The architects of Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed presidential are ready to examine what went wrong that ultimately led to Donald Trump’s November 5 triumph. In their first post-election interview, they blame, among other things, her shortened campaign and a political environment poisoned against the Biden administration. Harris had too little time to define herself and her policies after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, four senior staffers told Pod Save America’s Dan Pfeiffer on Tuesday. Her close ties to the current president also hindered her chances at a time when voters from many backgrounds and demographic groups said they wanted change.
During the hour and 40-minute interview, Harris’s top advisors also acknowledged that Democrats are “getting creamed online” and losing critical ground to Republicans in a larger, longer-term culture war. “The Republicans have a well-tuned, well-oiled, well-invested echo chamber that exists beyond where they’re campaigning,” said David Plouffe, the well-known Democratic campaign consultant. “And it’s online. It reverberates through TikTok. It reverberates through the culture. There is a cultural dynamic that’s at play in politics today where it is converging like we’ve never seen, and we’re losing the culture war.”
But Harris’s staff pushed back on claims that a different media strategy might have turned the tide in the vice president’s favor. Stephanie Cutter, a senior advisor who oversaw messaging and communications, dismissed criticism that Harris might have performed better among young men and other hard-to-reach voters had she sat for an interview with the mega-podcaster Joe Rogan. “There’s a lot of intrigue around this—a lot of theories. It’s pretty simple,” Cutter said. “We wanted to do it … We had discussions with Joe Rogan’s team. They were great. They wanted us to come on. We wanted to come on. We tried to get a date to make it work, and ultimately we just weren’t able to find a date.” The interview might have garnered media attention, but wouldn’t have “changed anything” in terms of the ultimate outcome, Cutter said.
The Harris campaign’s overall theory of the election isn’t particularly surprising: They fault a series of challenges and mishaps that outside observers have also flagged. Harris entered the race late, saddled with the baggage of an unpopular administration. She then struggled to make sufficient inroads with key groups, including Latino voters and young men. Cultural and economic issues—especially public perceptions of inflation—pushed many of those voters into the arms of Republicans, campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon acknowledged. But Harris’s advisors disputed the argument that Trump achieved some blowout, unexpected win: “We saw a little bit of a drop in support in a few areas for us,” Dillon said. “So that ultimately, I think, is why we weren’t able to close the gap. It wasn’t so much that what we were seeing [from Trump voters] … was out of expectation.”
The advisors agreed, however, that Democrats need to address some urgent, large-scale defections from the party before the 2028 election. Less educated voters and voters of color have moved toward Republicans in each of the last three presidential elections: “We can’t afford any more erosion there. The math just doesn’t fucking work,” Plouffe said.
