The Atlantic / Ron Brownstein: Why They Lost [View all]

[Dennis Donovan]

The Atlantic / Ron Brownstein - (archived: https://archive.ph/q2GVR ) Why They Lost

The Harris-campaign leadership believes that the Democrats narrowed the gap on Trump that Biden left—but not by enough.

By Ronald Brownstein
December 2, 2024, 7:50 AM ET



In the past few days, four of the senior officials who directed Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign spoke with me about how the race unfolded, from the chaotic first weeks after President Joe Biden’s sudden withdrawal until the final hours of Election Day. My conversations with Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair; David Plouffe, the former Barack Obama campaign manager enlisted as a senior adviser; Quentin Fulks, the principal deputy campaign manager with responsibility for broadcast advertising; and Rob Flaherty, a deputy campaign manager in charge of digital operations and advertising, offered a view into their decision making through every stage of the campaign.

In these interviews, and another one that these principals conducted recently with alumni of the Obama campaigns on the podcast Pod Save America, the senior Harris-campaign leadership was notably unremorseful about the choices it made in Harris’s failed sprint to the White House. Instead, the officials stressed the welter of difficult decisions that rapidly engulfed them from the moment Biden stepped aside. No president in modern times had withdrawn from the race so close to Election Day. Immediately, Harris had to formally secure the Democratic nomination, put her own stamp on the Biden campaign operation, introduce herself to voters, and begin the process of digging out from the deficit in the polls that Biden left after his disastrous June debate performance against Donald Trump.

“Our first week, it was like, Well, we need a biography ad; we need to talk about the border; we need to lay out an economic contrast; we need to get health care in there, abortion,” Plouffe told me. “If you have six, seven, eight months, you storyboard all this stuff, you have a narrative arc. Everything was smashed and collided here.”

The analysis of the race from Harris’s senior team won’t satisfy the shell-shocked Democratic critics who believe that the campaign’s tactical choices and the vice president’s occasional missteps as a candidate contributed materially to her defeat. They described what critics consider her most obvious blunders as largely irrelevant to the outcome.

Some on the left believe that Harris depressed turnout among the party’s core voters by emphasizing her support from anti-Trump Republicans such as former Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Some in the center believe she erred by not renouncing more forcefully the progressive positions she’d adopted during her ill-fated 2020 primary run. Others wonder how her campaign could raise more than $1 billion and still end up losing and in debt. Across the party, the most commonly held criticism has been that Harris should have done more to separate herself from Biden.

Against those complaints, her campaign leadership argued that no matter the tactics or the messages they tried, Harris could never fully escape the vortex of voter discontent with the economy, the country’s overall direction, and Biden’s performance as president. Even as voters remained disenchanted on all those fronts—arguably, because they remained so disenchanted—retrospective assessments of Trump’s first term were rising, to a point where, in the VoteCast survey conducted by the AP and NORC, a 52 percent majority approved of his performance. Only 42 percent of voters approved of Biden’s.

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