A onetime top Democratic fundraiser claims the party's own internal polling put Kamala Harris dead last among potential Biden replacements, and that leaders picked her anyway because they feared the political cost of passing her over.
Lindy Li, a former member of the Democratic National Finance Committee who raised money for both Joe Biden and Harris, laid out the claim in an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital. Li said the poll was commissioned internally and shared among a tight circle of party operatives and fundraisers in the months before Biden stepped aside from the 2024 race. The results, she said, showed Harris trailing every other name floated as a replacement, including Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, and Gretchen Whitmer.
Li is now publishing those claims and more in a new book titled *Unburdened*, which chronicles the internal maneuvering inside the Democratic Party during the months leading up to Biden's withdrawal. She has since switched her party affiliation.
The most striking number Li cited was Buttigieg's performance relative to Harris's. The former Transportation Secretary, who by Li's account drew zero percent support from Black voters in the internal survey, still finished ahead of Harris in the overall results.
"Kamala Harris came in dead last. It wasn't even close," Li told Fox News Digital. "Pete Buttigieg, who hilariously received 0% support from the Black vote, did better than she did. And yet the party is so straitjacketed by DEI that they had no choice but to appoint her."
Li described the National Finance Committee, the group that saw the polling, as a small, closely guarded body. "The list of membership is guarded like the papal conclave," she said. "But people talk. It's a very small group of people. That poll was commissioned internally."
She drew a distinction between this poll and typical campaign-funded surveys. "Most of the time I would say I don't believe a candidate's polling because it's basically just funded propaganda," Li said. "But in this case, we wanted an objective overview of who could actually mount the most formidable opposition to Trump."
The data, she claimed, pointed away from Harris. But the party's leadership went with her anyway.
Li's central accusation is that Democratic leaders ignored their own research because they were afraid of the political consequences of bypassing a Black woman who already held the vice presidency. She said the party viewed skipping Harris as a move that would fracture its coalition.
"They knew that skipping over Kamala Harris would be a slap in the face to the bedrock of the party, which is Black women in particular, and they just wouldn't have it."
That fear extended beyond traditional constituencies. Li pointed to Harris's online supporter base, known as the "K-Hive," as another source of pressure. "People were terrified of the online mob," she said. "The K-Hive isn't that numerous, but they're very, very toxic and they're very coordinated. No one wants to be labeled as a racist."
Li also described the public enthusiasm Democrats displayed for Harris after Biden's withdrawal as a performance. When asked about the party's apparent unity behind the vice president, she called it "Oscar-worthy. Honestly, truly Oscar-worthy."
Representatives for Harris did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
Li's account fits a pattern of accusations from former fundraisers about Harris's behind-the-scenes behavior during the transition from Biden's candidacy. Li has previously claimed that Harris positioned herself close to Biden's donor network while publicly pledging loyalty, a move that, according to Li, made Harris the choice the party could not easily reject once Biden stepped aside.
Li's insider critique does not stop at the nomination process. She has also spoken publicly about the culture of overconfidence that infected the Harris campaign once it was underway. In one account, Li said a senior Harris campaign official told her directly that Harris would win Iowa, a state Donald Trump carried in 2016 by ten points and in 2020 by eight.
Trump won Iowa in 2024 with 56 percent to Harris's 42.7 percent, a margin of more than 13 points. National Review reported Li's recollection of the exchange: "Someone even told me, we're going to win Iowa. And I gave them a weird look. But he was insistent. This is someone high up in the campaign, telling me that we would win in ruby-red Iowa."
That kind of detachment from electoral reality, Li and other critics have argued, was not an accident. It was the product of a party apparatus that rewarded loyalty over candor and punished anyone who questioned the chosen narrative, first about Biden's fitness, then about Harris's viability.
Li's book reportedly addresses how many top party figures had long known Biden's age created an unavoidable political liability but declined to act on that knowledge until it was too late to run a competitive open process.
Since Harris's loss, major Democratic donors have reportedly grown weary of Harris, raising questions about whether the party's financial base will support another run.
Harris's defeat in November triggered a wave of recriminations inside the party. Trump won the Electoral College decisively, flipped at least four battleground states, and became the first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004. Democrats pointed fingers in every direction, at Biden for waiting too long to step aside, at the campaign for choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as Harris's running mate, and at third-party candidates for siphoning votes in key states.
One Harris aide told Politico bluntly: "Joe Biden is the singular reason Kamala Harris and Democrats lost." Li herself told the Washington Examiner, "I know a lot of people are probably wondering tonight what would have happened had Shapiro been on the ticket."
Third-party candidates compounded the damage. Green Party candidate Jill Stein captured 18 percent of the vote in Dearborn, Michigan, while Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Trump after suspending his own campaign, moves that ate into Harris's margins in states she could not afford to lose.
Yet despite the scale of the defeat, Harris has already begun positioning herself for another run. She has courted the progressive left with calls to scrap the Electoral College and expand the Supreme Court, and she has reached out to figures on the party's socialist wing as part of what appears to be early 2028 maneuvering.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, one of the names who polled ahead of Harris in Li's account, has already pledged to step aside for Harris in a 2028 primary, a gesture that may say more about the party's unchanged fear of crossing her coalition than about any renewed confidence in her candidacy.
Li's claims rest on her own account. She has not released the polling data itself, and key details remain unknown, the poll's methodology, sample size, margin of error, and the full list of operatives who saw the results. No independent verification of the survey has surfaced. These are the assertions of a single former insider who has since left the party, and they should be weighed accordingly.
But the broader picture Li describes, a party that knew its nominee was weak, chose her anyway for reasons unrelated to electability, and then staged public enthusiasm to paper over private doubts, is consistent with the scale of the loss that followed. Trump did not just beat Harris. He won the popular vote. He flipped battleground after battleground. The party's own post-election finger-pointing confirmed that something had gone deeply wrong long before Election Day.
Li summed up the party's public display of unity behind Harris in two words: "Oscar-worthy." If her account is accurate, the Democrats' 2024 nomination was not a democratic process or even a strategic one. It was a casting decision made out of fear, and the audience did not buy the performance.
