Harris Responds To LA Times, Washington Post Non-Endorsements

Late on Monday, Vice President and Presidential candidate Kamala Harris responded to how both the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post both refused to endorse her through Op-Eds on Monday, calling the decisions a “Disappointment.”

Last week, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post chose not to run endorsements of Harris, even though drafts of each were ready. Editors from both papers subsequently resigned. Massive numbers of subscribers quit subscriptions. While the Times doesn’t have the exact figures out (estimated to be in the thousands), WaPo’s loss was estimated to be at around 200,000 digital subscribers.

Now former LA Times Editorials Editor Mariel Garza told the Columbia Journal Review “I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent. In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up. I didn’t think we were going to change our readers’ minds—our readers, for the most part, are Harris supporters. We’re a very liberal paper. I didn’t think we were going to change the outcome of the election in California.

“But two things concern me: This is a point in time where you speak your conscience no matter what. And an endorsement was the logical next step after a series of editorials we’ve been writing about how dangerous Trump is to democracy, about his unfitness to be president, about his threats to jail his enemies. We have made the case in editorial after editorial that he shouldn’t be reelected.”

However, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong responded back on X that “So many comments about the Los Angeles Times Editorial Board not providing a Presidential endorsement this year. Let me clarify how this decision came about. The Editorial Board was provided the opportunity to draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation. In addition, the Board was asked to provide their understanding of the policies and plans enunciated by the candidates during this campaign and its potential effect on the nation in the next four years. In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years. Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision. Please vote.”

So many comments about the @latimes Editorial Board not providing a Presidential endorsement this year. Let me clarify how this decision came about.

The Editorial Board was provided the opportunity to draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH…

— Dr. Pat Soon-Shiong (@DrPatSoonShiong) October 23, 2024

At WaPo, it was pretty much the same comments between the editors who quit and owner Jeff Bezos. And all through this, Harris never responded to the situation, likely due to the areas where the papers are (California, District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia)  being heavily Democratic. But as the stories have remained headline news for about a week and not yet run out of the news cycle, Harris finally responded on Monday.

“It’s disappointing, no doubt,” said Harris calling in to a radio call-in show on Monday. “The publications’ non-endorsements gets back to my point about who is Donald Trump because he is the one, right, who is up for election with me. …Some of your listeners may know and others may not, which is that , look, it’s billionaires in Donald Trump’s club. That’s who he hangs out with. That’s who he cares about.

“He’s not sitting around thinking about what he can do to take care of your grandmother and your grandfather. He’s thinking about people like himself or himself and all of his grievances and all that makes him angry about how he has personally been treated, as opposed to worrying about how you have been treated and what his responsibility is to lift you up.”

However, the endorsement debacle hasn’t helped Harris in the polls. On the 23rd, when the LA Times didn’t publish the Op-Ed, Harris was up nationwide by only 1.8 points in aggregate polling. On Tuesday, that lead had shrunk to 1.4 points. In California, during the same time, Harris went from a 23.9 point lead to a 23.7 point lead. In both cases, it showed that voters just really don’t care about what editorial boards have to say and what Soon-Shiong proposed would have likely helped Harris more.

“If the editorial board did what Soon-Shiong wanted, they could have gone all out and listed everything wrong to make their point based on the volume of issues,” explained Gary Harris, who analyzes op-ed endorsements, to the Globe on Tuesday. “Instead they decided to die on the hill of endorsements. Which, it should be noted that the Post has only been endorsing candidates since 1988. For the LA Times, they have only had endorsements since 2008. Newspaper endorsements are a relatively new thing, and many don’t even do them.

“If this were any other year, the owner deciding not to publish an endorsement would have been fine. But this is not a normal year. And then how Harris responded, she kinda twisted it around. If anything, it shows just how polarizing the election is, and people are upset over a policy going away that is quite new.”