Senior advisers to Vice President Kamala Harris’ failed presidential campaign suggested this week that there just wasn’t much else Harris could have done to beat Donald Trump.
Harris couldn’t have distanced herself from President Joe Biden, they said, because she was loyal. She couldn’t have responded more forcefully to attacks over trans rights, because doing so would have been playing Trump’s game.
And she might not have had much chance of winning anyway, given the deficit she inherited from Biden when he dropped out of the race in July.
“We were hopeful. I don’t know how optimistic we were, but we thought, OK, this is tied, and if a couple things break our way [we could win],” David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the campaign, said Tuesday on the “Pod Save America” podcast in a joint interview with fellow Harris campaign alums Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks and Stephanie Cutter.
Plouffe said the campaign’s internal polling never had Harris ahead of Trump.
“We didn’t get the breaks we needed on Election Day,” he said. “I think it surprised people, because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.”
There’s no doubt that voter anger over high prices hurt Harris, just as it has hurt incumbent politicians all over the world. Since Trump’s victory, however, Democrats have debated the relative impacts of other factors, such as the campaign’s muted response to Trump’s anti-trans TV ads and Harris’ decision not to say how she’d be different from Biden.
During an early October appearance on “The View,” Sunny Hostin, one of the hosts of the daytime talk show, asked Harris if there was anything she would have done differently than Biden, whose approval rating had been underwater since 2021.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris said, in an answer ready-made for a Trump TV ad. “And I’ve been part of most of the decisions that have had impact.”
Many Democratic pollsters and strategists have questioned why Harris didn’t give some example of how she’d be different, such as by saying she would have acted faster than Biden did to reduce migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Cutter said the campaign heard the second-guessing ― but, she said, Harris was merely being true to herself and loyal to Biden, and saying otherwise would have backfired.
“We knew we had to show her as her own person and point to the future and not try to rehash the past,” Cutter said. “But she also felt that she was part of the administration, and unless we said something like, ‘Well, I would have handled the border completely differently,’ we were never going to satisfy anybody.”
“She had tremendous loyalty to President Biden,” Cutter continued. “Imagine if we said, ‘Well, we would have taken this approach on the border.’ Imagine the round of stories coming out after that, of people saying, ‘Well, she never said that in the meeting.’”
Since Election Day, Democrats have also debated the impact of Trump’s anti-trans messaging, with some lawmakers questioning the party’s fealty to trans rights activists with uncompromising positions. The Trump campaign spent significant resources on ads highlighting Harris’ past support for gender-affirming care, including surgery, for people incarcerated in federal prisons.
Fulks, Harris’ former deputy campaign manager, called those ads “very effective,” though he and Plouffe said they doubted whether the ads actually moved voters. Some polling has shown the issue moved independent voters who broke for Trump.
“I don’t ultimately think the issue was really about ‘trans rights.’ I believe it made her appear out of touch, and the ad was almost a disguised economic argument, with the implication that taxpayers would be footing the bill,” Fulks explained. He added that the impact was worsened by the fact that the ads used footage of Harris stating her position in her own words, which made them more damaging.
“We tested a lot of responses to this, direct rebuttals, but none of them performed as well as simply having her focus on the future and what kind of president she would be,” Fulks said.
According to the campaign’s internal research, Fulks said, the strategy should have been to focus on attacking Trump or presenting Harris in a positive light, rather than defending her from Trump’s attacks. Plouffe pointed out that two other Democratic candidates had responded to similar anti-trans attacks in ads, but neither of them won their races.
“If we spent the entire campaign just countering attacks on immigration, crime, and trans rights, when would we have had the chance to bring Trump down or introduce the vice president on our own terms?” Fulks asked. “We would be playing on their turf.”
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