Vice President Kamala Harris' performance on Pennsylvania's swing voters during CNN's Wednesday town hall left the network's journalists and pundits stunned. She left the more than hour-long debate with redundant and evasive answers to questions from residents who supported the proposal.
“What I'm hearing from people I've talked to is…if her goal was to get a deal done, they don't know if she did it,” said CNN anchor Dana. Bash spoke immediately after the event in suburban Philadelphia.
“That being said, any time she can get in front of an audience and engage with voters, it's a win for her campaign. And they're very happy about it.”
David Axelrod, chief strategist for Barack Obama's presidential campaign and a veteran Democratic operative, said, “What concerns me is that when she doesn't want to answer a question, her habit is to go to word salad city.'' It's something,” he said.
“And she did so in some answers,” Axelrod said on a CNN panel after the town hall.
“One was Israel — Anderson [Cooper] He asked a direct question: “Do you think you're stronger on Israel than Trump?” And then there was a 7 minute response, which had nothing to do with his question. ”
Axelrod claimed Harris, 60, also “missed an opportunity” when asked about immigration.
“She will admit that she has no concerns about any of the administration's policies, and that's a mistake,” he said. “Sometimes you have to make concessions, and she didn't make many concessions.”
“She just didn't want to be there,” CNN host Abby Phillip said in a post-event panel, noting that her answer was flippant on policy.
The harsh assessment came after Cooper, who moderated the town hall, pressed Harris on policy issues, sometimes awkwardly repeating the same questions when she couldn't answer them properly.
The NDP told the Post that it was concerned about Harris' ranking, as former President Donald Trump is leading in polling averages with less than two weeks until Election Day on Nov. 5. Ta. All seven major battleground states.
“The right thing” on the borderline
In one of the most talked-about exchanges, Harris insisted that she and outgoing President Biden “did the right thing” regarding U.S.-Mexico border policy.
Harris defended Biden's work as a key figure in reducing illegal immigration, but Cooper cited Biden's order in June to limit the release of asylum seekers who entered the U.S. illegally. In fact, during his first three years in the role, his numbers were at an all-time high. too late.
The exchange began when a Drexel University student, a Republican who said he was leaning toward Harris, asked her to explain the “benefits and subsidies” she would provide to new immigrants. Veep completely sidestepped the question before Cooper took up the claim. Ask questions.
“America's immigration system is broken, it needs to be fixed, and it has been broken for a long time,” Harris deflected, calling out this year's bipartisan bill that conservatives say did too little to restrict. He ignored familiar campaign talking points before accusing President Trump of helping to destroy it. The release of illegal immigrants who crossed the border to seek asylum.
“You're talking about a bill that Donald Trump vetoed. That was in 2024,” Cooper interjected, offering to fact-check the timing. “There will be record border crossings in 2022 and 2023.”
“Your administration took hundreds of executive actions, but they couldn't stop the flow. The numbers kept going up,” Cooper said.
“Finally in 2024, in June, just three weeks before the first presidential debate with Joe Biden, you took executive action that had a dramatic impact and actually shut down people from coming and going. Why did you didn't the administration do that in 2022, 2023?”
Harris initially deflected again by claiming that she and Biden were negotiating with Congress over the immigration reform bill she proposed in January 2021 — with no significant movement on the bill and no plans to move forward. Despite being widely viewed as an impossible-to-pass messaging bill due to these facts, it claimed to require a path to citizenship for nearly all undocumented immigrants already in the United States.
“First of all, you're right, Mr. Anderson. As of today, we've cut the flow of migrants by more than half,” Harris said of recent border patrol officials reflecting a rapid decline in apprehensions. He said this, citing monthly statistics. The number of encounters with migrants reached a record high in December.
“But if that executive action was so easy, why not do it in 2022 or 2023?” Cooper pressed.
“Because we were working with Congress and we actually expected to get a long-term solution, not a short-term solution,” Harris argued.
“Couldn't you do one and both at the same time?” the journalist followed up.
“Ultimately, we have to understand that this problem will be resolved through Congressional action. Congress has the power and the wallet. I don't want to use the DC terminology, but it literally means that DC will write the check. Part of the problem is really solving the border problem,” Harris said.
“We need more judges to deal with asylum claims. We need more people to deal with processing.”
Mr. Cooper again asked candidly: “Do you wish the executive order had been implemented in 2022 or 2023?”
Ultimately, Harris said, “I think we did the right thing.”
“And, but the best thing that can happen for the American people is that there is a bipartisan effort. I am committed to working across the aisle to solve this long-standing problem.” she added.
The issue of immigration came up repeatedly at the forum, with Harris at one point mocking Trump's efforts to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border during his term, saying, “How much of that wall has he built? ?I think the last number I saw was about 2%.”
In fact, the Trump administration has built new barriers on about 25% of the roughly 3,000-mile southern border, but much of the wall has replaced existing barriers in high-traffic areas.
During the conversation, which lasted more than an hour, Harris was asked about her support for decriminalizing illegal border crossings when she was seeking the 2019 Democratic presidential nomination, and was forced to change her position, expressing regrets. There were also scenes in which he hinted at the idea of
“I never intended for America to have unsafe borders, and I will never allow it,” Harris said.
'Fascist' Trump: 'Create enemy list'
Ms. Harris has focused much of her appeal to voters on emphasizing that she is not Mr. Trump, who many consider a fascist.
“Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” Cooper asked Harris shortly after the town hall began, pointing to recent Trump comments by former Chief of Staff John Kelly and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. Citing criticism of Mr.
“Yes, I do. Yes, I do,” Harris said.
“In 13 days, we will decide who will sit in the Oval Office on January 20th,” the vice president said later in the event.
“After January 20th, you can see Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office in the White House plotting revenge. He talked about the enemy within… he was there I'm going to sit, be unstable, move freely, plan my revenge, plot my retribution, draw up a list of my enemies.”
While Trump claimed during his campaign to take back power that he would bring “retribution,” he has said at other points that simply retaliating would secure him a successful second term.
