In a striking admission that immediately set off alarm on social media, former Vice President Kamala Harris said Tuesday that her campaign had received inside data from Fox News’ closely guarded election night “war room” during the 2024 presidential race.
Speaking on The View, Harris recounted the evening of her failed bid against President Donald Trump, describing what she cast as a deeply personal and emotional night.
Yet her remarks also revealed what critics argue is a serious breach of journalistic ethics and potentially election integrity.
Harris told the hosts that her husband, Doug Emhoff, had just returned from campaigning with her brother-in-law in Pennsylvania, a pivotal battleground state. “I remember him being a little out of sorts, but there was so much happening,” Harris said.
She continued, “But on his way back from a rally where there was an incredible amount of enthusiasm, people on the ground were like, ‘We got it, we got it, we’re gonna do this,’ and then they talked with a mutual friend of ours who was over at Fox News, in the war room, who had been hearing about data that suggested things were not looking great in Pennsylvania.”
According to Harris, Emhoff later went into the shower and “prayed it was not gonna be a bad night.”
The former vice president claimed she had not even spoken to her husband about those tense hours until she began writing her new book. “It was that traumatic,” she said of her election defeat to Trump and the Republican Party.
But Harris’s casual disclosure that her team was receiving election-night data from Fox News’ internal operation — a nerve center typically sealed off from outside influence — sparked a storm of criticism.
For conservatives, it reinforced longstanding concerns about what they describe as collusion between the media and Democratic candidates.
“This is why we don’t trust Fox,” one pro-Trump account wrote in response, garnering more than 4,000 likes.
The former vice president’s remarks drew swift scrutiny not only because of the personal window they offered into her loss but also because they implied a trusted insider at one of the nation’s most influential news outlets was funneling information to a Democratic campaign. Even in Harris’s telling, her team was relying on this leak to gauge whether her path to the presidency was slipping away in Pennsylvania.
Her recollection comes less than a year after Harris lost decisively to Trump, who secured his political comeback on a platform that warned repeatedly about bias in the media and what he portrayed as a political class out of touch with ordinary Americans.
While Harris presented the moment as a private family story — her husband’s unease, his prayers, and her own delayed reckoning — her comments about Fox News injected a note of controversy. At a time when trust in institutions remains perilously low, Harris’s story may only deepen skepticism about the media’s impartiality and the fairness of the nation’s elections.
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