Election 2024: The real reason Kamala Harris 'lost'

Kamala Harris' team, according to staffers and allies, began playing Donald Trump's most inflammatory statements on the jumbotrons at her rallies in the last days before the election, exposing his meandering, racist, and, at times, violent vocabulary in vivid color.

Kamala Harris.

Francis Chung/POLITICO

It was a stark reminder of the importance of the election. And it didn't appear to benefit her at all. The outcome Wednesday was devastating for Harris and a bloodbath for Democrats throughout the country.

Harris took over Joe Biden's campaign over the summer, which seemed to be stalling due to the president's unpopularity and inability to deliver a message. And once Democrats removed Biden from the ticket, she quickly united her dormant party, mobilizing women, energizing TikTok and Instagram artists with supporting memes, and garnering eye-popping sums in donations.

However, the momentum that advisers claimed she had established did not materialize. She never fully buried Biden's ghost, limiting her capacity to persuade Americans that hers was the turn-the-page candidacy.

It happened simply because Harris failed to make a clean break from the previous four years, despite voters' clear preferences. Worse, she was hesitant to distinguish herself from her boss on Biden's most vulnerable area - his economic stewardship — or to specify any particular ways her administration would vary from his, other than adding a Republican to her Cabinet.

Some close associates, including a few aides, privately questioned why she continued to keep him so close, especially because her campaign did not make heavy use of their record. Inside her campaign, however, 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, as well as a pervasive sense that Biden and broader anti-incumbent sentiment put her in a difficult, if not impossible, position.

"We ran the best campaign we could, considering Joe Biden was president," muttered a Harris staffer who was permitted anonymity to talk freely. "Joe Biden is the singular reason Kamala Harris and Democrats lost tonight."

Another Harris aide stated that Biden should have exited gracefully much sooner, allowing Democrats to conduct a primary in which Harris was expected to win.

The thrashing was so strong that several of the party's next-generation leaders indicated the need for a thorough examination of the party's failings to stem the red wave.

"This is not a single county. This is not a single plot. This isn't just someone explaining their priors, right? "This is fairly 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" when it comes to Pennsylvania. "I don't think any Democrat who wants to improve upon this situation should sugar coat this."

Even Harris' team's long-held advantages — its professional ground game versus Trump's band of MAGA fanatics and wealthy rebels, as well as Democrats' supposed strength in the suburbs — were dulled. And, within the campaign, certain elected leaders and strategists had warned that not only was their operation underperforming, but it was also badly administered.

According to four people who attended or were informed on the meeting, Jewish Democrats and their allies met behind closed doors with Harris officials in Pittsburgh three weeks before Election Day in Pennsylvania, the country's largest swing state. They said the surrogacy operation was subpar, a concern shared by other significant states. They said that the Pennsylvania team lacked contacts with major elected officials, which was important since it meant that validators were not being used successfully to persuade people to support a candidate they knew little about.

The infighting and second-guessing had already begun.

One Democrat who requested anonymity to reveal a private chat termed the meeting "a venting." via that time, individuals were already voting via 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 stated.

Across the state, in Philadelphia, Latino and Black Democrats conducted similar private talks with Harris' staff in the weeks leading up to Election Day, raising many of the same concerns.

On Wednesday, Democrats began pointing fingers at Harris' data team. A Pennsylvania Democratic consultant, who requested anonymity to talk freely, stated that the Harris team expected stronger turnout in important counties like as Chester and Montgomery in the Philadelphia suburbs.

"This is looking like Robby Mook 2.0," the individual stated.

They were well aware that organization was supposed to be their strong suit. That wasn't the only department that was underperforming.

In a tense contest when the two candidates' daily activities sometimes eclipsed mechanics, Harris spent weeks running even with, or even behind, Trump on TV and streaming services. Indeed, Trump's free-wheeling and unstrategic style appeared to hide his advisers' quieter, but ultimately effective, campaign, which featured commercials that pummeled Harris for days on end without eliciting a reaction.

While Democrats, led by the Future Forward PAC, spent unprecedented amounts of money in battleground states to portray Harris as a middle-class warrior, Trump and his allies spent tens of millions of dollars on ads that left a more visceral impression, such as those featuring Harris' support for taxpayer-funded gender transition-related medical care for detained immigrants and federal prisoners. Others noted her desire to disassociate herself from Biden.

Democrats did not ignore warnings about what they saw as Trump's oligarchic aspirations, according to a Democrat close to the campaign. Rather, they thought he was already so clearly defined that greater effort should have been directed into identifying her values and making particular overtures to Black and Hispanic voters.

Harris had little over 100 days to launch her candidacy, which Democrats who knew her well saw as a benefit, sparing her from an ideologically charged primary and the rigors of a lengthy general election campaign.

And her idea was quite simple. Even before Democrats pulled Biden off the top of the ticket, Harris had secretly established the basis for her campaign weeks before, gathering few of her closest advisors and a few close supporters to begin preparing for what they expected to be the vice presidential debate.

At the time, Biden was still running. Harris also had no opponent for the vice presidential debate because Trump had not yet chosen a running mate. According to five people who were part in the early conversations, they began to informally craft messaging framing the choice as one between a career prosecutor working for average Americans and Trump, a convicted felon out for himself.

They devised a strategy to focus the vice presidential discussion mostly on Trump, with his choice serving as a simple stand-in; someone Harris would portray as loyal to the past president rather than to the country. It was how they envisioned her running as Biden's running mate: making the election a referendum on Trump rather than her unpopular employer, who was losing favor with Democrats.

Harris and her team were working under extremely tight deadlines. She had to sort out her new staff in Wilmington and key battlegrounds and assemble a core inner circle; channel the torrent of donations that began to flow into the campaign's coffers; choose a running mate; prepare for the debate with Trump; deliver an acceptance speech at the DNC; and then carry out her debate strategy. Everything went according to plan.

Harris' presentation was based on the concept that she represented the safer choice, which informed her tactical actions.

That's why she spent so much time campaigning with Republicans and non-Trump supporters; why she rhetorically clothed herself in the American flag and persistently promoted her own middle-class origins while blasting the airwaves with messages about Trump's disastrous economic plans. That is why she ran as the law-and-order candidate, determined to prevent a convicted felon from taking over the country. That's why she avoided discussing the historical significance of her candidacy and nomination.

After the immediate excitement among Democrats subsided, Harris began to face media inquiries — as well as criticism from Trump and his team — for refusing to sit for interviews with major news sites. It took Harris more than a month to do her first extensive interview, and she subsequently only appeared on a few chosen shows and sympathetic media sources.

Harris chose not to provide a thorough explanation, or even a rationale at all, for the vast disparity between many of her previous policy positions on everything from hydraulic fracturing (a major issue in Pennsylvania) and clean car mandates (a major issue in Michigan) to providing citizenship to unauthorized immigrants brought to the United States as children. She began with a "my principles haven't changed" statement, which would have to function as a catch-all.

Most people surrounding her endorsed the strategic move, believing that "less is more" and that providing extensive answers would expose her to new inquiries from the media and offer new material for Trump and Republicans to launch persistent assaults. However, it lost an opportunity to convey even the tiniest hint that she was aware that people could still be perplexed as to how she could drift so far apart on problem after topic.

Other calculations Harris made, at least internally, were much riskier, particularly her unwillingness to break from Biden despite the president publicly offering her permission to do so. During the campaign, Harris' aides emphasized that this was a line she refused to cross, claiming that doing so would invalidate a slew of public remarks she'd made about the president and blot out her own record of successes in the White House.