Kamala Harris’ Ex Criticizes Her Campaign: ‘Not One of Them Got it Right’

While some supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris attribute her historic defeat to now-President-elect Donald Trump to President Joe Biden’s delayed withdrawal from the race, several former campaign staffers argue that this perspective is “detached from reality.”

Former San Francisco Democratic Mayor Willie Brown, who dated Harris in the 1990s, believes her campaign lost because they “read the tea leaves wrong.”

“Not one of them got it right, not one. They did not go back and say, how is it we did not succeed with Hillary? Is it possible to elect a woman to the presidency in the United States? If that answer from all of the processes says questionable, then you know what you need to do,” Brown remarked.

He further noted that while Hillary Clinton was “traumatized by her defeat for years,” he thinks Harris has the resilience to “overcome” this setback and continue in politics.

As a young prosecutor, Harris dated the much older Willie Brown, who treated her to luxurious experiences like trips to Paris and the Oscars, as well as a BMW, which is thought to have played a role in her rapid rise in California politics.

The vice president is widely known for having dated Democratic powerbroker Willie Brown in 1994, when he was the California Assembly Speaker and she was 29, as reported by the New York Post.

“Over the course of the relationship, Brown gave Harris a BMW, she traveled with him to Paris, attended the Academy Awards,” and accompanied him on a business trip to Boston, where he met with Donald Trump, according to the 2021 biography Kamala’s Way: An American Life by journalist Dean Morain.

The Los Angeles Times described Harris as Brown’s “frequent companion,” while the San Francisco Chronicle called her “the speaker’s new steady.” Their relationship was well-known in San Francisco.

As his term as speaker neared its end, Brown appointed Harris—then working for the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office—to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a position with a $72,000 annual salary requiring monthly meeting attendance.

Brown, now 90, has also acknowledged his role in Harris’s “meteoric political rise.” Last week, he joined other prominent Democrats endorsing her for president ahead of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as noted by the New York Post.

“Yes, we dated,” Brown wrote in a 2019 opinion piece. “Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker. And I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco.”

Meanwhile, some of Harris’s allies blame her loss to Trump on Biden’s late exit from the race, though many former staffers contend that perspective is “detached from reality.”

They argue that the loss resulted from Harris’s challenges in connecting with a majority of voters and appearing authentic.

“The biggest onus of this loss is on President Biden,” said Andrew Yang, a Harris supporter who sought the 2020 Democratic nomination, according to the Associated Press. “If he had stepped down in January instead of July, we may be in a very different place.”

However, as Newsweek noted, other critics argue that Harris herself bears responsibility for her decisions during the campaign.

Philadelphia Democratic Chair and former Congressman Bob Brady observed that many of Harris’s staffers were “just elitist and went out there, did their own thing and didn’t include Democratic city committee or (ward leaders) or committee people. They just didn’t do it.”