Obama hails Harris, slams GOP election tactics in first post-DNC remarks

(CNN) — Former President Barack Obama offered a note of caution to Democrats buzzing over Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, telling donors on Martha’s Vineyard Monday night that the party needs to ramp up its focus – and spending – on down-ballot races across the country.

“Kamala’s (convention) speech showed her command, that she’s prepared to be president,” Obama said, according to a partial transcript provided by the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a party-aligned group fighting for fairer state and congressional maps. “She was outstanding, and the theme was joy. And so, people were feeling great. And I want everybody to feel great, but I also want everybody to get a little bit of a reality check.”

The NDRC told CNN the fundraiser brought in $1.7 million.

Obama at the event described Republican efforts to “redraw maps and manipulate the rules,” backed up by courts “that are willing to uphold unfair maps and unfair rules,” as both a power play by a party “that’s basically decided we can’t win on the basis of ideas” and the chief obstacle facing many of the politically popular policies Democrats are campaigning on with new gusto since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the nominee.

“Politics in America is and always has been, not simply a matter of rhetoric and joy and excitement. It is also nuts and bolts exercises of power,” Obama said. “If we elect Kamala, but we haven’t dealt with the nuts and bolts issues that NDRC is focused on, she will confront the same nonsense that I had to deal with, with (then Senate Majority Leader Mitch) McConnell and (former House Speaker John) Boehner.”

Democrats lost more than a thousand seats in state legislatures during Obama’s presidency, while also suffering a string of defeats at the gubernatorial level and in the US Congress, where Republicans won a 2010 House landslide before taking control of the Senate in 2014. The damage at the state level has been the most difficult for Democrats to unwind, in part due to gerrymandering by state GOP leaders.

“Underlying those efforts,” Obama said, “is obviously a longstanding philosophy that says there are certain people that aren’t real Americans, and so they really shouldn’t be represented anyway.”

Former Attorney General Eric Holder, who was appointed by Obama and led the Justice Department from 2009 to 2015, has led the NDRC since its formation in the months after former President Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. Since then, the NDRC and allies like the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the party’s state-level campaign arm, have slowly turned back the tide. The group says the current maps are on track to be the “fairest” in a generation.

Obama also credited the NDRC’s work for Democrats’ better-than-expected showing in the 2022 midterms, when the predicted “red wave” never crashed and Republicans failed to wrest control of the Senate and won only a narrow, fractious majority in the House.

“What a lot of people didn’t mention (after the election) was because of the work that Eric and NDRC and others had done, we just had a better map,” Obama said. “And that’s part of the reason that we did not see a red wave. It was that maps were fairer and, as a consequence, better reflected the will of the people.”

In his own remarks, Holder touted the NDRC’s work since it began operating in 2017 – a time, he said, when what “seemed like intractable gerrymanders in a whole bunch of different states” had locked Democrats out of power in state legislatures, courts and US congressional races.

Holder told the audience that the group is now focused on its “10-year” plan to assure that the “redistricting that we do in 2031 will be even better than the one that happened in this cycle.”

Still, he insisted, the nature of modern Republican politics and candidates – who, he said, “have made peace with the notion of being a minority party” – meant that battles over the rules governing elections were as important as Democrats’ messaging and ability to grow their political base.

“They won’t have the majority of the American people, but they want majority power nevertheless. It’s almost like political apartheid, and they’ve made peace with that,” Holder said. “And they’ve used gerrymandering, voter suppression.”

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