(New York Post) Vice President Kamala Harris’ performance at CNN’s Wednesday town hall with Pennsylvania swing voters underwhelmed the network’s journalists and pundits — as she left the more than hourlong forum with verbose and evasive answers to queries posed by on-the-fence residents.
“What I’m hearing from people who I’ve been talking to … if her goal was to close the deal, they’re not sure she did that,” CNN anchor Dana Bash said immediately after the event outside Philadelphia.
“Having said that, any time that she can be in front of an audience and interacting with voters is a win as far as her campaign goes — and they are very happy about that.”
Veteran Democratic operative David Axelrod, the chief strategist on Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, said, “The things 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,” Axelrod said on a CNN panel following the town hall.
“One was on Israel — Anderson [Cooper] asked a direct question, ‘Would you be stronger on Israel than Trump?’ And there was a seven-minute answer, but none of that related to the question he was asking.”
Axelrod argued that Harris, 60, also “missed an opportunity” when asked about immigration.
“She would acknowledge no concerns about any of the administration’s policies. And that’s a mistake,” he said. “Sometimes you have to concede things, and she didn’t concede much.”
“She just didn’t want to go there,” CNN host Abby Phillip said on the post-event panel, pointing out that the answers were light on policy.
The bleak reviews came after Cooper, who moderated the town hall, forcefully pushed Harris on policy matters — at times uncomfortably asking her the same question repeatedly when she failed to give a straight answer.
National Democrats have told The Post that they’re concerned about Harris’ standing less than two weeks ahead of Election Day on Nov. 5 — as former President Donald Trump leads in polling averages of all seven major battleground states.
‘Right thing’ on border
In one of the most-discussed exchanges, Harris insisted that she and retiring President Biden had done “the right thing” on US-Mexico border policy.
Harris defended her service as Biden’s point person on reducing illegal immigration, which instead hit record highs for the first three years of her role, as Cooper pressed her to admit that Biden’s June order to restrict the release of asylum seekers who enter the US illegally came too late.
The exchange began when a Republican Drexel University student, who said he was leaning toward supporting Harris, asked her to describe the “benefits and subsidies” she would offer to new immigrants — a query the veep entirely sidestepped before Cooper picked up the line of questioning.
“America’s immigration system is broken and it needs to be fixed and has been broken for a long time,” Harris deflected, defaulting to familiar campaign talking points before blaming Trump for helping crush a bipartisan bill this year that conservatives said did too little to restrict the release of illegal immigrants who sought asylum after crossing the border.
“You talk about the bill that Donald Trump quashed. That was in 2024,” Cooper interjected, offering a fact-check of the timeframe. “2022, 2023 there were record border crossings.”
“Your administration took a number of hundreds of executive actions that didn’t stem the flow. Numbers kept going up,” Cooper noted.
