Democrats give Harris rocky reviews on CNN town hall

Vice President Harris’s CNN town hall performance received tough reviews from fellow Democrats who criticized her for missing the moment to sell her candidacy as polls have started to show a shift toward former President Trump in recent days.

Democrats took issue with the vice president being too evasive with her answers and overly relying on her typical stump speech and talking points while fielding a bevy questions from CNN’s Anderson Cooper and politically diverse undecided voters in the audience.

“Even if the questions make her uncomfortable or piss her off, why can’t she answer them plainly and clearly and then pivot to the platitudes that put everyone to sleep?” one Democratic political consultant said. “Instead, it’s just all platitudes and BS … this constant evasiveness is exactly what voters hate about politicians and her inability to communicate like a human being instead of like a politician is her greatest challenge.”

“Christ already, answer a damn question” the source added.

Harris in general played it safe when it came to addressing questions about the economy, immigration and how she would lead differently than President Biden but then at times pivoted to other matters.

One issue proving to be a sticking point to Harris’s campaign is on the matter of the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

One audience member asked what she would do “to ensure that not another Palestinian dies due to bombs being funded by U.S. tax dollars.” 

In response, Harris reiterated that the killing of Palestinians was “unconscionable” but then veered into other territory, saying those voters who see that as a sticking point to her campaign also care about “bringing down the price of groceries. They also care about our democracy and not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”

The town hall gave Harris the chance to go before a mainstream, prime-time audience. More than 3 million viewers tuned into the town hall, which was held in the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania. It reached more than 700,000 in the 25- to 54-year-old age demographic, according to the network.

Longtime Democratic strategist David Axelrod said Harris at times took too long to explain her answers on questions she was mostly dodging, saying she spoke in a “word salad.”  

“The thing that would concern me is when she doesn’t want to answer a question, her habit is to kind of go to word salad city, and she did that on a couple of answers,” he said Wednesday night on CNN.

“One was on Israel. Anderson asked a direct question: ‘Would you be stronger on Israel than Trump?’ And there was a seven-minute answer, but none of it related to the question he was asking,” Axelrod added.

Axelrod argued though that Harris came out strong at the top of her remarks, during which she agreed with Cooper when he asked if she thought Trump was a fascist. The beginning of the town hall was focused on her response to John Kelly, Trump’s ex-White House chief of staff, saying the 45th president “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist” in an interview in The New York Times this week.

Meanwhile, former White House adviser Van Jones also knocked Harris’s overall performance on CNN, saying, “the world salad stuff gets on my nerves.”

“I think that some of the evasions are not necessary. But when she‘s talking about trying to get you a house, I believe her,” he said.

Harris was also faced with more personal questions from Cooper and the audience Wednesday night.

Some Democrats thought when she went personal, she was able to stand out. The vice president did take the opportunity to present a more intimate side of herself to voters when she was asked about her faith and how she handles grief following the death of her mother in 2009.

She talked about religion more than she typically does, saying that she prays “sometimes twice a day,” and she spoke directly with a widow in the audience about grieving her own mother who died in 2009.

Harris also shared her personal background, in which she boasts a middle-class upbringing as being at the center of some of her policy proposals.

A former Biden administration official said, “her strongest moments were when she talked about her experience growing up and how that influenced her priorities around housing, small businesses, child tax credit.”

“That part was good and I think shows voters what she is really about,” the former official said.

Harris’s stump speech and interviews in recent days have involved her talking about her policy proposals but then quickly reverting to Trump, drawing a contrast with her rival on issues like democracy, reproductive rights and the economy.

Harris went into the town hall with Democrats hopeful she could turn her campaign around while Trump has momentum in the final stretch of the race. Trump is forecasted to have a 52 percent chance of winning in November, according to Decision Desk HQ/The Hill’s prediction model, and an aggregation of polls shows Harris with a 1 percentage point lead over Trump.

Democrats questioned though if she was able to move the needle at all with her town hall performance — but thought her way of connecting with voters was a positive outcome of it.

“She did it. She showed up and answered the questions; she connected with voters, which was the job,” said Ivan Zapien, a former Democratic National Committee official. “I don’t see a world where the reviews of how she did move the needle or help us explain how it landed with undecided voters, so I would not pay any attention to the reviews and keep running toward the tape if I were her.”