It’s literally 2016 but worse somehow.

One source close to the Harris campaign tells Rolling Stone they reached out to several staffers in and around the campaign to voice concerns about the candidate embracing Dick and Liz Cheney.

“People don’t want to be in a coalition with the devil,” says the source, speaking about Dick Cheney. They say a Harris staffer responded that it was not the staff’s role to challenge the campaign’s decisions.

A Democratic strategist says they warned key Harris surrogates and top-level officials at the Democratic National Committee that campaigning with Liz Cheney — and making the campaign’s closing argument about how many Republicans were supporting Harris — was highly unlikely to motivate any new swing voters, and risked dissuading already-despondent, infrequent Democratic voters who had supported Biden in 2020. The strategist says they also attempted to have big donors and battleground state party chairs convey the same argument to the Harris campaign.

Another Democratic operative close to Harrisworld says they sent memos and data to Harris campaign staffers underscoring how, among other things, Republican voters, believe it or not, vote Republican — and that the data over the past year screamed that Democrats instead needed to reassure and energize the liberal base and Dem-leaning working class in battleground states. “We were told, basically, to get lost, no thank you,” says the operative.

  • UltraGiGaGigantic
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    3 days ago

    To me campaigning with Cheney was a way to signal to dissatisfied Trump Republicans that an alternative exists.

    You can facilitate the more moderate alternative by passing electoral reform in blue states.

    This has already happened in Alaska, which has already implemented Ranked Choice voting. The voters picked a more moderate conservative over Sarah Palin.

    Republicans are trying to repeal Ranked Choice voting in Alaska by the way. More proof that electoral reform is the way forward for our country.

    Now all we have to do is convince democrats to support democracy in states they control. I guess step one would be beating into their heads that they are no longer allowed to fight the republicans alone.

    Democrats must allow more political parties to participate in the electoral process. Given their flailing looking for something or someone to blame for their failures (again), I think they still are not willing to do so. I hope I’m wrong.

    • ᗪᗩᗰᑎ
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      3 days ago

      wouldn’t implementing ranked choice voting in blue states just further fracture them and weaken them against red states? I would think it would make sense to initiate ranked choice in red states first.

    • MimicJar@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Sure, if you have years and election cycles worth of time, that’s a much better solution. If you have 90 days then “big tent” sounds reasonable to me.

      • queermunist she/her
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        3 days ago

        Except they made the tent big enough for Liz Cheney, but not big enough to let a Palestinian-American speak at the Convention.