Saagar Enjeti: The Harris campaign still doesn’t get it

Opinion: Saagar Enjeti 

I try really hard to pick a variety of stories during the week for my monologues. I want to keep it fresh for you guys.  

But some familiar news broke yesterday which was just far too delicious for me to pass by. 

Senator Kamala Harris has fallen to just 3% support in the latest USA Today/Suffolk poll of national Democrats. She finds herself behind Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang in the poll.

As we highlighted on Tuesday’s show, Harris is also trailing Yang and Gabbard in the latest CNN poll in New Hampshire. And, as if on cue, hours after the USA Today poll was announced, Kamala’s campaign announced that her campaign was going to be restructured and that dozens of her staff were going to be let go. 

Her own campaign manager is taking a $10,000 pay cut and her consultants will be getting considerably less than they originally thought all so she can afford a seven figure ad buy in the state of Iowa.

I find this all incredibly amusing because her campaign still just doesn’t get it. Just days ago if you recall she was blaming racism and sexism for her drop in the polls. Let’s take a listen for those who might have missed it.

I wonder how she squares being overtaken by an Asian man and a Hindu Hawaiian congresswoman with that statement. I’ve talked endlessly here about how Kamala in many ways most represents the empty bipartisan consensus I see in the Democratic primary of paying lip service to progressivism with fake platitudes while playing up woke identity politics. 

Remember this is the woman who thinks it’s clever to put the word “she” in front of president during the debates and who derailed a pretty good discussion on breaking up big tech to challenge Elizabeth Warren to join her in calling for Donald Trump’s Twitter account to be banned. Let’s relive that moment just for very good measure.

Beyond the schadenfreude I get from watching Kamala’s empty ideology fail, there is also a profound sense of justice in her campaign’s flailings. Kamala perhaps more than any other candidate embodied the elite snobbery of the establishment Senators that entered the campaign simply because they were entitled to be President of the United States. 

They didn’t feel compelled to run for any other reason than they deserved to be there. There’s only room for one such candidate like that and look how it’s working out for Joe Biden. 

Kamala and Pete Buttigieg were the ones who snickered when Andrew Yang announced his freedom dividend challenge on the stage in the second debate. She was the one who said of Tulsi Gabbard after she attacked her saying: “This is going to sound immodest but I’m obviously a top-tier candidate and so I did expect that I would on the stage and take hits tonight…” Later characterizing her as people “polling at 1% or whatever.” 

Now Yang and Tulsi are ahead of her without the massive expensive campaign infrastructure that is bleeding her dry beneath them. They stand solely on the ideas carrying them forward in the debate, and in Tulsi’s case of course a slight assist from Kamala’s compatriot, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.