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.
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“I ultimately don’t believe that it was about the issue of ‘trans.’ I think that it made her seem out of touch, and it was sort of a pseudo-economic ad underneath it, because he was saying you’re going to pay for it with taxpayer money,” Fulks said, adding that the fact the ads used video of Harris stating her position in her own words made them more damaging.
“We tested a ton of responses to this, direct responses, and none of them ever tested as well as basically her talking about what she would do… the future, the type of president that she would be,” Fulks said.
The campaign’s internal research, Fulks said, indicated they should focus their message on attacking Trump or introducing Harris to voters in a positive way, rather than defending her from Trump’s attacks. (Plouffe noted that two Democratic candidates did put out ads responding to anti-trans attacks; neither won their race.)
“If we spent this entire race pushing back on immigration attacks or crime attacks and pushing back against trans attacks, at what point are we bringing Trump down and/or introducing the vice president on our own terms?” Fulks said. “We’re playing on their field.”