Harrison, who unsuccessfully ran for the Senate in 2020, will now be asked to guide the top committee at a time when Democrats have control of all three key bodies in Washington, the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives.
As with everyone else, I didn't recognize the impact this would have on the national party. And unlike almost everyone aside from Chris Cillizza, I do know now.
She built a Presidential campaign from scratch, chose a VP in two weeks, and pulled off one of the most successful Democratic convention in decades in under a month.
— Jaime Harrison (@harrisonjaime) September 24, 2025
She crushed an opponent who has stood on more presidential debate stages than anyone in history. She energized… https://t.co/e3PQLrgkPQ
I haven't read Cillizza's full response to Harrison's tweet, for which a subscription to the journalist's Substack is necessary. Nonetheless, one thing is clear: Cillizza believes Kamala Harris was a bad candidate and Jaime Harrison believes she was not, or at least pretends to believe that.
It's not that Harrison is wrong about everything. He's right about several things, ironically thereby proving Cillizza's theory and disproving his own.
The then-Vice President did "pull off" an extremely successful convention. She "crushed an opponent" in debate, "energized an electorate," and "raised a billion dollars in just 107 days." Further, she was an extremely well-qualified candidate in that she possessed an excellent resume: top law enforcement official in a big city, top law enforcement officer in our largest state, a US Senator representing our largest state, and Vice-President of the USA.
Taken as a whole, that is extremely impressive.
Nevertheless, those were elements of her campaign- the fund-raising: well-executed, exciting rallies; tremendous debate performance. None of those go to whom Kamala Harris is.
She did have only 107 days, as the title of her new, controversial memoirs,"107 Days," not so subtly remind us. Those were 15-16 weeks to persuade voters that they should not return to office an individual who had been defeated for re-election four years earlier by someone generally believed no longer to have the full capacity (whether cognitive or physical) to run the country for another four years.
The former Senator was handed a gift. She did not have to run a gauntlet of primaries, in which she would have been tempted to take stands and make statements endearing her to a Democratic primary electorate but which would have been fodder for the opposing party in a general election.
Moreover, there is no assurance that Harris would have won the nomination if contested in that traditional manner. She entered the presidential race in 2019 and could not advance even to the first primary or convention. The Californian certainly tried hard enough, even winning plaudits from the political crowd for describing rival candidate Joe Biden as a racist without branding him as a "racist." Slick.
That strategic tour de force unsurprisingly brought a lot of money into her campaign coffers, though upon further review, we learned that she herself had expressed a similar view of mandatory school busing. It was a masterful performance by Harris, though eventually registered Democrats recognized who she was and she was done.
Done, but not finished. Persuaded by US Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, who was in Democratic House leadership and a friend of former Vice President Biden, to select a black woman as his running mate, the nominee selected Ms. Harris. Jill Biden was reportedly incensed by Harris' attack in debate upon her husband and therefore opposed her husband's decision, proving that sometimes, mother does know best.
The vice presidential nominee had minimal or no effect upon the presidential race in 2020. President Biden thereafter put her in charge of border policy, enabling critics to label her "czar." Her ineptitude and bad presidential policy- the latter probably a greater factor- led to a remarkable upsurge in illegal border crossings and requests there for asylum, which played a major role in November 2024.
After Biden dropped out of that race, Harris became the default Democratic presidential nominee. She already was vice president, thus arguably heir apparent, and she is black. Yet, well before then, as of early September of 2023, there was talk about the possibility of the Biden-Harris ticket being challenged for the 2024 nomination. However, according to this little-noticed, yet extremely significant article from NBC News at the time, "longtime Democratic strategist" Karen Finney stated
When you had people who were trying to test the waters, the party rose up and made it clear to those individuals- who were mostly white men- that to disrespect the vice president would not be well received by women and people of color within the party. They got a little bit of a smack in the face.
The message was- and is- clear: that irrespective of any other factors, Kamala Harris had to be on the ticket for reasons (demographic) beyond her, or anyone's control. She was entitled to it, whether she would be an effective successor as President to Joe Biden, a net benefit in the campaign, or anything else.
Fortunately for her- vice president, after all- she was able to escape the scrutiny of the media, rival candidates, and others inevitable during a primary campaign. And even then, she may have lost. In the video below, a well-meaning Wisconsin reader maintains (at 2:40) "it was a very short amount of time for the Party to get its act together before the election and had President Biden decided not to run sooner, I think that Vice President Harris would have had a better chance."
It (with her help) did get its act together, she was polling better than Trump, and then the voters got to know her better. So, no.
We cannot know how Kamala Harris would have fared in a primary race. However, we all saw her fail on ABC's The View, CBS' 60 Minutes, and with Dana Bash on CNN. She doesn't think well on her feet, an attribute common to many of us who don't run for public office.
That wasn't her campaign; that was her. She is weak in some formats, is substandard as a retail politician, and seems to feel entitled. A sense of entitlement is common in politicians but unlike most of them, Harris is unable to hide it.
Little of that seems to be pertinent to Jaime Harrison. Oh, but it is. In the last sentence of his response to Chris Cillizza, the ex-DNC chairman asks rhetorically "what the hell have you done to sit in judgement of our MVP?"
Besides being a citizen of the USA, in which the First Amendment still applies, Cillizza is a veteran journalist, and relatively objective one. He is entitled (being entitled is not bad; having a sense of entitlement is) to his own opinion, an educated one, which often is right, less frequently, wrong.
Harrison's question is bizarre for another reason: he refers to Harris as "our MVP." "MVP" stands for Most Valuable Player. Say what you will about Harris, who would have been an infinitely better President than has Donald Trump. She lost an election, a winnable one, and that hardly qualifies her as an MVP for the Party which Jaime Harrison was appointed to strengthen. There is only one major political party which now supports freedom of speech, and that commitment may flourish a little more with him no longer its leader.
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