There has been much speculation about what happened in the political operation of the $1 billion presidential campaign that ended in a massive defeat for Vice President Kamala Harris. But there is one moment that stunned top Democratic strategists and is frequently cited as the beginning of the end of her campaign.
During an Oct. 8 interview on ABC News’s The View, the vice president was asked whether she would have done anything differently than President Joe Biden.
That's the election. It's a wrap.
Kamala Harris is asked by The View if she would do anything differently than Joe Biden, who has been the most disastrous president in our lifetimes.
"There is not a thing that comes to mind…"
pic.twitter.com/0HrEKiSOCy
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) October 8, 2024
Harris responded to co-host Sunny Hostin’s question by saying she would not change “a thing” about Biden’s presidency despite having low approval ratings and widespread voter dissatisfaction.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris told The View hosts. “I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.”
Hostin later said on the show’s Behind the Table podcast that she was stunned by the Democratic nominee’s bungled answer.
“I asked the vice president what she would do differently in a Harris administration as opposed to a Biden administration,” Hostin explained as she reflected on the moment on the show.
Sunny Hostin admits that she tried giving Kamala a softball question… but then it backfired and might be why she lost pic.twitter.com/WNGimcmdAn
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 13, 2024
“I followed up because I was surprised at the answer,” she told the podcast host and ABC show’s producer Brian Teta.
“Look, I think it wasn’t so much about the question, but it was really more about the answer,” Hostin added.
“The reason I followed up was because that wasn’t a gotcha question. That was a layup, really,” The View host said, admitting she was aiming to give an easy question.
Teta told Hostin that her question keeps “coming up” during the campaign and wondered whether she “personally cost” the Democratic candidate’s bid for president by asking her that question.
“Oh wow, I wish I had that much power because I would have flipped it in the other way,” Hostin reacted.
James Carville agrees that The View ended Kamala's campaign.
pic.twitter.com/kLrXUEstPD
— Vince Langman (@LangmanVince) November 9, 2024
Democratic strategist James Carville said The View interview was the end of Harris’s failed campaign.
“I think if this campaign is reducible to one moment, we are in a 65% wrong-track country,” he said on The Bulwark Podcast. “The country wants something different. And she’s asked, as is so often the case, in a friendly audience, on The View, ‘How would you be different than Biden?’ That’s the one question that you exist to answer, all right? That is it. That’s the money question. That’s the one you want. That’s the one that everybody wants to know the answer to. And you freeze!”
The 2024 Trump-Vance presidential campaign used her comment for viral campaign ads that highlighted policy disasters of the Biden-Harris administration.
While on the campaign trail, now-Vice President-elect J.D. Vance mocked Harris in battleground states.
“When she did this View interview, they asked, ‘What is one thing you would have done differently than Joe Biden?’ You know what she said? ‘Nothing comes to mind.’ That I think is the official tagline of the Kamala Harris campaign: Nothing comes to mind,” he said as the crowd roared in applause.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) tore into Harris by citing examples of her administration’s policies, including high grocery prices, open borders, high crime, and endless wars.
Comedian Bill Maher called her answer “terrible.”
Later, in an interview with late-night host Stephen Colbert, the vice president was asked again about what would be different in her administration from the Biden administration, and her answer was about Americans being an “ambitious people” and that she was “not Donald Trump.”
Harris was asked the same question during a Univision town hall, and she talked about how she had a career “as a prosecutor.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
When Fox News anchor Bret Baier questioned Harris during her media blitz about her answer, she told him, “Let me be very clear: My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency.”
At an Oct. 9 Pennsylvania campaign rally, Trump reiterated that she would “not do anything differently” and taunted his rival while saying to the crowd, “This November, the people of Pennsylvania have to tell Kamala Harris that ‘we’ve had enough of you! You’re an incompetent person. You’re the worst vice president in the history of our country. Kamala, you’re fired!’”
