DNC official calls Harris campaign a '$1 billion disaster'

Democratic National Committee (DNC) official Lindy Li called Vice President Harris’s bid for the White House a “$1 billion disaster” following her loss to President-elect Trump in the 2024 presidential election. 

“The truth is this is just an end epic disaster, this is a $1 billion disaster,” Li, a DNC National Finance Committee member, said during her Saturday morning appearance on “Fox & Friends Weekend.”

“They’re $20 million or $18 million in debt. It’s incredible, and I raised millions of that. I have friends I have to be accountable to and explain what happened because I told them it was a margin-of-error race,” she added. 

The strategist said that Harris’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, “promised all of us that Harris would win.” 

“She even put videos out saying Harris would win,” Li said on Saturday. “I believed her, my donors believed her, and so they wrote massive checks. I just feel like a lot of us were misled.”

Following Trump’s runaway triumph in the contest on Wednesday, Democrats have started to clash over the strategy the party deployed and who should be blamed for the election’s outcome. Some argue the party did not move to the left enough to satisfy the base while centrists argue the party moved too far left and spooked away the more moderate backers in the swing states. Harris lost all seven battleground states. 

Some within the party have said that Democrats should restart and begin focusing more on messaging and to better assess the temperature of the electorate. 

Li said that even on the night of the election, she heard Democrats express confidence in Harris’s hopes of winning the election, something Li herself did not fully understand. 

“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.

Updated at 12:26 p.m. EST