. But chaos is a ladder, as the saying goes, and the party is packed with climbers.
Democrats are still sifting through the rubble of last week’s election results, and many said that a period of grieving and soul-searching is due after Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss. But over a dozen operatives said that the leadership vacuum fueled by her defeat will attract members of the party’s deep bench who likely won’t wait long to cast themselves as the messenger Democrats need to bounce back ahead of the 2028 election.
“I have not seen any outreach from the national party to folks for 2028. I think they’re too busy playing the blame game, they’re too busy knifing each other,” said one person who has spoken to multiple potential 2028 candidates. “In terms of donors reaching out to their candidate of choice, that has been never ending over the course of the last four or five days. And then there’s a lot of local outreach to people.”
Democrats boast several governors, senators, House members and more rumored to have national ambitions.
Among them are California Gov. Gavin Newsom; Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker; Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear; Maryland Gov. Wes Moore; Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer; North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper; Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro; Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock; New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker; Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman; California Rep. Ro Khanna; and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, her running mate, could also play some role in guiding the party, though it’s unclear how much of an appetite there is in the party to allow the bench to take on a supporting role to members of the losing ticket.
Already, the jockeying is underway, albeit not yet in full force.
Shapiro has received calls from Democrats in his state, a source familiar with the matter confirmed, as has Beshear, who also wrote a New York Times op-ed examining his party’s woes. Newsom held a call with his grassroots donor network and is set to be a top Trump antagonist, and Khanna is mulling a media blitz and listening tour to areas that have borne the brunt of deindustrialization, sources familiar with their thinking said.
Buttigieg has traversed the country touting the administration’s infrastructure achievements, often goes behind enemy lines to appear on Fox News and moved his residency to Michigan, which has an open gubernatorial race in two years. Fetterman has been vocal about what he calls his party’s disconnect from working-class voters.
All have some kind of argument, whether it’s a blue-collar appeal the party has been missing, proven electoral experience in red or purple areas, or something else, and most hit the campaign trail for Harris this year. More maneuvering is expected to come, especially once Trump takes office and his policies go into effect, likely galvanizing Democrats’ base.
“I think that what you’ll probably see beginning in January, is people who are at least considering being candidates come out with really detailed, expansive programs. Some may be about jobs, some may be about education, some may be about who knows what else. But it will probably be policy-based,” said Dan Fee, a Democratic strategist and donor adviser based in Pennsylvania.
“I think you’re going to see a lot of a lot of governors and a lot of other folks do the speaking circuit thing, be going to events, certainly heading into ’26, you’re going to see a lot of people endorsing folks,” added one senior Democratic strategist, referencing the 2026 midterms.
There is no clear frontrunner in the beefy field, but some did see their personal stock rise during the Biden administration or as the result of the election.
Newsom, in particular, could benefit, given that his California roots and political base overlapped significantly with Harris’. But Buttigieg also boasts a beefier resume after four years in President Joe Biden’s Cabinet, Shapiro and Beshear were vetted as part of Harris’ veepstakes, and many hit the trail — especially to the early primary state of New Hampshire — throughout the year, helping them building relationships with local groups and voters.
Still, anything can happen in four years.
Republicans, not too long ago, were walking in the political wilderness themselves after President Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, sparking a famed autopsy. Four years later, now-President-elect Donald Trump won his first term, ushering in two years of unified Republican control but a series of fits ever since over the identity of the party and how much it should hew to his brand.
Democrats too were on a high after Biden’s win in 2020, a euphoria reinforced after the party defied the odds in the 2022 midterms to expand its Senate majority and limit its House losses. Now, they’re conducting a postmortem of their own.
What’s more, positioning oneself for higher office is more art than science. Appearing too eager risks turning off voters, while not stepping on the gas hard enough risks ceding ground to other aspirants.
But promoting oneself isn’t the only way to improve one’s standing amid the jockeying, and operatives predicted that the knives will be out.
“I think the [opposition research] books are probably already being built,” said the operative who has spoken to multiple potential 2028 candidates.
For all the preparation, though, would-be party leaders can’t make themselves so just by themselves. And party donors may not quite be ready to indulge a 2028 free-for-all as it analyzes its 2024 loss, especially after Harris’ team boasted of smashing several fundraising records only to get swept in all seven swing states.
“People were being told this is a toss-up, and so, their biggest problem is going to be getting fundraising,” said John Morgan, a prominent donor to Democratic candidates and causes. Donors “do not trust people with the money. Nobody does.”
That’s not expected to make a bench full of ambitious politicos collectively pump the brakes, though.
Several of the operatives who spoke to ABC News predicted a gargantuan 2028 primary field, even eclipsing that of 2020, which boasted over two dozen candidates.
“It’s gonna make the 2020 presidential primary look like it was a small gathering. This is going to be frenzied, it’s going to be competitive. There will be no punches pulled. And I think that’s a good thing,” a former Fetterman staffer said. “I hope we let it all out this time and the strongest person emerges.”
(WASHINGTON) — Former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., a once-rising star in the GOP who fell out with her party over her criticism of Donald Trump, slammed the former president as an “unrecoverable catastrophe” in her call for other Republicans to vote against him this year.
“We see it on a daily basis, somebody who was willing to use violence in order to attempt to seize power, to stay in power, someone who represents unrecoverable catastrophe, frankly, in my view, and we have to do everything possible to ensure that he’s not reelected,” Cheney told “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl.
“You have many Republicans out there who are saying, ‘Well, you know, we’re not going to vote for him, but we will write someone else in.’ And I think that this time around, that’s not enough, that it’s important to actually cast a vote for Vice President Harris,” Cheney added.
Cheney made her endorsement of Harris official this week, also announcing her father, former Vice President and liberal antagonist Dick Cheney, would follow suit.
The announcements from the Cheneys marked the highest profile endorsements from Republicans for Harris yet as the vice president looks to peel off disgruntled GOP voters frustrated with Trump’s hardline and personal brand of politics.
For his part, Trump appeared unconcerned with the endorsements, calling the former vice president “an irrelevant RINO, along with his daughter,” on his Truth Social platform. “RINO” stands for “Republican in name only.”
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung responded in kind when asked about the endorsements, replying, “who the f— is Liz Cheney?”
Liz Cheney cited both Harris’ policy stances this year — some of which have moved to the center since her first run in 2019 — and a speech Harris gave at the Democratic convention this summer which leaned heavily on themes of patriotism.
“I have never viewed this as a policy election, but I think that it’s very important point. If you look at Vice President Harris’s speech, for example, at the Democratic Convention, it is a speech that Ronald Reagan could have given. It’s a speech that George Bush could have given. It’s very much an embrace and an understanding of the exceptional nature of this great nation,” she said.
“I think that she has changed in a number of very important ways on issues that matter. And I would encourage independents to look at where she is on these policy issues today. I would encourage independents to compare where she is today with where Donald Trump is on these issues,” she added. “And on top of all of that, the Republicans have nominated somebody who you know is depraved.”
Cheney seemed to recognize the stark departure from carrying on a career as a conservative warrior in the House to now endorsing a Democrat for president, suggesting that the GOP has shifted its values while she has remained consistent.
When pressed by Karl if she’s still a Republican, Cheney responded, “I’m a conservative.”
“I am certainly not a Trump Republican. I am a conservative. I think that what’s happened to the Republican party today is indefensible, and I hope to be able to rebuild, as I said, after this cycle,” Cheney said.
“But I also think it’s really important for us as we’re thinking about rebuilding, as we’re thinking about the future the country, to recognize that at the end of the day, the vast majority of people in this country want to know fundamentally that their elected officials are going to defend the peaceful transfer of power,” she said. “And as someone who’s been a lifelong Republican, it’s heartbreaking to me to see what has happened to so many of the elected officials in my party, and I know we can do better.”
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden on Thursday joined growing calls from Democrats and even one Republican to bring Congress back to pass certain additional disaster aid funding in the wake of the devastation in southeastern states caused by back-to-back hurricanes.
Biden told reporters that the Small Business Administration is “pretty right at the edge now,” and it would take “several billion dollars” to help businesses recover in the affected states.
“I think that Congress should be coming back and moving on emergency needs immediately,” he said, but notably did not say the same about Federal Emergency Management Agency funding before Election Day.
Former President Donald Trump has falsely claimed FEMA has run out of disaster funds because the money was “stolen” to use instead to help migrants, a claim the White House has strongly denied, saying the money comes from separate funding “spigots.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas insisted Thursday that FEMA has enough disaster funding to handle the immediate needs from Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton and related tornado damage.
Even as raised the dire need for more SBA funding, Biden said he has not reached out to House Speaker Mike Johnson about bringing House lawmakers back to Washington.
While Johnson has committed to passing relief after the election, he has resisted pressure from Democrats, especially, to bring the House back before Election Day, explaining it will take time for states to assess the need.
“Congress will provide,” Johnson promised during an interview this past weekend on “Fox News Sunday.” “We will help people in these disaster-prone areas. It’s an appropriate role for the federal government, and you’ll have bipartisan support for that, and it’ll all happen in due time, and we’ll get that job done. There shouldn’t be any concern about that.”
There are similar calls from lawmakers for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to reconvene the upper chamber.
Dozens of House Democrats sent a letter to Johnson making their case as he toured damage in western North Carolina on Wednesday with Republican Sens. Thom Tillis and Ted Budd and GOP Rep. Chuck Edwards.
“Recent legislation has provided initial relief funds, yet these provisions fall critically short of what will be necessary to address the scale of destruction and the recovery needs for Fiscal Year 2025. We, therefore, urge you to immediately reconvene the US House of Representatives so that it can pass robust disaster relief funding,” the letter, signed by 63 Democrats, said.
The speaker’s office declined to comment to ABC News directly on the letter, instead referring to Johnson’s public comments on the topic.
Democrats are not alone in their request.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican who evacuated her home in Pinellas County, also wants Johnson to bring lawmakers back for a special session.
Luna, who has been spreading misinformation about FEMA funding, posted a statement on X claiming that additional funding would be approved.
“If Congress goes into a special session we can get it passed immediately,” she said.
Mayorkas also stressed the gravity of the situation following a tour of western North Carolina on Thursday.
Although he said that FEMA has the funding to handle hurricanes Helene and Milton and related tornadoes, he said the federal flood insurance program is in the red.
“We are working on a continuing resolution that is not stable footing for the work that we do in disaster response. And so that is why I underscore the need for Congress to act swiftly upon its return,” Mayorkas said.
