Meghan Hayes, a former aide to Biden, said the Harris-Waltz campaign is unfairly placing the blame for the president's election loss on the media.
Mr. Hayes served in the White House. message planning director From January 2021 to August 2022, he was responding to comments made by Harris campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon on the Pod Save America podcast earlier this week.
O'Malley Dillon said it was “totally bullshit” to say that Vice President Harris was afraid to do more interviews early in her short campaign, and that the journalists she eventually met with were “absolutely bullish.” criticized.
“We're going to do an interview, but to Stephanie's point, the questions were smaller and more procedural and more of the same,” she said, according to Stephanie Cutter, a senior adviser to the Harris campaign. interjected.
“It's ridiculous,” Cutter said of the interview question.
Hayes on Friday's Fox News appearance gravure emphasizedstates that this story began for a reason.
“She didn't do interviews for the first 30-odd days. I think the media took note of that and when they asked her questions afterwards, it was more about why she wasn't being interviewed. '' Hayes said.
“But again, you're interfering with the narrative there, so I think they missed the mark on this. I think there could have been more of a local media strategy. I could have been interviewed.”
O'Malley Dillon added on the podcast that frustration with the media led to underlying quotes about how the campaign was being covered.
“They didn't inform the voters who wanted to know more, who were listening to understand,” she said. “And I'm not trying to say here that the whole system was wrongly focused on us.”
“What I want to say is, again, what we need to explore as we move forward as a campaign and as a country, is that it’s a disservice to voters,” she continued.
Hayes advised the campaign and its allies against playing the “blame game.”
“So I don't think this blame game is necessarily going in the right direction, but I understand that they're in a position where they have to explain why they lost. So why would they blame someone? I understand that we have to do it,''' Hayes said.
In her podcast, Cutter also noted how problematic Harris' inability to distance herself from President Biden turned out to be in retrospect. He said the vice president “didn't want” to be seen as publicly criticizing the president out of loyalty and tradition.
“So our focus was, let's look to the future. Let's talk about her and her approach to things. To demonstrate that difference, we need to focus on policy, forward-looking policy. Take advantage of it,” Cutter said. “But at the end of the day, we all look at the data, and it's — so many people thought you were going to get a sequel. Which was bad for the economy, you know. He was an existing murderer.”
According to exit polls, Harris lost voters whose top issues were the economy and immigration.
