CNN’s Jake Tapper couldn’t hide his disbelief after Vice President Kamala Harris’ lackluster election night performance.
When John King compared her voter turnout with President Joe Biden’s 2020 results, the data showed a dim picture.
“You asked: Are there any places that the vice president is over-performing Joe Biden in 2020?” King questioned, displaying the information on the network’s Magic Wall.
The state-wide data remained dark, not showing a single state where Harris outshined Biden.
“Holy smokes,” Tapper said, clearly stunned. “Literally nothing? Literally not one county?”
“Literally nothing,” King responded, then shifted focus to the counties, revealing Harris had surpassed Biden in just 58 counties by over 3%.
“There might be more out here in the West Coast,” King remarked. “It’s possible one or two more as they finish the count here. But in the states that matter… in one county in battleground Pennsylvania, she’s outperforming President Biden by 3% or more.”
That’s when they broached the topic of Biden potentially being more competitive than Harris was against President-elect Donald Trump.
“I don’t want to be disrespectful to the president of the United States,” King remarked.
“The vice president of the United States looks like she’s about to lose the presidential election. She was campaigning vigorously from the second she got the nomination until the votes counted today. Is there any evidence on the table that the president of the United States could do half of what she did?”
Tapper replied, “No,” which he repeated when King asked if Biden could manage “a third of what she did.”
Before the election was officially called, Tapper speculated that the Harris campaign was preparing for bad news after Abby Phillip mentioned they had gone silent by 11 p.m. EST.
“This is my seventh presidential election,” he observed, “when campaigns go silent it’s generally not a positive sign.”
CNN declared Trump’s victory shortly before 6 a.m. Wednesday, following his win in Wisconsin, hitting the necessary 270 electoral votes.
“Whether people like it or not, Donald Trump ran an issues-based campaign. Whether or not his two-hour stemwinder rally speeches covered all of it,” Tapper conceded.
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