DNC critic sparks discussions about what went wrong for Harris

A Democratic National Committee (DNC) member is making headlines with her criticisms of Vice President Harris’s loss to President-elect Trump, calling the operation a “$1 billion disaster” and suggesting she and other people were given false hope that Harris had a chance to win the election.

Lindy Li, a Democratic donor and member for the DNC’s National Finance Committee, told NewsNation’s Rich McHugh that she told donors what she was told, “that this is an eminently winnable race.”

She’s also been outspoken about the Harris campaign’s debt.

Li’s comments, which have irked some Democrats, come amid broader finger-pointing over what went wrong in the lead-up to last week’s elections, in which Democrats lost the White House and Senate majority and don't appear likely to flip the House to avoid a Republican trifecta.

“First of all, I haven't heard that from campaign officials, so let’s not make assumption about that,” Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist who’s also an advisor to DNC Chair Jaime Harrison, said in response to Li’s remarks about the campaign’s fundraising and debt.

“Secondly, and certainly, you have to make investments if you want to win,” he added.

Li in a series of interviews has called out the party and the Harris campaign, pointing out the sheer amount of money raised while saying the campaign was between $18 million and $20 million in debt.

Several news outlets have reported Harris's campaign ended with $20 million in debt. The campaign declined to comment for this story, and the campaign’s postelection filing won’t be publicly available until Dec. 5.

“This is a $1 billion — just a $1 billion disaster,” Li said during a Fox News interview Saturday, noting the campaign's millions of dollars in debt.

“It’s incredible, and I raised millions of that. I have friends that I have to be accountable to and to explain what happened, because I told them it was a margin-of-error race,” she said. “I was promised — Jen O’Malley Dillon promised all of us that Harris would win.”

Li notably did not put blame on Harris.

“I just want to be very clear: There’s one person I don’t blame, and that’s Kamala Harris,” Li told NewsNation. “She was handed this. She did the best she could under the circumstances. She had 107 days. I love her — maybe she’s upset with me. I love her.”

Some Democrats were unfamiliar with Li before her recent interviews. Earlier in her career, Li ran for Congress in Pennsylvania’s 6th Congressional District in 2016 before dropping out of the Democratic primary.

More recently, she worked on Asian American outreach efforts for President Biden's 2020 campaign and was selected to serve on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s (D) Advisory Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Affairs.

One major Democratic donor, John Morgan, agreed with Li’s assessment, describing her as as “right on” in a social media post.

Another individual who helped raise multiple millions for the campaign and requested anonymity to speak candidly called it “embarrassing and incompetent” that the campaign had spent as much as it did.

“Perhaps if they had more smartly used their money and run tough ads on immigration and the economy like Jacky Rosen and Ruben Gallego and Tammy Baldwin, we could have had a different outcome,” the individual said.

Other Democrats disagreed with Li’s assessment of the Harris campaign’s fundraising and debt.

“I think it's ridiculous,” explained Matt Bennett, executive vice president for public affairs at the center-left Third Way, noting, “You basically spend everything you possibly can, if we all agree that this was a, you know, an existentially important campaign.

“And I think if they’d ended the campaign with a single dollar in the bank, people would have been very angry.”

Scott Merrick, a New Hampshire-based Democratic strategist who served as Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s (D-Minn.) state director during her 2020 presidential run, called it “disingenuous” to suggest the campaign was a “$1 billion disaster,” as Harris had a short runway of time to campaign.

Merrick suggested the onus was on both the campaign and the DNC and their efforts to message correctly to voters.

The $1 billion disaster “isn’t the fact that the Harris campaign lost. I think it's about the DNC, along with the campaign, didn't do anything to change messaging. Didn't do anything to actually figure out what the voters were looking for and just kind of stuck with the same messaging,” Merrick said.

Merrick suggested that while it’s fair to look at how resources were allocated, changing financial strategy might not have mattered in the end.

“I think the broader piece is that even if you go back and you say we should have spent more money in maybe another state, would it have really mattered if the messaging stayed the same?” he asked. “If we weren't able to listen to what the voters were looking for, would it have really mattered? I don’t know.”

Li’s remarks come amid a broader discourse within the party over what went wrong. Harris lost all seven battleground states, as Trump made inroads with key voting blocs, including Latino voters.

While Trump’s Electoral College win was decisive, Harris did keep the margins tight in the seven battleground states.

Data from Decision Desk HQ as of Wednesday morning shows Harris’s margin of loss across the seven battleground states ranged from just less than 30,000 votes — or about 0.9 percent of the vote — in Wisconsin to nearly 190,000 votes in North Carolina, about 3.4 percent.

As Democrats parse through lessons learned and how to interpret last week’s results, Rodell Mollineau, a Democratic strategist who worked on independent expenditure efforts in the presidential election, suggested the party’s autopsy should be wholistic and all-encompassing.

“We need to at least start off with an all-of-the-above approach to why we lost and how we regain our footing.”

Included in that endeavor, he acknowledged, is grappling with the rift between the party and voters.

“There is a large chasm between what we think we are and what we believe in, and what the American people think we are and believe [in], and we gotta figure out how to overcome that divide,” he said.

Alex Gangitano contributed.