HINDSIGHT IS 2024, PT. 2
What did the Harris campaign learn from this year’s painful defeat? Should she have broken with Joe Biden, met with Joe Rogan, avoided Liz Cheney? Her top staffers weighed in on all that and more, in their first interview since the election on Pod Save America.
- Democrats are searching for answers in the wreckage of the 2024 campaign. The polls showed a neck-and-neck race… but in the end, President-elect Donald Trump won both the popular vote and all seven swing states decisively, if not by an overwhelming margin. Four of Harris’s closest advisors joined Crooked’s Dan Pfeiffer in a podcast episode released today to address some of the burning questions that have been circulating among despondent Democrats.
- Why didn’t she break with Biden? In large part: loyalty. Throughout the campaign, Harris was criticized for not explaining how she would be different from President Joe Biden, at a moment when many Americans were unhappy with his handling of core issues, from the economy to the war in Gaza. But Harris “felt like she was part of the administration. So, why should she look back and … cherry-pick some things that she would have done differently when she was part of it?,” said Stephanie Cutter, a campaign senior adviser. A break with Biden on some significant issue, she said, would likely have launched a wave of negative news coverage about exactly who said what in key White House meetings, and put a focus on the past. “We were trying to tell a story and give the impression that she was different without pointing to a specific issue,” Cutter said.
- Why didn’t she go on Joe Rogan? The whole campaign wanted to do it. But not at any price in a very short race, and the timing just didn’t work out. There’s been plenty of speculation about why Harris didn’t go on The Joe Rogan Experience, the biggest podcast in the world with a majority male audience. Harris’s team said they offered to do the pod when she visited Austin during a reproductive rights rally — but that happened to be the same day Trump filmed his appearance, Cutter said. David Plouffe, a top Harris campaign adviser, added: “We were obviously not going to be back in Texas, but [we] offered to do it on the road.” Rogan didn’t want to do that. (Random trivia: Hot Ones, a popular YouTube show where celebrities are interviewed while eating chicken wings, didn’t want Trump or Harris on because the show didn’t want to get into politics, Harris’s advisers said.)
- Why didn’t she respond more forcefully to pro-Trump transphobic ads? For months, Trump-aligned groups ran ads that warned about transgender women playing sports, an issue that polls suggest most voters didn’t care all that much about. But after the election, Harris’s team was blamed for seemingly ignoring those ads and not pushing back. “All of our testing told us that the approach that we were taking — of her being more positive and talking about the economy and what she would do — was a better tactic,” said Quentin Fulks, Harris’s campaign manager.
Did she spend too much time embracing anti-Trump Republicans like Liz Cheney? Her campaign team forcefully argues that she needed to claim the center to have any hope of winning — even though that strategy came up short in the end.
- Democrats touted endorsements from former Republican officials and generals who compared Trump to a fascist and warned about the consequences of his return to office. The Harris campaign’s data showed that former MAGA officials were more credible messengers than Democrats when it came to bashing the former president, Fulks said. Their support showed “she couldn’t be so extreme and dangerously liberal as Trump was trying to frame, because these folks wouldn’t be with her,” said Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’s campaign chair.
- Plouffe argued Democrats face a continuing need to win over moderates in battleground states to win elections, as I noted yesterday. That’s part of another overarching conversation Democrats are having right now, sparked in part by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the firebrand progressive who, shortly after the election, blamed Democrats for abandoning the working class.
- Biden may have been one of the most left-leaning pro-labor presidents in recent history, but in the end, that didn’t matter: Working-class voters were a primary reason Trump won. So, what should Democrats change moving forward? Should they appeal to the Cheneys of the world, or move further left while focusing on populism?
- Faiz Shakir, a senior adviser to Sanders, laid out an alternative vision on New York Times journalist Ezra Klein’s podcast today: “We have to tell you a story about America’s economy. It starts with it being rigged against you. It talks about how hard it is as a middle class person right now to afford college, to pay for child care,” Shakir said. “I live in the same world that you do. I see what you’re going through, and now I’m going to connect it to why I want to serve. And that fundamental framework that we just talked about is not a principal way in which I hear a lot of Democrats thinking about how to campaign.”
This debate will continue raging among Democrats ahead of the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential election — and the answer could hold the key to winning back millions of voters, not to mention the White House.
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