Mark Halperin to Newsmax: FEMA Worker's Actions 'Outrageous'

News of a FEMA worker's order to skip houses in Florida where signs were posted supporting President-elect Donald Trump is "outrageous," and raises questions about the agency's culture, political analyst Mark Halperin said on Newsmax Sunday. 

"You don't need to be a partisan to understand, as FEMA leadership has said, that this is completely in contradiction to their mission," Halperin told Newsmax's "Sunday Agenda." "It's amazing that such a thing could happen. It's kind of amazing that somebody would write such a thing down."

"This is a clear violation of FEMA’s core values and principles to help people regardless of their political affiliation," FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said in a statement, announcing that the worker, who has not been named, has been fired. "This was reprehensible.”

"I think in this case they acted pretty quickly," Halperin acknowledged. "Again, it seems like it's a one-off, but it does raise questions about the culture of an agency that has got to be completely nonpartisan in a crisis."

Halperin also on Sunday discussed the "postmortems" being done about Vice President Kamala Harris' loss to President-elect Donald Trump last week.

"There's two ways to think about it," said Halperin. "Should [Joe] Biden have run? Should someone else have been the nominee besides Harris? How did Harris do as a candidate?"

But even more "profoundly," the question is about the voters. 

"Voters don't really care about tactics and strategy," said Halperin. "They wonder which of the candidates is going to be a good steward of a good economy, be a fierce commander in chief, and keep the culture wars from impinging on their family and the values of their community."

And when the election is considered in that manner, it's "little surprise to my sources, including a lot of Democratic sources, that Kamala Harris was not able to define herself anything like as attractive enough for the undecided voters as Donald Trump was."

Harris also underperformed compared to Biden's 2020 numbers, and Halperin said that with COVID being a factor in that race, "a lot of Americans did not think as fondly of the Trump years as they do now."

But now, with Harris, "the Democrats had a candidate who did not have connections to a lot of the constituency groups, labor, Black voters, Hispanic voters that were a big part of any Democratic coalition since Barack Obama that Joe Biden inherited," said Halperin. "Harris simply didn't have that level of enthusiasm."

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