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.”
“My concern is that she has this habit of going to word salad city when she doesn’t want to answer a question,” said David Axelrod, chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and a veteran Democratic operative. ” he said.
“And she did so in some answers,” Axelrod said on a CNN panel after the town hall.
“One was about Israel, and Anderson (Cooper) asked a direct question: ‘Do you think you’re stronger on Israel than Trump?’ And there was a seven-minute response, and it was his It had nothing to do with the 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 with less than two weeks until Election Day on Nov. 5, former President Donald Trump is leading in polling averages in all major battleground states, making it difficult for Harris to be ranked. He said he was concerned.
“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 criticized Biden’s June order restricting the release of asylum seekers who entered the country illegally. In fact, his numbers were at an all-time high during his first three years in the role. too late.
The exchange began when a Drexel University student, a Republican who says he leans toward Harris, asked her to explain the “benefits and subsidies” she provides to new immigrants. Veep completely sidestepped the question before Cooper could ask it.
“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, just in June, three weeks before the first presidential debate with Joe Biden, you took executive action that had a dramatic impact and really cut off people from coming and going. Why? Didn’t your 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 hope of passing it. It sought a path to citizenship for nearly all undocumented immigrants already in the United States, even though it was widely considered impossible.
“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 while 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?”
“I think we did the right thing,” Harris ultimately said.
“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.
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, asking, “How much of that wall did he build? 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 an unsafe border, and I never will,” 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, referring 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, on January 20th, we will decide who will sit in the Oval Office,” the vice president said later in the event.
“After January 20th, you 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 retaliation, draw up a list of my enemies.”
While Trump claimed during his campaign to take back power that he would bring about “retribution,” he has said at other points that his retribution would simply result in a successful second term.
