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.
I'm pretty sure Biden being in the race, and him stepping aside, were all determined by the DNC, not Biden himself.
The donor class decided that Biden need to step down, not leadership, not voters. He and the party were animate that he was staying in the race until the donor class said the money stops here.