Harris Campaign Managers Blame Election Loss on ‘Ferocious Headwinds,’ Limited Time

Harris campaign advisers said they were in ‘crisis management mode’ after Biden exited the race.

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at Howard University in Washington, on Nov. 6, 2024. Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Campaign managers behind Kamala Harris’s presidential bid blamed her loss to President-elect Donald Trump on their limited time to promote the vice president as a “new generation of leadership.”

The Harris–Waltz campaign team of Jen O’Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quintin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter discussed where they fell short on the progressive podcast “Pod Save America,” hosted by Dan Pfeiffer, who was strategy and communications adviser to President Barack Obama.

“In 107 days, what typically takes us a year and a half to two years in our presidential campaign, we were defining someone who was wholly undefined from the start, trying to remind people about the opponent and what life was like underneath him, and also take into account what the political environment was and the realities that we had to deal with,” Cutter said during the podcast published on Nov. 26.

President Joe Biden announced that he would no longer seek reelection in July. In August, Harris became the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, giving campaign managers only a few months to prepare for the 2024 presidential election.

The campaign advisers were “honestly in crisis management mode” after the president exited the race and had three weeks to “flip a convention that was being built around Joe Biden,” Fulks said.

Harris had a “huge deficit in favorability” because of negative press and a lack of voter knowledge of where she stood, Cutter said.

When asked on “The View” in October what she would have done differently in her role as vice president, Harris answered, “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of, and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact, the work that we have done.”

When asked on “Pod Save America” if Harris should or should not have done more to distance herself from Biden, O’Malley Dillon said that it wouldn’t have helped to separate herself from Biden by cherry-picking what should have been done instead.

“Look, vice presidents never break with their presidents,” O’Malley Dillon said. “The only time in recent memory is when Pence broke with Trump.”

Harris chose to remain loyal to Biden to avoid changing precedent, O’Malley Dillon said.

“Our focus was to look at the future,” she said.

‘Very Effective Ad’

The campaign leaders also discussed ads targeting Harris’s stance on government-funded transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants and prisoners.

Fulks said the team chose not to respond directly and focus on the objectives of defining and defending Harris.

In looking at the core issues such as the economy and immigration, the transgender issue fell at the bottom as a concern for voters, according to their research, Fulks said.

“Obviously, it was a very effective ad in the end,” Fulks said. “I ultimately don’t believe that it was about the issue of trans.”

Fulks said the ad accomplished two goals: it portrayed Harris as being out of touch with the American people, and it suggested that citizens would be the ones footing the bill for the transgender surgeries.

On Harris not appearing on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, Cutter said Harris was willing but that they weren’t able to schedule a good time.

“We had discussions with Joe Rogan’s team,” Cutter said. “They were great. They wanted us to come on. We wanted to come on. Will she do it sometime in the future? Maybe. Who knows. But it didn’t ultimately impact the outcome one way or the other.”

Plouffe attributed Harris’s loss to prickly political conditions.

“We were dealing with ferocious headwinds,” he said. “So we had a complicated puzzle to put together here in terms of the voters.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.