In the final sprint to the election, Kamala Harris’ campaign — at her insistence, aides and allies said — started playing Donald Trump’s most incendiary comments on the jumbotrons at her rallies, displaying in technicolor his meandering, racist and, sometimes, violent rhetoric.
It was an emphatic reminder of the stakes of the election. And it hardly seemed to help her at all. The result Wednesday was brutal for Harris, a bloodbath for Democrats across the map.
Harris inherited a campaign from Joe Biden over the summer that appeared to be flatlining, given the president’s unpopularity and inability to carry a message. And after Democrats excised Biden from the ticket, she rapidly consolidated her moribund party, rallying women, setting TikTok and Instagram creators ablaze with supportive memes and raising eye-popping sums from donors.
But the momentum advisers insisted she’d built failed to materialize. She never sufficiently buried Biden’s ghost, severely hamstringing her ability to sell voters on the idea that hers was the turn-the-page candidacy.
It happened, simply, because Harris refused to make a clean break from the last four years when voters indicated that’s what they wanted. Worse, she hesitated to draw any daylight between herself and her boss on Biden’s biggest vulnerability — his stewardship over the economy — nor identify any specific way her presidency would be different from his tenure beyond naming a Republican to her Cabinet.
Some close allies and even a few aides privately questioned why she continued to hold him so closely, particularly because her campaign didn’t try to make extensive use of their record. Yet inside her campaign, there was little sense Harris should bear the brunt of the blame, with aides pointing to how she moved battleground numbers in her favor and held down Trump’s margins, and a pervasive feeling that Biden and broader anti-incumbent fervor put her in a difficult, even impossible position.
“We ran the best campaign we could, considering Joe Biden was president,” grumbled one Harris aide granted anonymity to speak freely. “Joe Biden is the singular reason Kamala Harris and Democrats lost tonight.”
Another Harris aide said it was clear Biden should have made a graceful exit much sooner, allowing Democrats to hold a primary they believed Harris would have won.
So resounding was the thumping that some of the party’s next-generation leaders were signaling the need for a deep autopsy of the party’s failures to stop the red wave.
“This is not just one county. This is not just one storyline. This is not just someone using this to explain their priors, right? This is pretty systematic,” said Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle of Philadelphia. “This is a solid Republican victory, and the largest Republican victory by a presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984. I don’t think any Democrat who wants to improve upon this situation should sugar coat this.”
Even the advantages Harris’ team had long boasted about — its professional ground game versus Trump’s band of MAGA activists and billionaire rebels, along with Democrats’ perceived strength across the suburbs, were blunted. And inside the campaign, some elected officials and strategists had been warning that not only was their operation lagging, but it was being poorly run.
Three weeks before Election Day in Pennsylvania, the biggest swing state, Jewish Democrats and their allies met behind closed doors with Harris officials in Pittsburgh, according to four people who attended or were briefed on the discussion. They said the surrogate operation was not up to snuff, a complaint echoed in other key states. They said the Pennsylvania team lacked relationships with key elected officials; that this mattered because it meant validators weren’t effectively being used to help persuade voters to support a candidate they barely knew.
The infighting and second-guessing was already beginning.
One Democrat granted anonymity to describe a private conversation called the meeting “a venting.” By that point, people were already voting by mail.
“There’s no amount of social media ads or TV ads or podcast interviews or anything that you can do that’s going to influence people because their ballots are cast and they can’t go back and change it,” a second Democrat said.
Across the state, in Philadelphia, Latino and Black Democrats held similar private meetings with Harris’ team in the weeks leading up to Election Day, where they made many of the same complaints.
And on Wednesday, Democrats were also starting to point fingers at Harris’ data team. A Pennsylvania Democratic strategist, granted anonymity to speak freely, said that the Harris campaign predicted higher turnout in key counties such as Chester and Montgomery in the Philadelphia suburbs.
“This is looking like Robby Mook 2.0,” the person said.
It wasn’t lost on them that organizing was supposed to be where they had a clear edge. And that wasn’t the only department that, under the radar, was falling short of expectations.
In a curtailed race where the two candidates’ daily activities often overshadowed mechanics, Harris went weeks running even with, or even trailing, Trump on TV and streaming services. Indeed, the free-wheeling and unstrategic Trump seemed to mask the quieter and yet ultimately effective campaign that his advisers were waging in ads that battered Harris for days on end without fulsome responses.
While Democrats led by the Future Forward PAC launched unprecedented spending into the battlegrounds with a focus on Harris as a middle-class warrior, Trump and his allies spent tens of millions on spots that left a more visceral mark — such as those featuring Harris’ support for providing taxpayer-funded gender transition-related medical care for detained immigrants and federal prisoners. Others captured her unwillingness to separate herself from Biden.
It wasn’t that Democrats didn’t offer warnings about what they portrayed as Trump’s oligarchic intentions, explained a Democrat close to the campaign. Rather, they feared he was already so well defined that more focus should have gone to defining her priorities and making specific appeals to Black and Hispanic voters.
Harris had just more than 100 days to mount her campaign — something viewed by Democrats who know her best as an advantage, freeing her from an ideologically-packed contested primary and the rigors of a protracted general election campaign.
And her plan was relatively straightforward. Even before Democrats pushed Biden from the top of the ticket, Harris had quietly laid the groundwork for her campaign weeks earlier when she gathered several of her top advisers and a few close allies to begin preparing for what they imagined would be the vice presidential debate.
Biden at the time was still running. And with Trump yet to pick a running mate, Harris had no opponent for the vice presidential debate. So they started to loosely devise messages that framed the choice as one between a longtime prosecutor in service of everyday Americans and Trump, a convicted felon out for himself, according to five people involved in the early discussions.
The plan they formulated was to try to largely focus the vice presidential debate on Trump, with his pick as a mere stand-in; someone that Harris would paint as loyal to the former president and not the country. It was how they envisioned her running as the No. 2 to Biden: making the election a referendum on Trump and not on her unpopular boss, who was on the outs with Democrats.
Harris and her team were under an exceedingly compressed timeline to execute. She had to sort out her new staff in Wilmington and crucial battlegrounds and assemble a core inner circle; channel the torrent of donations that started to flow into the campaign’s coffers; select a running mate; prepare for the debate with Trump; deliver an acceptance speech at the DNC and then execute on her debate plan. All went according to plan.
Core to Harris’ pitch, and from which her tactical decisions flowed, was the idea that she represented the safer option.
That’s why she spent so much time campaigning with Republicans and never-Trumpers; why she rhetorically draped herself in the American flag and relentlessly advertised her own middle-class upbringing while bombarding the airwaves with messages about Trump’s dangerous economic policies. It’s why she wanted to appear as the law-and-order candidate who was out to stop the country from being taken over by a convicted felon. It’s why she didn’t lean in on talking about the historic nature of her candidacy and nomination.
After the initial elation among Democrats settled, Harris began to face questions from the media — and criticism from Trump and his campaign — over her not sitting for interviews with major news outlets. It took Harris more than a month before she sat down for her first extended interview, and then afterwards only went on a few select shows and friendly media outlets.
Harris chose not to provide extensive explanation, or sometimes any rationale at all, for the gaping chasm between many of her past policy positions on everything from hydraulic fracturing (a huge issue in Pennsylvania) and clean car mandates (a big deal in Michigan) to providing citizenship to unauthorized immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. She led with a “my principles haven’t changed” approach that would have to serve as a catch-all.
Most around her supported the strategic decision, seeing it as “less is more” and contending that giving lengthy explanations would subject her to new questions from the news media and provide fresh fodder for Trump and Republicans to launch unrelenting attacks. However, it missed an opportunity to give off even the slightest whiff that she understood people might still have questions about how she could drift so far on issue after issue.
And other calculations Harris made at least internally seemed even riskier — notably the refusal to separate from Biden, even after the president publicly offered her his permission to do so. Harris’ aides during the campaign stressed that this was a line she was unwilling to cross, offering that doing so would undermine a litany of public statements she’d made about the president and blow holes in her own record of accomplishments in the White House.
Eugene Daniels contributed to this report.
