Over the last three weeks, Democrats have been grappling with Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss in the 2024 election as they look ahead to another Donald Trump presidency.
For the first time since Election Day, the leadership team from the Harris campaign spoke publicly about what happened, on the podcast "Pod Save America."
On the latest episode, host Dan Pfeiffer spoke with Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, senior adviser David Plouffe, deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks and senior adviser Stephanie Cutter, who provided insights into some of the more controversial decisions that were made during Harris’s whirlwind 107-day campaign.
Here are four main takeaways from the episode:
The uphill battle of the Harris campaign
Plouffe told Pfeiffer that the fact that the race had reached a dead heat by Election Day was an accomplishment for the Harris campaign given the significant challenges it faced, such as President Biden’s low approval rating.
“At the end of the day, the political atmosphere was pretty brutal, and that’s not an excuse,” Plouffe said. “About 72% of the country said they were angry and dissatisfied. You had Trump’s approval rating from his first term frustratingly high, 48 to 51 depending on the state. Obviously the incumbent president’s approval rating, around 38 to 41 depending on the state, and I think the economy and inflation were still driving a lot of votes,” Plouffe explained.
Should Harris have spoken more about her character and not have focused on Trump?
Pfeiffer asked Plouffe about a debate outside the Harris campaign that the most important thing for Harris to do was to educate voters about who she was as a candidate, rather than focus on Trump, because voters already knew all there was to know about him. “I take it you guys disagreed with that analysis and you felt the need to knock his numbers down a little bit, is that right?” Pfeiffer asked Plouffe.
“Of course, I mean, that is nonsense,” Plouffe replied.
Plouffe reminded listeners that Americans living in reliably blue states like California and New York, or reliably red states like Alabama and Florida, experienced Harris’s presidential campaign differently than those living in battleground states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. Plouffe argued that while the campaign did drive core messages on Harris’s positive personal qualities and the economy in those battlegrounds, it couldn’t just focus on those issues alone.
“When you’ve got someone whose first term was judged favorably enough by enough people to give him the election, and people are dissatisfied about where you are now and you’re part of that administration, you have to basically raise the stakes,” Plouffe told Pfeiffer.
“For us it was on the economy, it was on the fact that all the people who stood in [Trump’s] way last time were warning us about him, it was about Project 2025, it was about abortion ... to win a race like this given the political atmospherics, which were quite challenging, we had to raise the risk of a Trump second term,” Plouffe explained.
Why didn’t Harris say she would have done things differently than Biden?
Harris received a lot of flak from Republicans after she said in an October interview on ABC's The View that there wasn't anything she would have done differently than Biden, who has a low approval rating, has done as president. "There is not a thing that comes to mind," Harris said. "And I've been part of most of the decisions that have had impact."
Pfeiffer asked Harris’s team about her answer in the interview and if she should have done more to distance herself from President Biden.
“We knew we had to show her as her own person,” Cutter said. “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.”
Cutter said that the campaign sought to differentiate Harris from Biden by talking about how she is part of a different generation, most of her career took place outside Washington, D.C., and she has a record of reaching across the aisle.
“We were trying to tell a story and give the impression that she was different without pointing to a specific issue,” Cutter explained.
Why didn’t the Harris team respond to the attack ad on trans issues from the Trump campaign?
In the days leading up to the election, the Trump campaign spent tens of millions of dollars on an advertisement that attacked Harris's support for trans-related issues.
Pfeiffer asked the team why the campaign didn’t specifically respond to the ad.
Fulks, who oversaw paid advertising for the Harris campaign, said it wasn’t something that the team missed; rather, they decided that responding to it wasn’t the best tactic.
“Obviously it was a very effective ad at the end,” Fulks replied. “I ultimately don’t believe it was about the issue of trans. I think that it made her seem out of touch ... we tested a ton of direct responses to this. And none of them ever tested as well as basically her talking about the future, the type of president that she would be.”
