Vice President Kamala Harris struggled to explain her plan for the US at a voter town hall organized by CNN, giving non-answers to easy questions and preferring to attack her rival Donald Trump instead.
Democrats nominated Harris in July, after pressuring President Joe Biden to drop out of the race. She has since tried to present herself as an agent of change, even though Biden has repeatedly said she was involved in all of the current administration’s policies from day one.
“There was a lot that was done, but there’s more to do. And I’m pointing out things that need to be done that haven’t been done but need to be done,” Harris told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday, when asked why none of her current policy ideas had been implemented since 2021.
In a post-event panel, Republican pundit and former Trump campaign aide David Urban called it a “word-salad answer.” He also said that the GOP would have gladly paid for another hour of the town hall just to keep Harris talking.
The ‘Trump War Room’ campaign account on X eagerly shared excerpts from the town hall, in which Harris missed even the most softball questions. At one point, for example, Cooper asked Harris a leading, “softball” question, suggesting that she has “evolved” on three previously controversial and unpopular positions, to which she was clearly just supposed to say yes. Instead, the Democrat began talking about the intricacies of her plan.
In another exchange that went viral, Cooper reminded Harris that she called the border wall “stupid, useless, and a medieval vanity project,” yet she voted in favor of spending $650 million to finish building it.
“Well let’s talk about Donald Trump,” Harries replied, cackling. She ended up claiming that she disagreed with how Trump went about building the wall, not the wall as such.
“’Trump bad’ is not a message that will get her elected,” Urban noted later.
“She focused a lot more on Donald Trump, I think it’s fair to say, than she did on the many specifics of what she would do as president,” said another CNN anchor, Jake Tapper.
“If her goal was to close the deal, they’re not sure she did that,” CNN’s Dana Bash, who moderated the Biden-Trump debate in June, said she heard from some Democrats. While the voters may understand better who Harris is, they aren’t sure what she would do, Bash added. “The question about her legislative priorities, name one? There wasn’t one.”
Harris kept coming back around to her past as a prosecutor in San Francisco and the state of California, whether the questions were about immigration or the cost of groceries. She also admitted she would implement price controls, “reform” the US Supreme Court because she disagreed with some of its rulings, and create “parity around what the richest people pay in terms of their taxes,” without explaining what that might actually mean.