A onetime Biden-Harris fundraiser claims the Democratic Party's own internal polling showed Kamala Harris finishing dead last among potential replacements for Joe Biden, and that leaders picked her anyway out of fear they'd be called racist.
Lindy Li, a former member of the Democratic National Finance Committee who has since switched her party affiliation, made the claim in an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital. Li says the poll tested Harris against California Governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as possible nominees if Biden stepped aside. Harris, Li says, came in behind all of them.
Li is promoting a new book, "Unburdened," which she says chronicles the months leading up to Biden's withdrawal from the 2024 race, the party's internal deliberations over who should replace him, and what she describes as long-ignored warning signs about Biden's decline. The book is published by HarperCollins.
Li's sharpest claim involves the gap between the polling data she says she saw and the party's final decision. She told Fox News Digital that Harris didn't just trail the field, she wasn't competitive within it.
"Kamala Harris came in dead last. It wasn't even close. 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 poll as an internal effort commissioned within the party and circulated among a tight circle of operatives and fundraisers on the National Finance Committee, a body whose membership she compared to a papal conclave.
"I'm part of the National Finance Committee. The list of membership is guarded like the papal conclave. But people talk. It's a very small group of people. That poll was commissioned internally."
She acknowledged that campaign-funded polling is often little more than "funded propaganda," but said this survey was different. "In this case, we wanted an objective overview of who could actually mount the most formidable opposition to Trump," she said.
Li did not provide the exact polling numbers for each candidate, the sample size, or the methodology. Fox News Digital noted that representatives for Harris did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
If the data pointed away from Harris, why did the party still choose her? Li's answer is blunt: identity politics and fear. She told Fox News Digital that Democratic leaders believed bypassing the sitting vice president, a Black woman, would alienate the party's most loyal voting bloc.
"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."
Li also pointed to what she called the coordinated intimidation of Harris's online supporter base, known as the "K-Hive." She described the group as small but aggressive enough to silence internal dissent.
"People were terrified of the online mob. 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's account fits a pattern that has emerged since the 2024 election. She previously accused Harris of running a "charade" with top donors before Biden left the race, claiming Harris had quietly positioned herself near Biden's fundraising network well before his withdrawal.
In the Fox News Digital interview, Li described Harris's maneuvering in similar terms, saying Harris "positioned herself close to Biden's donors" and "made herself the choice the party couldn't turn a blind eye to." Li summed up the performance in two words.
"Oscar-worthy. Honestly, truly Oscar-worthy."
Li's claims carry extra weight because the strategy she describes ended in a decisive defeat. Donald Trump beat Harris in the Electoral College, won the popular vote, the first Republican presidential candidate to do so since 2004, and flipped at least four battleground states, the Washington Examiner reported. Democrats have been pointing fingers internally ever since.
The disconnect between the party's internal confidence and the actual result was stark. Li herself told National Review that a high-level Harris campaign official insisted the campaign would win Iowa, a state Trump carried by more than 13 points, 56% to 42.7%, after winning it in both 2016 and 2020.
That kind of detachment from reality has become a recurring theme in post-2024 Democratic autopsies. National Review's Jim Geraghty argued that the mainstream media's coverage of American politics is "so often so indistinguishable from cheerleading for the Democratic Party that Democrats never actually have a good, reliable, realistic sense of how they're doing."
Li's book and her public comments suggest the problem ran deeper than media cheerleading. If her account is accurate, the party's own data told leaders that Harris was the weakest option on the table, and they chose her anyway, not because they believed she could win, but because they feared the consequences of passing her over.
The fallout has been visible across the party. Democratic candidates in battleground states have rejected Harris's campaign help ahead of 2028, a signal that rank-and-file candidates see her brand as a liability rather than an asset.
A Fox News Digital video segment on Li's claims noted that Democratic leaders were reportedly aware of Harris's poor internal numbers but feared the political fallout of bypassing the sitting vice president. The segment reinforced the core tension Li describes: data versus identity-group pressure, with pressure winning.
Meanwhile, the 2028 field is already shifting. Gavin Newsom's presidential odds have cratered, the same Newsom whom Li says outperformed Harris in the internal poll that party leaders chose to ignore.
Li's account rests entirely on her own word. She has not released the poll itself, its methodology, or its raw numbers. No second source in the available reporting has independently confirmed the existence or the results of the survey she describes. That matters.
But Li is not an anonymous tipster. She served on the Democratic National Finance Committee, worked closely with top donors and the DNC, and fundraised for the Biden-Harris ticket. She is putting her name on a book, published by a major house, that makes these claims in detail. If the account is fabricated, it would be an extraordinarily reckless career move for someone who operated at the center of the party's money operation.
Harris's team has not disputed the claims. Fox News Digital said her representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Whether they eventually do, and what they say, will shape how much weight this account carries going forward.
The broader question Li raises is not really about polling methodology. It is about whether the Democratic Party's leadership class chose a nominee they knew was weak because they were more afraid of an internal backlash than of losing a general election. Li says the answer is yes. The 2024 results suggest she may have a point.
Some Democrats, like Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, have staked their political futures on Harris even as others sprint in the opposite direction. The split tells its own story about a party still unable to reckon honestly with what happened in 2024.
When a party picks its nominee based on who it's afraid to skip rather than who it believes can win, the voters notice. They did in November 2024, and Democrats are still paying the price.