The official sharply criticized the campaign’s messaging while raising more than $1 billion in roughly 100 days, and going into debt.
Democratic National Committee (DNC) official Lindy Li said on Nov. 9 that party donors feel “misled” about Vice President Kamala Harris’s chance at winning the 2024 presidential election after it raised a record amount of funds in slightly more than 100 days of campaigning.
“The truth is this is just an epic disaster—this is a $1 billion disaster,” Li, a member of the DNC National Finance Committee, said during an interview on “Fox & Friends Weekend.”
“They’re $20 million or $18 million in debt. It’s incredible, and I raised millions of that,” she said. “I have friends I have to be accountable to and explain what happened because I told them it was a margin-of-error race.”
Li said she felt like Harris’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, previously the Biden campaign chair, had “promised all of us that Harris would win,” with videos touting the vice president’s chances at success.
“I believed her, my donors believed her, and so they wrote massive checks. I just feel like a lot of us were misled,” Li said.
After President-elect Donald Trump defied the odds and outperformed polling expectations for the third time in a row, many Democrats have begun assigning blame for Harris losing all seven battleground states to Trump.
Many moderate Democrats, including Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), have blamed the progressive left for its fixation on topics such as transgender issues over cost of living and border security for why the vice president and the Democratic Party lost on Nov. 5.
Progressives recently fired back, claiming that exit poll data would paint a different picture; although one poll found that the focus on transgender issues was one of the most motivating factors for voters throughout the nation choosing Trump instead of Harris.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who caucuses with Democrats and ran in the party’s 2016 and 2020 presidential primaries, blamed the DNC leadership for defending the status quo and abandoning the working class in his analysis of Harris’s loss.
“In the coming weeks and months, those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions,” Sanders wrote in a Nov. 6 letter posted on X.
Regardless of how the party chooses to move forward, Li said she had suspicions on election night when others in her party seemed confident of the vice president’s chances.
“I asked them, ‘Are you privy to internal numbers that I am not seeing?’ because I study this so carefully, and I just wasn’t seeing any basis for that level of confidence,” she said.