In this candid interview, the leaders of the Harris-Walz Campaign speak for the first time about the challenges they faced and why they made the decisions they did. Dan sits down with Jen O’Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter to talk about the campaign’s roadmap, their approach to nontraditional media outlets like Joe Rogan, the voters they most needed to win over, why they fell short in the end, and what Democrats should do differently next time.

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.

Watch full interview here.

Full Transcript:

Dan Pfeiffer: Welcome to Pod Save America. I’m Dan Pfeiffer. We have a special show for you today. I am here in Washington, D. C., where I’m about to sit down with the leadership of the Harris-Walz campaign for their first interview about what happened in the election. Last week, Michael Tyler, who’s the communications director for the campaign, called me and said that they were ready to speak and that they wanted to have that conversation on Pod Save America. This is the first time that any of them have done an interview since the election. They don’t pretend to have all the answers here. There’s way more to cover than we could possibly cover in one podcast. This is the beginning of a conversation about understanding what happened in 2024 and learning the lessons that Democrats are going to need going forward. Here in Washington with me are Harris-Walz campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillion, Quentin Fulks, who’s the deputy campaign manager, and oversaw paid advertising, Stephanie Cutter, who oversaw messaging and communications, and joining by Zoom is David Plouffe, who consulted on all of it.

Jen, Quentin, Stephanie, David, thanks for joining us. Thank you for doing this. Very much appreciate you having this conversation with us here on Pod Save America. Just to level set, Jen, and I’ll start with you: How did you feel going into Election Day? And at what point did you have a sense that things were beginning to break Trump’s way? Was there a county result? Something about the turnout? Like, was there a moment when you sort of understood that– how it was going to end? 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Well, I, the truth is that we really thought this was a very close race. We talked about the entire time we saw it as a margin of error race, almost the entire time the vice president was in the race. And we knew we had to have strong turnout on Election Day. We saw early vote really, uh, ending strong for us and saw, you know, the types of voters we wanted to see turnout. But, you know, we expected this to be close. We also expected that Florida was going to come in a bit redder. Virginia we knew was tracking to being, you know, that we were going to be ahead, but that we would be ahead by less than we were in 2020. So we were expecting to see that when we saw that. We also did anticipate that the night would go relatively long because some of these states would take longer to come in. But I think it was, you know, really after polls closed, there was nothing that we saw throughout the day. There was nothing that we saw that told us there was overwhelming turnout or anything out of complete expectations on Trump’s side. But it really took us into the hours of, you know, polls closing for us to know for sure that things were not tightening. They were tight, but they weren’t tightening in the direction we needed them to be.

Dan Pfeiffer: And is that just because Trump’s turnout was so high? 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Well, honestly, I think, um, I think it’s a little bit mixed. I mean, we saw certainly Trump turnout high in early vote. We really believe that to be mode shifting and that’s what I think it was. I think we also saw turnout was as expected in rural areas, like we didn’t see anything that said, you know, like maybe we saw in ’16 or even in ’20 that he had more turnout than we had anticipated, and our analytics really was quite close, much closer than it had been in ’20 and in ’16. But I do think we saw some lighter turnout in some of the areas we had hoped, but difference of a point here or there, which obviously in a close race makes a huge difference. And then I think we saw a little bit of a drop in support in a few areas for us. So that ultimately, I think, is why we weren’t able to, to close the gap. It wasn’t so much that what we were seeing in the battlegrounds was out of expectation or that he had some hidden turnout we hadn’t picked up on. 

Dan Pfeiffer: David, when you say it was a margin of error race you needed high turnout, what did your polls tell you where the race was heading into election day?

David Plouffe: Well, Dan, you and I talked prior to the election, and just to rewind, I think when Kamala Harris became the nominee she was behind, we kind of, you know, climbed back. And even post debate, you know, we still had ourselves down, you know, in the battleground states, but very close. And so I think by the end it was a jump ball race, and I think we needed some things to break our way. Maybe Trump’s Election Day turnout would underperform. Our election day turnout would, you know either be at level or over perform and, you know, we’d win more of the people who decided in the last three or four days. I think our data and the New York Times data and other public data suggested we did have some progress with undecideds at late October. So it was a dead heat race. But, you know, at the end of the day, you know, the political atmosphere was pretty brutal and that’s not an excuse. You had right track, wrong track, I think 28-72, about 70 percent of the country saying they were angry and dissatisfied. You had Trump’s approval rating on 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 you know, I think the economy and inflation is still driving a lot of votes. So I think given that we had a challenging political environment, the fact that we got the race to dead heat was positive, but boy, it was slow moving. And I think we were focused on seven states. You know, that’s our windshield into the world, the battleground states. But, you know, what we saw on election day was, you know, New Jersey and California and Connecticut and New York, massive shifts. So I think where Kamala Harris campaigned, we were able to keep the tide down a little bit, but it ended up being a pretty strong, you know, tailwind for Donald Trump.

And I think it’s worth reminding everybody we saw in ’22, even though that was a pretty decent democratic year, we saw these shifts, we saw them in ’20, we saw them in ’16. You know, Trump, specifically, but Republicans generally improving their vote share amongst non-college voters, particularly non-college voters of color. And this was a surprising race because Kamala Harris actually did, I think, better with senior voters than I think a lot of people would have thought. So, margin of error race where we inherited a deficit, we got it to even, but the thing never moved. So, to Jen’s point, I think we were, you know, we were hopeful.

I don’t know how optimistic we were, but we thought, okay, this is tied, and if a couple things break our way, and listen, I’m naive in this way, I just thought at the end of the day, particularly because Trump did not close well, I thought, and I thought Kamala Harris closed well, Trump was reminding people some of the things they don’t like about him. That that might give us what we needed. But at the end of the day, I think the political atmosphere, the desire for change, all those fundamentals that you’ve spent a lot of time talking about, really presented huge challenges for us. So, you know, we got, we got there, but we didn’t get the breaks we needed on election day.

Dan Pfeiffer: How deep was the hole that she had to climb out of?

David Plouffe: Well, Dan, I mean, I think, listen, there was the Biden-Trump 1.0, which is obviously pretty catastrophic in terms of where the race stood. When we got in, my recollection is some of that snapped back, but you know, we were behind. I mean, I think it surprised people because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw. You know, I mean, it was just basically a race that in the battlegrounds was 46-47, 47-48. So that’s not where we started. We started behind. She was able to climb out. I think even after the debate, we might have gained, what, .5-1? It wasn’t a race that moved a lot. And so I think when you think about our own internal analytics, you know, if you have Wisconsin at 47-47, or Pennsylvania 48-47 Trump, let’s say, which I think is where we had it at the end, you know, you’ve got to have undecideds break your way more than your opponents, and you’ve got to get a little benefit from turnout, which we weren’t able to do.

Dan Pfeiffer: Obviously the defining event of this race was the candidate switch. And everything, every decision you guys had to make, everything you had to do was defined also by the compressed calendar in which you were operating in. Quentin, you were there when that switch happened. Were you able, there was a one month period between the debate and when the president actually dropped out. Obviously it seemed like dropping out could be a possibility. Were you able to do any thinking or planning in that one month period about what a race with the Vice President look like, or did you have to sort of start cold on that first day, the moment the, you know, you got the call or the statement went out? 

Quentin Fulks: I mean, we started cold. We, there was no planning involved in any other candidates. I mean, we were honestly in, in crisis management mode of keeping President Biden in the race. You know, convincing, um, you know, Democratic allies, that he could still do this. And one of the things was trying to keep the President out on the road as much. We were still doing everything we could from a campaign, and he made the decision that he did not want to continue on. And he pulled some of the senior leadership together and said that he was going to be with the vice president. It also wasn’t anything that our team took for granted to just say, okay, she is the nominee. We knew that there was still a situation where we had to shore up delegates. And that’s where we started from. And then after that point, that is when we begin to say, okay, how can we define her? Also Trump’s favorability numbers were creeping up as Plouffe said, and we had to do something about that as well. And so it was a lot of walking and chewing gum at the same time, but there really was no sort of contingency planning to turn the race over to her right after that debate or at any point until President Biden definitively said he wasn’t going to continue on. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Stephanie, I think what probably surprised a lot of people in politics was the vice president was a largely unknown quantity to much of the electorate. So you guys had, under a very short time frame, had to do two things, as Quentin said. You had to teach people about her and also make a case against Donald Trump, who would just come off, he was at an all time high, come off the assassination attempt, the debate against the president. In terms of messaging, how did you think about the balance between the two? 

Stephanie Cutter: Well, the first thing we had to do is put on a convention. And we had about three weeks to flip a convention that was being built around Joe Biden. So, we were able to flip it, you know, to fit this very new character of a different generation, different experience, different background and looking at the data at the time, which Jen and Plouffe and Quentin have all talked about, there was, she had a huge deficit in favorability because either people didn’t know about her, or what they did know about her was based off of negative media. So, our first priority was to define her in that convention. Fill in her bio. As part of that, you know, we already knew how to do the negative on Trump. And we knew that there was a lot of Trump-nesia out there. People didn’t remember the four years of the Trump administration that badly because they had been through hell. They had been through COVID. Both under his watch and under President Biden’s. I’m putting aside a lot of the details of who’s at fault and what Biden did to dig us out and all of that. And then they had to deal with inflation. So they had been through hell. So looking back, you know, you remember a previous time much more fondly because you now think that you’ve gone through the worst. So we had to remind people what life was like. That was our second imperative. And then the third imperative as part of the convention and leading into the remaining days of the campaign is what’s that choice? What are the two very different visions between Trump and Kamala Harris? So the convention demonstrated a lot of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris, a lot of freshness, future oriented, bringing a variety of coalitions together. We had Independents, Republicans, Democrats, business leaders, sports figures, everybody coming together around a new way forward and finally turning the page. So, you know, through the rest of that campaign, through the, our next thing was the debate just a few weeks later, and it was boom, boom, boom, all the way through probably early October after the Walz debate that we had to move through these things so quickly. Once we got through all of that, then the race started to gel.

And to the extent people were open to remembering what Trump– what life was like under Trump, we were trying to fill that in. To the extent people had questions about Kamala Harris, we were still trying to fill that in. So in 107 days, you know, what typically takes us a year and a half, two years in a 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 which, you know, she was the incumbent, but she really wasn’t the incumbent. People didn’t know that much about her. The economy was still, slightly getting better, but we couldn’t really take credit for it. So we were in a bit of a crossroads trying to figure out what that October messaging and closing messaging would look like. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Plouffe, there is a, sort of a debate outside of your campaign about that the primary and most important thing to do was to educate voters about Kamala Harris and that voters sort of knew all they needed to know about Trump. I take it you guys disagreed with that analysis and you felt a need to at least knock his numbers down a little bit, is that right? 

David Plouffe: Of course. I mean, that is nonsense. So, first of all, back to where the question you were talking to Stephanie about. Kamala Harris started this race, if I recall, with favorable 33 to 35. She ended it at 48. She actually ended the election with a higher approval rating than Donald Trump. I’m not sure someone’s won the presidency with a lower approval rating, so I think as people got to know her, they liked her. I think her approval rating now, post election, is north of 50. That was really hard work, and I will say that, you know, think about if, if Kamala Harris had come out of a process that was traditional, running in and winning a primary, so maybe become the nominee March or April, you know, you spend a month, six weeks on your biography, you keep coming back to it, you define the Trump first term, you raise the stakes of what a Trump second term would be like, you have like a month just to run paid advertising on things like housing and your tax cut. So this is where there was a price to be paid for the short campaign and you can’t even say 107 days because to Quentin’s point, some of that was spent shoring up the Democratic nomination. Then you really have to have said everything you want to say by the time people start voting early. 

So we had a little more than two months to do bio, contrast on the economy, on healthcare, raising the stakes of Trump. So yes, when you have a race where you’ve got the current incumbent president with approval ratings of let’s say 38 to 40. Never in history have we had this before, at least since I guess Grover Cleveland. So once. You have a former president running where 48 to 51 percent of the people approve of his first term. And people are dissatisfied with the direction of the country. You have to raise the stakes of what a second term would be like. So I think for us, we spent much more time trying to raise the stakes of a second term than re-arbitrating the first because voters just weren’t open to that. So that’s why pointing out, you know, his tariff and what that would mean in terms of a huge sales tax for the American people. The fact that he’s more unhinged, he wants unchecked power, Project 2025 ended up being about as popular as the Ebola virus, so we did a lot of good work there. And now, of course, the son of a bitch lied about it, and he’s hiring everybody who authored it. Project 2025 is going to be the Trump administration agenda, as we pointed out, so we had to do that.

So if we had just run a race solely on Kamala Harris positives, though we did a lot of that, on what Kamala Harris wants to do on the economy. We did a lot of that. It’s worth reminding your listeners who live in California, New York or Alabama or Florida, you’re not experiencing the presidential race as it’s experienced in Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina. We spent a lot of time, she spent a lot of time, driving a core economic message. But in our view that was not enough. 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. And for us, it was on the economy. It was on the fact that all the people who stood in his way last time were warning us about him. It was about Project 2025. It was about abortion. And you know, I think we did a good job of that based on our data, but we had to stay on that. So I, I think that that is an incredibly faulty reading that what we should have done is just lift up Kamala Harris. We clearly did. Her favorability rating increased by, I believe, 15 points. If you look at “who do you trust more to look out for people like your family, who do you think is going to fight for the middle class?” Huge progress for Kamala Harris. Even on crime and immigration, we were able to make double digit progress. So we were very focused on lifting her up. But 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. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Jen, you guys were obviously operating in a very, very tough political environment. Incumbent president, very low approval ratings, as Plouffe mentioned, wrong track, right track, approval of the economy, all very challenging. Also, in at least the public polling, huge desire for change, right? Frustration with the status quo, not just that’s here in the United States, but we’ve seen that across the world since COVID.

Challenging place to be if you were the vice president to the unpopular incumbent president. I felt like much of the convention that Stephanie mentioned was trying to make her a change candidate to talk about turning the page. Can you talk a little about how you tried to do that and whether you think she could or should have done more to distance herself from President Biden. Something that I think, as evidenced by the answer on The View, she was at least personally uncomfortable with. 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Well, yeah. I mean, look, first of all, I think people, when they vote for president, want to vote about the future and they saw in the vice president someone they didn’t know. Someone they didn’t know a lot about, a background, so, you know, who she was, what she stood for, what she did as vice president. So, in every step of what we were trying to do, we had to tell a pretty robust story in, in one ad or one policy rollout or one event that you don’t often have to do because of the time we were in. But, I do think that we really focused from the get go on how she was different than everyone else, different than Joe Biden, different than Donald Trump.

And at the end of the day, the choice was her versus Donald Trump. And at the same time, you know, she was very clear that she was a new generation of leadership, but it wasn’t just like a statement. It was, here’s what I need to focus on. Her first policy announcements were economic. Talking about housing, talking about lowering costs, understanding that people really didn’t feel like things were progressing in the way that they wanted to, a la the right track, wrong track data, but how she brought her own point of view to thinking about housing, sandwich generation. That was probably her biggest applause line, one of the best testing things that we did. That wasn’t a poll tested, let’s, you know, work on this poll, this data to tell us this is the right issue we should go talk about. That was about her life and also understanding what people in the country were really needing. So I think that in a 107 day race, it is very difficult to do all the things you would normally do in a year and a half, two years. But I think wherever we had an opportunity, the vice president did put her own stamp on this and did it in a deeper way than I think probably we got the kind of full breadth of coverage on it. Of course, you know, when you have an administration that a lot of progress has been made and you’re part of that progress it’s complicated when you’re asked questions in certain ways. But at the end of the day, I think she really, every time she talked to a voter, every time she was out on the stump, she really leaned into her own vision. But the headwinds were tough. I will also, though, add, of course, we lost. I’m not here to say that that didn’t happen. We would much rather not have that happen. But where she campaigned, we did way better than the rest of the country. And Donald Trump did worse, to the point that you were just talking about with Plouffe. This idea that people have just a well constructed, already baked-in idea about Trump and they don’t need to learn anymore. It’s just complete fallacy. I mean, his numbers are stronger today than they have ever been.

And that was critical for us. And we also believe this race was not just about Kamala Harris. It was Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump. And we had to set that choice and that frame up. And I think that we were able to – anywhere we campaigned and all seven of these states where Donald Trump, by the way, he campaigned too, he did worse and we did better. And we did make real progress against these national headwinds. If in every other state, but the battlegrounds, there was a negative eight point shift to the right in the battlegrounds, there was only three. So we needed it to be better than that. And perhaps if we had more time, we could have done that. But I think that’s fundamental that when people learn more about her, understood what she stood for, where she came from, and what her vision was, they responded well to that, and they responded in a favorable way, especially in contrast to, you know, a point of view that Donald Trump will be worse. And I think that’s playing out right now. 

Stephanie Cutter: And Dan, on the Biden question, we of course got that, everywhere we went. And we knew what the data was. We knew we had to show her as her own person and point to the future and not try to rehash the past. But 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. So we did talk about things like: she’s a different generation, most of her career is from outside of Washington, not inside Washington. So she knows a lot of the best ideas are from across the country. Her career has been about reaching across the aisle, finding common sense ways to get things done. It’s not been based in ideological politics. All of these things we were trying to tell a story and give the impression that she was different without pointing to a specific issue.

Dan Pfeiffer: Can I ask just why not a specific issue? Is it something she was unwilling to do? You’re, it seemed– you were worried it would feel disingenuous or…?

Stephanie Cutter: Because she felt like she was part of the administration. So why should she look back and pick out – cherry pick some things that she would have done differently when she was part of it? And she also, she had tremendous loyalty to President Biden. And, you know, if we had said–just imagine this. You’ve, I mean, you’ve been on plenty of campaigns. Imagine if we said, well, we would have taken this approach on the border. Imagine the round of stories coming out after that of people saying, “Well, she never said that in a meeting,” or “What meeting when she said this,” or “I remember when she did that.” And it was just, it wasn’t going to give us what we needed because it wouldn’t be a clean break. It would be, you know, days upon days in a limited time window that we had of dealing of who, what, when, where. So, the best we could do and the most that she felt comfortable with was saying, like, “Look, vice presidents never break with their presidents. The only time in recent memories is when Pence broke with Trump after Trump stormed the Capitol.” So Biden’s—

Dan Pfeiffer: They call that the murder exemption. 

Stephanie Cutter: *Laugher* That’s the – 

Dan Pfeiffer: If the president tries to murder you, you can break. 

Stephanie Cutter: Right!

Dan Pfeiffer: Yes, Yes.. 

Stephanie Cutter: If you are, you know, ripping up the Constitution, trying to overturn an election, people die, then you can break with your president. But absent that, vice presidents stick by their presidents.

And she wasn’t willing to, you know, change that precedent for whoever the future president, vice presidential partnership would be because it would mean a whole, you know, different set of problems, as if we don’t have enough problems in our democracy right now. So unless we were willing to say, you know, Biden said green and she said blue on any particular issue where we’re never really going to satisfy that.

So our focus was let’s look to the future. Let’s describe her and her approach to things. Let’s use policies, future looking policies to demonstrate that difference. But in the end, you know, we’ve all seen the data. It’s, too many people thought that you’d be a continuation. Which on the economy was, you know, the incumbent killer.

Dan Pfeiffer: Quentin, in the post election analysis, there’s been a ton of focus on the very ubiquitous trans ad that the Trump campaign spent tens of millions of dollars on. There have been sort of two strains of thought on this. One, the sense that her position and the Democratic Party position on trans related issues are one of the reasons why we lost, but also real questions about why the campaign decided not to respond to the ad, specifically, my understanding from reporting, at least, is that you guys tested a bunch of responses and it didn’t, and they didn’t work.

Just tell me your thinking there and what role you think that ad and those issues actually played in the race. 

Quentin Fulks: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it’s important to put everything into context. We, you know, very well established a time frame. And it’s honestly a lot shorter than 107 days, but we had three core objectives to the paid media.

It was to define the vice president. It was to defend her, uh, on incoming attacks. And a lot of these attacks have been baked in for the past three and a half years. While she was the vice president, they were attacking  her. You know, she was at negative 20 something on immigration. We got that down to negative 10.

Trump had a positive 22 point advantage on the economy. We got that down to seven. And we had to respond to those things and when you sort of looked at the core issues aside from the attacks like trans issues are just at the bottom for voters. The economy, inflation, crime, immigration are the top issues.

They were also some of the issues that she was getting attacked on. And to the element of sort of defining her and doing it in a way that sort of fit within what you’re trying to do, there’s a direct approach that you can take to anything and then there is an approach that you can take that accomplishes two of the three objectives.

A lot of the stuff that we did, such as talking about her prosecutorial background and then saying that she went after transnational gangs, cartels. It was to push back pseudo-ly on the immigration attacks that were coming at her, as well as credentialing her, her background on things that were absent, and standalone of the Biden administration.

We did a lot of stuff about her record as AG, her record as a prosecutor. Not as vice president because it also allowed her to stand alone separate from the Biden administration. On the trans attack, one obviously it was a very effective ad at the end. I ultimately don’t believe that it was about the issue of trans.

I think that it made her seem out of touch. And it was sort of a pseudo economic ad underneath it because he was saying you’re going to pay for it with taxpayer money. And it was in her own words and that’s something, but we tested a ton of responses to this, direct responses. And none of them ever tested as well as basically her talking about what she would do to Jen’s point, the future, the type of president that she would be. There were elements of it where we did try to say, you know, and we put ads on television of her saying, “You’ve seen all the negative attacks against me.” And try to bottle it up, because I also think you have to think about the entire sentiment when you’re running a paid campaign. And the trans ad, I think because of the content, a lot of people felt like it was much bigger than what it was, but to put that into context, Team Red, meaning Trump and all the super PACS that were spending on Trump’s behalf, that was seven percent of their total ads was on that issue.

Dan Pfeiffer: Was that specific? 

Quentin Fulks: That specific— 

Dan Pfeiffer: I think it was two ads, right? There was the original and then there was the one with Charlamagne…

Quentin Fulks: Yeah, and it was all Trump. So Trump spent, you know, 37 percent of his, you know, 200 million on that ad. But Trump wasn’t the only spender. We were getting hit across the board. And so you have to take into account what all the super PACs are doing and play off of that.

And I think that’s what Trump was doing. His Super PACs were hitting us on the economy, immigration and crime. And Trump even started hitting us on immigration and I think the veracity of which we came out of the gate and responded to that, they weren’t expecting that from us and then they backed off of that and at that point they started going into it.

And so, it is easy to say with the kind of resources that we raised, we should have been able to do everything, but that’s not the case. You have to make decisions in the time frame that we were in in this race. We had to choose. And we chose to focus more of our attention on one, driving down Trump, because that was not being done in our ecosystem on our side.

And it was incredibly important that we did that, as well as defining her. And so if we spent this entire race –  and not to be defensive about it at all – but if we spent this entire race pushing back on immigration attacks or crime attacks, and pushing back against trans attacks, at what point are we bringing Trump down?

And or introducing the vice president on our own terms. We’re playing on their field? And I think that that was ultimately what went into it but again it wasn’t something that we missed. It’s just 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.

Dan Pfeiffer: Not to be sort of overly nerdy about it but that seven percent is total money spent and not number of ads run? 

Quentin Fulks: Yes. Yes. 

Dan Pfeiffer: So it’s higher than that terms of ads run because it was candidate side ads, right? 

Quentin Fulks: Yeah, but I mean..  

Dan Pfeiffer: Probably like, do you know? 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: But we did, I mean I would just add, we did respond. What our testing showed and look, there’s no easy answers to this. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Yeah of course. 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: But you know, we looked at this a lot and she never got directly asked about it, but was, you know, obviously something we looked at in responding there.

But we did respond. For the people that were getting this on digital, and we did a ton more digital than the other side did, but we definitely threw out ads to make sure anyone that was getting these directly we would be engaging with them with a little bit more specific content. Obviously, she spoke to some of this in the Fox News interview and the Trump administration oversight during this period, but we saw that we could neutralize the ad, but we couldn’t actually put points on the board for us if we did – responded in kind. So then you really have a question. People don’t know her. They need to know more about who she is, what she stands for. They’re concerned about the economy. They’re concerned about immigration, and we need to push down Trump’s numbers.

So how do you fit all of that in? And what we tested showed us that ads that were much more, as Quentin is saying, on the economy or other issues that people cared more about actually had better response for our testing than a head to head. So, you know, you, as we looked at this, the Trump side didn’t close on this issue.

You know, obviously economy was far more effective and we had to really play the game there. And we had a lot of work to do and we were successful to a point. But that’s sort of the balance that we had. And while we had a lot of resources in a short amount of time, we were also trying to think about what does a person receive?

We looked at certainly testing, but we’re looking at our qualitative and a lot of people thought it was very political. They thought it was over the top. They had different kind of points of view that didn’t really anchor it as a vote mover. But I know it anecdotally had a lot of attention and, you know, they played it in places that, you know, we saw it and we monitored it as we went.

David Plouffe: And I would just add, Dan, so both campaigns, Super PACs, there was a lot of national ads. So I think if you’re sitting in California or Texas or Florida, you see this ad, you don’t see any of our responses, right? So in the battleground states, you know, her talking, you know, in a very common sense way, in a very practical way, whether it be about immigration, whether it be about the economy was our best defense to, because this was less about trans than it was about priorities and being out of the mainstream. So I think these voters in the battleground states, both through ads and through seeing her doing local interviews, and I think that’s one of the reasons you had such a difference between the battleground states and the non battleground states is people knew her better, number one. Number two, as Jen said, you know, it’s very easy these days to understand who has experience in ads. So we were feeding a lot of digital ads to people who might have saw that spot. But, you know, at the end of the day, we were spending a lot of time with voters in these battleground states, both quantitatively and quantitatively, and this trans ad was not driving the vote.

I mean, the most effective ad, Quentin, I think they ran was not. It was the Bidenomics ad, right? 

Because that was kind of core to people’s concern. It was like, well, maybe you’re not change. You’re defending an economic program that I don’t think has helped me. Listen, I think we’re all very proud of what Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Democrats did to help us dig out of the pandemic, but people weren’t feeling it. So that was more effective. So I think in many respects, my concern here, as we think about the future, is if there’s a belief that if only we had responded to this trans ad with national and huge battleground state ads, we would have won. I don’t think that’s true, number one. You know, number two, here’s also a fact pattern here. So if we could have just said, that’s a lie. It’s not anything she’s ever believed. You know, she was on tape. Surgery for people who want to transition in prison was part of the Biden-Harris platform in 2020. It was part of what the administration did, right? We also saw Colin Allred and Sherrod Brown, both who ran good races, kind of directly responded to trans attacks. And in our view, you know, you’re playing on your opponent’s side of the field. I understand why they felt they needed to do that in those states. So to Quentin’s point, you know, you have a set of things you’re trying to get done. It doesn’t mean that you’re in such a tunnel that when something comes at you that you don’t, we spent, I mean, Jen, Quentin, Stephanie, I don’t know, dozens of hours on this.

Like what should we do? How are voters responding to it? Maybe hundreds of hours on it. So we took it very seriously, but it wasn’t something at the end of the day, what matters in an election is, is something causing someone to behave differently, either who they vote for or whether they vote. And our sense was in the battleground states this was not driving vote behavior to the same extent like the economy was generally, even immigration.

So, I think that it’s important to understand, I think, that we were very much in voyeuristic listening mode here in terms of how are voters processing this. And in the battleground states, what we got from voters, that doesn’t seem like her, like she seems sort of mainstream and normal number one. It’s a political attack and we trust it. So, I think in many respects, Democrats who live outside of battleground states would see this ad and were convinced it was the thing that cost us the election, but I think in the battleground states, it was a different brew. 

Quentin Fulks: Well, I also, the last point I’ll make on this too, is that I think, again, to Plouffe’s point about it moving vote, I think that the Trump campaign knew that too, and I think that the way in which they targeted this ad, they were trying to, I think, make our job harder with Black voters.

I’m just going to say it point blank and I think that specifically Black men— ultimately we got the same amount of the vote share that President Biden got with Black men and we increased among Black women. But when you look at where Trump was running this ad, it was in Philadelphia, it was in Atlanta, and in the outer markets where there wasn’t as many diverse voters or Black voters, they weren’t doing this.

We saw them targeting this in the mailboxes of Black voters, Black male voters. So, there was this theory out there that we were struggling with Black men, and I think that while we were doing the work to try to make sure that that wasn’t the case, and we saw that consolidation come back after President Biden got out of the race, I think that Trump and them weren’t using this ad to move vote share as much. I think that they were using this ad to try to make our job of getting these voters back or consolidating them and I think ultimately, if you look at it from that metric, it wasn’t effective. But I think, again, the content of it and, you know, getting it from the way it was talked about in the press and narrated about: this sort of earned echo chamber around these things can have much more of an impact on them than the money that’s put behind them.

And I think that this trans ad is one of those, because if you look at how Trump was targeting it. It didn’t move those voters he was targeting, to Plouffe’s point. But I think it did make our job of sort of trying to get in front of them and making us seem like we knew what they were going through and we were focused on their problems much more difficult. And so that’s how I sort of see it, but I don’t think it was moving the vote. 

Stephanie Cutter: And, I mean, where we saw the first indication of what Quentin is talking about is when Charlamagne started talking about it. And that was when, you know, we clued in that, okay, so their strategy isn’t to pull in new voters to them, it’s to mess with us.

Quentin Fulks: And a day after Trump took the clip of Charlamagne, ran the exact same ad and just put Charlamagne at the opening. And so he had a Black man talking about it at the beginning and then tried to do it, and then started serving it the exact same way, and so, you know. 

Stephanie Cutter: And that’s when we, you know, well, we had been doing the research to try to figure out what the actual policy was, you know, where does this come from, and discovered that it was the Trump policy also and tried to push that out there, the New York Times wrote about it, we tried to force a discussion on it, it didn’t ultimately get going. She did get asked about it on Fox News. Her response was that was the Trump policy as well, we’re to follow the law, but ultimately, there wasn’t enough earned media on that piece and we certainly weren’t going to run ads on that this was a Trump policy. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Jen, you guys obviously raised a ton of money very quickly. You made huge investments in linear television. You made the largest investment ever in digital, a huge field operation. In the post election analysis, there has been, even from some folks, anonymously at least, inside the campaign, some critique of some of the spending decisions around things like the set for “Call Her Daddy,” renting the sphere,  that sort of stuff. I’d love to hear you respond to those criticisms and then maybe give— just want to get clarity on the point is that when you, do you think when all of the, when you guys have done all the books, that whether the DNC will be in debt at the end of this race? 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: So, first of all, I think it was an extraordinary testament to the vice president to have the kind of grassroots support that she had and built on the foundation of the list and the support that President Biden had and had built and we cultivated over years. We had some unique things that we had to do in this race that I think were really critical to do early and spent a lot of resources at an earlier stage than we would have traditionally.

Dan Pfeiffer: Is that ads? 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Ads, but also the field program. I mean, we had massive investment of staff, you know, 3,000 staff, hundreds and hundreds of offices in battleground states. We had canvassers and people out knocking doors. 

Dan Pfeiffer: And that’s on the, that’s pre-Kamala Harris too, or is it? 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Yes, we, a hundred percent started it pre-Kamala Harris and we’d been building for the entire campaign, but we really had to take it into hyper drive because it wasn’t, we had so much work that we had to do. We knew that we couldn’t just reach people with one medium and we had to make sure we were maximizing it and we had to really move up spend when we’re announcing the vice president as the new nominee.

We are, you know, a couple weeks later announcing a running-mate. We are, you know, building out who is she standing for, all the things we’ve been talking about. And so those things cost a lot of resources, especially when you’re running seven states. There was different opportunities for us to look at the battleground map and to say, “Is anything moving away from us?”

And we saw up until the very end that every single state was in such a margin of error. There was nothing that told us we couldn’t play in one of these states. And we needed to ensure with Pennsylvania, which was our toughest of the blue walls, from the beginning where we were tied. What’s the alternative to make up those electoral votes? So we ran a very wide map in other races that some of us have worked on together. We had to you know, move off of states. That was not actually a part of our plan. And then we had to reach very hard to find voters. So, we were trying to, yes, spend more resources on digital, not for the sake of that, but because we’re trying to find young people.

We’re trying to find these lower propensity voters that were tuned out to politics. So much of the electorate, pre-Vice President Harris and post, had opted out of political engagement, had opted out of wanting to talk through or hear the kind of partisan environment. So we had to work extremely hard to find them.

And doing so made us make really key choices. “Call Her Daddy” was really an important choice to make. And the hurricane, which you’re alluding to and why we had to make some adjustments on schedule. You know, the hurricane impacted two weeks of our ability to reach people, not just in North Carolina and Georgia, but all across the country. I mean, we put her on the Weather Channel in part because that’s where people are watching. So everything, of course, you know, you can look at, did we get the best deal here? This was quite costly here. It’s quite expensive. At the end of the day though, if you look at the spend we had, the majority of the money we spent, it was to reach voters.

The money we spent at the end, I mean, Trump was every single day for the last two weeks of the race, he was dumping millions of dollars on our head on more points. And we didn’t go chase him everywhere, but we had to look at what are people getting served? How do we match that? How are we hitting our voters and not getting distracted? How are we making sure the people that he’s serving stuff to we’re getting to? And he had an army of Super PACs that were so coordinated. I’m sure there’s some legal way they were communicated, coordinated, but like—

Dan Pfeiffer: I’m sure it was legal. 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Yeah, right. 

Stephanie Cutter: Or illegal. 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: But they, you know, from the beginning they were, you know, week to week all, you know, one Super PAC would take a couple weeks and hit Pennsylvania and then the next one will come in and do the same and they’re all coordinated.

We didn’t have the benefit of that. So I am very confident that the fidelity of our finances was strong throughout and we focused it on direct voter contact. You know, you, you mentioned the sphere, of course, as you well know, to do something like that, we had to make some bets pretty early on, but we believed as we were closing the race that it was really important for people to feel like they were part of something bigger and that we were trying to identify opportunities to culturally reach people, not just politically reach people. So while the point of the sphere wasn’t really necessarily a Las Vegas play, it was a play to get the kind of attention and awareness and to see in that, you know, the song and, you know, just you want to be part of that. That was a big part of our strategy. It’s why in Philadelphia we spent, and in all of our urban markets, real resources on out-of-home, yes, billboards, but also murals and other ways that people could walk down a street and they see something that’s cultural and cool and something that connected with them, not in a political way, to reach people. And we felt like that was really, really important for the voters we had to reach. 

There is lots of important work that the DNC does week-to-week. We worked in tandem and in partnership this whole time, and part of the reason that the Vice President was able to be so quick is because of the campaign, but also because of the infrastructure and the work the DNC has done. So they’re going to be in good stead. They’re going to have everything they need.

They continue to have a lot of money that they put out to state parties all across the country as part of the commitment that President Biden and Vice President Harris made when they came into office. So that work continues. It doesn’t just stop when there’s a campaign. They have more raising and more work to do.

But we are going to be in a good space across the board, across all of our entities without debt that carries forward.

Dan Pfeiffer: Without debt? 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Yep. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Okay.

David Plouffe: Having been through this, you know, some time ago, but then witnessing again this time, we have to stop playing a different game as it relates to Super PACs than the Republicans.

Love our Democratic lawyers. I’m tired of them. Okay. They coordinate more than we do. I think amongst themselves, I think with the presidential campaign, like, I’m just sick and tired of it, okay? So, we cannot be at a disadvantage, number one. Number two, to Jen’s point, I think you don’t want duplication, but I think having multiple players on the field as long as they’re well coordinated is great.

Like, back in ‘20, you know, I spent a bunch of time with Tara McGowan, who now runs Courier with Acronym, and all we did, I think, was 80 or 90 million dollars, which was great. We only did digital low information voters, right? So whatever Future Forward was doing, we were very focused on that, particularly low information voters of color.

So I think to have an ecosystem where whether it’s on issues like reproductive health or climate or, you know, manufacturing or health care or a specific lane that you’re focused on in terms of messaging. I think that’s really, really important. I think that they tend to have more entities that are, to Stephanie’s point–clearly it is not legal what they’re doing. But we’re at a disadvantage when our folks are playing by a different set of rules than they are. I mean, I remember going back to 2012, you guys might remember this, like, Mitt Romney’s running around the country asking for specific dollar amounts at Super PAC events. And we were told that Barack Obama couldn’t even attend them. Okay, so like—

Dan Pfeiffer: The one event, I think, right?

David Plouffe: Right, so I just think at the end of the day, this is important. Again, this is not at the top of the reasons that we had a different outcome here. But, you know, to win close races, you kind of want to be maximizing every piece of the arsenal. And so I think this is something we really have to reflect on and make some adjustments going forward.

Dan Pfeiffer: Did you need more cavalry at the end? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jen O’Malley Dillon: I think we needed more cavalry early. Look, I think there’s a lot of really important discussions I know you’re having and we’ll all have about the path forward. I think our side was completely mismatched when it came to the ecosystem of Trump and his super PACs and ours. And you know, that’s not like a, just a head-to-head comparison on points spent.

It is just how we have to think about our voters and what they need. And we had a super PAC that was helpful, very important and necessary for the work that they did because they were the kind of central recipient of a lot of the funding on our side. And, you know, they staked a strategy and a plan and we clearly could see it and we knew what it was to spend late.

But we did not have the ability to have people come in with us early. And so every ounce of advertising, every ounce of carrying these strategic imperatives of defining the vice president and trying to bring down Trump’s numbers, all sat with us as a campaign. And because we had the strength of our list and because of the grassroots donors who were the heart and soul of this, and our major donors too, at a level we have never seen in politics before, we needed every cent of that because we carried like 90 percent of the bulk of it.

And we needed to put North Carolina in play. We needed to make sure we’re running this big map. We had a lot of work to do, and we didn’t really have partners to call on in that early window. At the same time, there are really important groups out there that do important work that are targeting key coalitions. When we’re talking about how we needed to reach young people and African Americans and Latinos, the voices and the strength of organizations that are not this campaign, that are not political, that have a history and a foundation of doing this work, that have credibility with different communities is really important for us. And I don’t know that those entities got funded early enough. So I think this is just…

Dan Pfeiffer: Can I ask you a question on this?

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Yeah.

Dan Pfeiffer: In the history of all of the presidential elections, post Citizens United, the Democrats have had a designated Super PAC, sort of, I don’t know what the legal term is, but there’s been one singular entity that was the recipient of all the Super PAC dollars.

It was Priorities USA in ‘12 and ‘16, and then it’s been Future Forward in ‘20 and ‘24. Going forward, would your recommendation be that there be, like the Republicans, multiple entities that are all sort of viewed as important places for people looking to influence the election to donate, for people looking to donate to go to?

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Yeah, I mean, my personal opinion is–

Dan Pfeiffer: That’s why you’re here

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Is that there are a lot of really important groups that do shit really well and they need the resources to go do that. We don’t need to recreate the wheel and we certainly don’t need to funnel everything through one place. We need to have groups that have the ability to reach these very difficult to reach voters in ways that can be compelling and long lasting have the funding that they need to go do that, and that, to me, means you are talking about a number of groups.

Of course, you want them on the outside to coordinate well, and you don’t want duplication. We’ve certainly seen in previous presidentials where everyone was stepping on everyone else and spending money in duplication. You don’t want that either, but I think we have very sophisticated groups. They do it on the Senate.

Cycle after cycle and we have the benefit of learning and growing from that and I also think that we should let people do what they do well and help support them in that and just have some coordination. So that would be my recommendation going forward. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Stephanie, one of the, I believe to be the more tedious post election debates is about should Kamala Harris have gone on Rogan?

Can you, not to be tedious about it, but could you talk a little bit about how close you came to doing it, why it didn’t happen. 

Stephanie Cutter: Yeah. There’s a lot of intrigue around this. A lot of theories. It’s pretty simple. We wanted to do it. I hate to repeat this over and over, but it was a very short race with a limited number of days and for a candidate to leave the battleground, to go to Houston, which is a day off the playing field in the battleground. You know, getting that timing right is really important. So, we had discussions with Joe Rogan’s team. They were great. They wanted us to come on. We wanted to come on. We tried to get a date to make it work, and ultimately we just weren’t able to find a date.

We did go to Houston, and she gave a great speech at an amazing event.

Dan Pfeiffer: The Beyonce event?

Stephanie Cutter: Yes, well I’m going to call it reproductive freedom and because Texas is ground zero for the impact of these Trump abortion bans. There’s a story out today, in fact, of another young woman who lost her life because of it. And we were hoping to be able to fit it in around that and ultimately weren’t able to do it. As it turns out, that was the day that Trump was taping his Joe Rogan, so, which they had never confirmed to us. We kind of figured that out, in the lead up to it. She was ready, willing to go on Joe Rogan.

Would it have changed anything? You know, it would have been a, it would have broken through, not because of the conversation with Joe Rogan, but because of the fact that she was doing it. And that was really the benefit of it. Will she do it sometime in the future? Maybe. Who knows? But it, you know, didn’t ultimately impact the outcome one way or the other.

But she was willing to do whatever it takes. 

David Plouffe: Yeah, Dan, so what’s clear is we offered to do it in Austin. People should know that. Didn’t work out. I think, you know, maybe they leveraged that to get Trump in studio. I don’t know. And then, you know, we were obviously not going to be back in Texas, but offered to do it on the road.

Dan Pfeiffer: And he wouldn’t travel, right?

Stephanie Cutter: Right, no. 

David Plouffe: And I agree with Stephanie. Like, I don’t know at the end of the day, how much it would have driven vote. But listen, the reason that we, the night of the first debate, challenged Trump to a second debate. We were going to do that whether that first debate went good, bad, or indifferent. We needed big moments. We were behind in the race with a candidate who was not fully defined. So, that’s why I think we would’ve done Rogan. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Trump did a ton of podcasts. Like, let’s put Rogan aside. As I said, you don’t win or lose. It would have been a big moment. You don’t win or lose the campaign on one podcast. That was the core of Trump’s media strategy was to do a bunch of these podcasts.

They were not political podcasts per se. They were probably political adjacent, right adjacent. It’s my understanding that you guys wanted to do a bunch of the larger, more popular, not specifically political podcasts. Can you talk a little about why that may not have happened? Like I’ll give you, for example, is Hot Ones right?

Stephanie Cutter: Oh yeah. Hot Ones.

Dan Pfeiffer: Hot Ones as an example. Like there never in time has there been a candidate better suited for a podcast than Kamala Harris on Hot Ones.

Stephanie Cutter: I think, if I remember correctly, on Hot Ones that they didn’t wanna delve into politics.

Dan Pfeiffer: Yeah.

Jen O’Malley Dillon: And that, that’s across the board, right? 

Stephanie Cutter: But some of them did.

Jen O’Malley Dillon: We had, I think, real opportunity for some core podcasts that hit key constituencies: “All The Smoke,” “Club Shay Shay,” you know, everywhere we could, we did it. But I do think we had a lot of support in a number of, you know, athletes and others that were just not super interested in getting their brand caught up in the politics of this campaign. And I don’t think he had the same problem. Now, he wasn’t talking to the kind of folks, you know, that we were trying to get, and these are big names, that their reputations would be tied into, but he, I think, certainly was able to tap into some cultural elements in ways that we couldn’t, and I think that that had an impact on us, that there were places that we knew we had support, that we desperately wanted to go and have conversation that we thought would be interesting and relevant and fun, and we couldn’t get there. But we did get to a number of places that I think were really impactful for us hitting men, African American men, Latino men. We had a number of opportunities there that I think when we could do it, we absolutely did it and it was a top priority for us. 

Stephanie Cutter: And the truth is, when Trump would go on these podcasts, the conversation wasn’t political.

Dan Pfeiffer: Right.

Stephanie Cutter: You know, and we saw that and, you know, we did lots of outreach to many of the same podcasts that he went on. Ultimately, you know, as we said, with everything in this campaign, we had to pick and choose because of the limitations on time. But I do also want to say that Tim Walz was a huge podcaster and was on podcasts all the time in the politics adjacent space that you were talking about: sports, hunting, you know, fishing, running, football generally. He went on “SmartLess,” a whole host of them. So we definitely see the value in this strategy. I guess the thing that was different about our campaign versus Trump’s, are a couple of things. One, you know, all of his podcasts were reaching the audience that we were struggling to pull in. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Young men. 

Stephanie Cutter: Young men. And we saw that we knew that. And number two, in addition to doing podcasts, we were also doing earned media. And he was doing a little bit of that, but it was mostly right wing media, anything mainstream, he would book it and then they would cancel it. So, how people viewed our campaign doing the earned media in addition to the podcast, the podcast kind of got lost in that conversation. 

Dan Pfeiffer: I’m sort of fascinated by the fact that, you know, four years ago, the idea that it would be more politically problematic to have on these Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president of the United States, than Donald Trump, a man who’s been convicted of a crime and tried to violently overthrow the election. Do you have any theories as to why that is? Is it specific about the people he was talking to? Is it establishment versus anti-establishment? Politics versus not politics?

Stephanie Cutter: Of when people…

Dan Pfeiffer: Yeah, why people would be, some folks would be more, feel more comfortable for their brand to have a convicted criminal on than the sitting vice president.

Stephanie Cutter: Yeah. It was never a choice, like we’ll have him but we’re not going to have you. Anybody that took him would take us. It was more some of the, like, like “Hot Ones,” which is a great show. They didn’t want to do any politics, so they weren’t going to take us or him. So that was the issue. But we, you know, we got on plenty of them and, you know, the bottom line is she was willing to do just about anything and have a conversation with anybody regardless of where they sat.

Dan Pfeiffer: Do you have, she, like, she did more traditional media than Trump did, as you point out, did basically none.

Stephanie Cutter: Trump did none.

Dan Pfeiffer: Literally none. 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: And got no shit for that. 

Stephanie Cutter: Got shit from the interested party, you know, the media that wasn’t getting their interview. But voters don’t give a shit. 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Wait, Trump got shit for that? That’s what I’m saying. We got shit. I’m saying Trump got no shit.

Stephanie Cutter: Oh, yes. We got tons of shit that she wasn’t doing enough media. 

Dan Pfeiffer: He got no shit.

Stephanie Cutter: You know? Not, you know, yeah.

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Double standard.

Stephanie Cutter: Like, don’t even get me going on that. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Now that the campaign’s over and you’ve sort of identified who, sort of the voters were who moved at the end. How do you feel about the utility of some of that earned media stuff? Is it, is it now feel a little bit like we’re just sort of talking to our own people all the time?

Stephanie Cutter: Yeah. And not even the, well, in terms of who the targets were, the persuadable voters, which were largely young men, they’re not watching the evening news. They’re not watching cable. They definitely do not watch 60 Minutes. So, older voters, you know, maybe that’s why the vice president did a little bit better with senior citizens, but look, our background is doing lots of earned media through the course of our careers. Does it help in where we stand now?

You know, if you’re a candidate with a limited amount of time to get your voice out there and define yourself, you kind of have to do everything. But did it screw with our narrative, not just in getting shit for not doing enough earned media, but getting questions that we knew voters weren’t going to care about?

And you know, their myopic mindset on certain issues was not what the race was going to be about. So at a certain point we had to decide, is this helping us or hurting us? Um, and you know.

Dan Pfeiffer: What did you decide? You can say it. 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: I would say, I mean look, I am not a media hater by any measure and I think that, you know we women don’t get far in life talking about double standards.

Stephanie Cutter: Mm-hmm

Jen O’Malley Dillon: So that’s not the point. But I do think a narrative – 107 days, two weeks fucked up because of the hurricane. Two weeks talking about how she didn’t do interviews, which, you know, she was doing plenty, but we were doing in our own way. We had to, you know, be the nominee, had to find a running mate and do a rollout.

I mean, there was all these things that you kind of wanna factor in. But, real people heard in some way that we were not going to have interviews, which was both not true and also so counter to any kind of standard that was put on Trump that I think that was a problem. And then on top of that, we would do an interview and to Stephanie’s point, the questions were small and processy and about like…

Stephanie Cutter: Dumb. Just dumb.

Jen O’Malley Dillon: They were, they were not informing a voter who was trying to listen to learn more or to understand.

And I’m not here to say that, you know, the whole system was focused on us incorrectly. I’m just saying like, again, of the things we need to explore as we move forward as a campaign and as a country, that does a disservice to voters. And, you know, I think back and think we should have signaled more of our strategy early on about podcasts and who we were trying to reach and— but we had a limited amount of time to reach the people we were trying to reach and we were trying to go to them.

But being up against a narrative that we weren’t doing anything or we were afraid to have interviews is completely bullshit and also like took hold a little bit and we just gave us another thing we had to fight back for that Trump never had to worry about. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Plouffe, I wanna talk a little bit about the decisions towards the end around campaigning with the Cheneys, doing the events with the Republicans, the sort of the pivot or, you know, around like the statement you guys did after the John Kelly fascism comments.

I know at the end of every campaign, everyone, in a losing campaign, at least everyone then looks at it from the outside, looks at it and says, the reason our side lost confirms whatever priors I had beforehand. But one of the arguments, particularly some folks on the left are making is that doing this stuff with Cheney and Republicans suppressed turnout among the base.

Just talk a little bit about why you decided to do this stuff with Cheney and whether you saw any blowback at all in your data. 

David Plouffe: Well, first of all, you know, like any organization, you know, that’s got the resources in the private sector or in this case in politics, you make as many decisions as you can based on data by the marketplace.

Okay? So, you know, turnout was up in Milwaukee, was down a little bit in Philadelphia and Detroit, but, you know, we’d spent a lot of time with voters who we were concerned weren’t going to vote. And the fact that Liz Cheney was supporting Kamala Harris was not an issue raised by any of them. Okay. So I’d say a couple of things.

We were in a challenging political environment where to get to 50 percent of the vote in enough states to win 270 electoral votes. We needed some percentage of Republicans, but I think what people forget is, it’s more the independents who act like Republicans, where issues of democracy, of how unhinged he is, Project 2025, mattered to them, even as some conservative Democrats.

Also, when you’re being attacked as being a crazy, out of touch California liberal. When you have generals, and former Republican elected officials saying I’m for Kamala Harris, that helps rebut that. In many respects, that’ll be more effective than what she would say herself. And then as it relates to, you know, the comments about, you know, wanting generals like Hitler, that bothered voters, okay?

This is something that concerned them about, okay, he seems like he’s lost a step. He seems a little more unhinged, unstable. The people who worked for him last time are warning us, and now he says something like this. So, yeah, we could have decided to ignore that and just say, let’s talk about tax cuts today.

I don’t think that would have advanced the ball with the people we needed to advance it with. And again, I just want to, again, it can sound like making excuses. This political environment sucked, okay? We were dealing with ferocious headwinds, and I think people’s instinct was to give the Republicans, and even Donald Trump, another chance. So we had a complicated puzzle to put together here in terms of the voters. And it was going to take a little bit more independent Republicans than we saw in ’20, maybe a percent more Republican voters for us. It was going to take voters saying, ‘Even though I judged Trump’s first term favorably, I’m more concerned about him this time.’

We had to get more voters to say that so, you know, and if you look at how we closed I think we did one day with Liz Cheney in the last couple of weeks. You look at the ads we ran, they were heavily centered on the economy, on tax cuts, on Trump being for the wealthy. So this notion that somehow we weren’t focused on the economy, that was the driving motivation and message in our campaign. The closing speech, yes, it took place at the Ellipse, was a huge contrast on the economy and the people Donald Trump would fight for and the people Kamala Harris would fight for. So I think that mistakes, you know, I think my concern about that is, again, we have to understand what happened in this election and what didn’t.

And, you know, I think at the end of the day, we had to raise people’s concern and the threat level of a Trump second term. I think if you look at our internal data, and Quentin can speak to this, we did a lot of that. We just didn’t get it to the extent that we needed to to win. But at the end of the day, I think people, you know, it was the price of eggs that drove a lot of the debate here. And I think Trump’s gonna be in hot water because he’s gonna do a lot of stuff starting January 20th that’s not gonna be about the price of eggs. It’s gonna be about sort of the MAGA ideological pursuits that his, he and his base will insist happen. Whether that’s pardoning January 6th rioters or some of the other things around healthcare and immigration.

So, but I think, Dan, that it is important. We spent a lot of time with voters in the aftermath of those comments from Milley and about, you know, desiring generals like Hitler and it bothered voters. So again, that wasn’t the core of our campaign. The core of our campaign was an economic contrast in these battleground states, but it was an important element of it.

Dan Pfeiffer: Quentin, can you talk a little bit about–you know, at the end, you know, there was a, you know, I’d be curious in your data, how many, what percent of people in the last week were undecided or movable? And sort of who those voters were. And I know that a lot of folks in the campaign were, said that, you know, in that last week where it seemed like the vice president, not seemed like, was clearly closing very strongly Trump was sort of, seemed to be imploding everywhere. Just, were you guys, were the, were the last voters moving in your direction? There just wasn’t enough time? Or did Trump, you know, win those late deciders.

Quentin Fulks: I mean, it’s hard. Look, he won the election, so it’s hard to say that they broke our way, but look, we saw a shrinking pool of undecided voters all the way until the end. And as Jen mentioned, Republicans were turning out early to vote. We were looking at it to see if it was mode shifting, meaning, were these people who would normally vote on Election Day as Republicans just voting early and that was the case and then so we sort of knew this wasn’t some surge, you know, of Republican voters turning out, and, you know, ultimately not enough of them broke our way. These are those voters that were in that margin that we were counting on to get us over that hump. You know, to your previous question that you just asked and that Plouffe answered, you know I think that there’s a lot of things to learn in this election, but I think over learning some of them is a danger as well. There’s a number of states that will be on the board, including in ‘26, that are Senate races that will be very hard to win without getting some of those voters that we were talking to. And I think that—

Dan Pfeiffer: Those Republican leaning voters?

Quentin Fulks: Those Republican leaning votes. I mean, and if you look at it, and again, this probably sounds, I hope it doesn’t sound defensive to the people listening because it’s really not.

But if you look at ‘22 and you look at ‘20, that’s how Democrats won these races. I mean, 9 percent of Republican voters voted for Raphael Warnock in Georgia in 2020.

Dan Pfeiffer: And you managed his race.

Quentin Fulks: Yeah. And there’s no, there, there is no Democratic majority without the state of Georgia. And so when you’re looking at some of these states, North Carolina, Cheri Beasley almost got there in ‘22, but she didn’t, but if she had gotten a little bit more of those Republican voters, and of course, look, if you can turn out more of your base voters, that is good. But especially as we head into a midterm, and we also saw these voters beginning that trend of coming to Democrats in 2020 from the Biden race was the first time they did it. In 2022, we said, ‘Can we hold these voters?’ We ran strategies to try to do that. We were successful at doing it. So these voters had given us indication that they were, you know, willing to be open to Democrats, and we spoke to them, and we kept trying to speak to them. Now we saw some of them going back in Trump’s favorability to that piece, and so a lot of this was getting that down, and you could either have a Democrat trying to give that message, or you can have generals and people who worked for Trump delivering that message.

Dan Pfeiffer: And your net data set those people probably had more credibility to do that than a Democrat?

Quentin Fulks: One hundred percent. And so I just think that, you know, at the end of the day, there’s obviously work that needs to be done on both sides, but I would caution just trying to say that you should just throw that to the wind, especially, you know, and maybe it does end with Trump, but, you know, to the point of how we got here and the voters that allowed us to, to get to this point, I think a lot of those voters, and I think that that was a big part of it, and I don’t, I think it’s a false choice to say it has to be one or the other. I think that that is a mistake, I think we just have to do everything and we have to do it better. But I don’t think that this is saying that by trying to win those voters who have shown you in the past two cycles that they are open to Democrats, you are abandoning the base. 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Well, and I would just add, I agree with this so much, and I think to win you need, you need to have moderate Republicans and progressives of all ages, like we cannot win without these core elements. We don’t have the luxury of choosing one group of voter or another, but in the battleground states, um, we were heavily focused on suburbs. We knew they were very important in ’22, obviously, we’re very, very focused on women in particular, but moderates, independents, and the vice president actually did better in the WOW counties in Wisconsin than Joe Biden did. And while the rest of the country moved five points to the right in the suburbs we moved a point to the right. So that isn’t enough to win, but just a reminder that, like, we understood the work we had to do. And when your opponent is trying to make you more extreme and to make you dangerously liberal, the ways you can push back on that, you know, we talked about the trans ad earlier, is by having people stand with you that don’t agree with you on everything, but do see in you–it wasn’t just that the Republicans that stood with us were saying they were against Trump. They were also saying they were for the vice president and why. And I think that had real impact. Not enough, but it definitely was an important calculus to the broader framing that Trump was trying to drive people to us and to also, just by having these folks stand with us at the volume that they were standing for any reason they were with us. It wasn’t just about democracy. It wasn’t just about January 6th. That really showed to people who didn’t know her that well that if those Republicans would stand with her, well, she couldn’t be so extreme and dangerously liberal as Trump was trying to frame because these folks wouldn’t be with her, you know, as a baseline.

Dan Pfeiffer: When you look at the – 

David Plouffe: Let me just Dan–

Dan Pfeiffer: Yeah. 

David Plouffe: So just, it’s always worth reminding people. It’s really hard for Democrats to win battleground states. Okay. Let’s look at Pennsylvania. 25 percent of the electorate is liberal, roughly. 34 percent is conservative. By the way, in most battleground states, that conservative number is over 40.

So in every battleground state, there’s more conservatives than liberals. So in Pennsylvania, if exits are to be believed, Trump won conservatives 91-8. Harris won Liberals 93–6. Moderates, Harris won 56-43. But you kind of got to win 60 percent of them, right? So, you know, for Democrats to win battleground states, to Quentin and Jen’s point, it is a false choice.

You want to maximize your base, of course. And that was a place where we spent enormous time, a lot of resources. That’s critical. And obviously I think in Milwaukee, you know, just to use that, that as an example, we hit our turnout targets, fell a little bit short in Philly and Detroit. So that’s not good, that’s part of the equation. You’ve got to couple that with dominating in the middle. Not just winning it a little. We have to dominate the moderate vote. And I think as we look ahead to ’26 and ’28, particularly where you have seen drift amongst non-college voters generally, particularly those of color, specifically, you know, we obviously have to get some of that back. We can’t afford any more erosion. The math just doesn’t fucking work. Okay. But, I don’t think this is a permanent realignment, but the point here is to win battleground states. Yes, of course you have to maximize your turnout and your vote share amongst liberal voters if you’re a Democrat. That was a huge focus. You’ve got to win the center. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Speaking of realignment, right, like I think in a lot of ways it’s fair to say this is an anomalous election. Trump is a unique candidate, former incumbent president, you were, there’s obviously global trends taking place here. But, you know, I think what you guys all want to do, what I want to take from this conversation, is like, how do we project forward for the next races?

And I think one of the bigger concerns when you look at these numbers for the future of the Democratic Party in national politics is Latino voters, right? Based on exits, which I know are imprecise, but since 2012, they have moved 29 points to the right. Like, that is unsustainable, and the map becomes impossible.

And the Senate, like a durable Senate majority, is impossible if you’re losing Latino voters at that number. What did you guys see with Latinos? Because yes, like, inflation is an issue here, but we also had a pretty big shift from ’16 to ’20. So what were you just, just seeing with Latino voters and any thoughts you have on how we begin, if you have them yet, on how we begin to move back?

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Yeah, I think this is super tough. You know, I think we saw, as you’re saying, this isn’t just for ’24. You know, we saw it in ’20 where, you know, we spent so much time and resources and I thought, even in ’20, did a really good job from a campaign standpoint to reach Latino voters in particular.

And I think we missed the mark then and in that instance, I think it was economic broadly, right? And that was such a conversation about COVID and then the economy. I think, you know, we really saw in hindsight, we should have been far more on the economy and COVID kind of second. But, you know, I think, as you look at ’24, first of all, as you well know, Latino voters are not a monolith and in every battleground state, in every state in the country that have a cohort of Latino voters that make up the electorate, they’re very different. And I think certainly the national numbers look particularly bad because they incorporate Florida and Texas.

But we also, you know, saw a shift in this trend, as you’re saying, that we have a lot of work to do. I think that it’s Latino men in particular. I do think though the smaller shift right happened in Pennsylvania and there’s a heavy Puerto Rican community there outside of Philly, inside of Philly.

And I think, you know, obviously that was a big part of the close and where we did see some movement too. 

Dan Pfeiffer: After the Trump Madison Garden rally. 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, look, at the end of the day, I think a lot of this is really baked into the right track, wrong track and the economic concerns.

And I think, you know, that’s fundamental. I also don’t know that Latino voters are, you know, one again, not just monolithic, but maybe not an anomaly to other people in their communities. And they’re feeling the same concerns that people have. But I think globally with men, with Latino men in particular, with, you know, obviously we talked about the work we did with African American men.

I mean, I would say African Americans have been on the same trend line since ‘08 even, where we’ve seen a decrease in support cycle after cycle, which we were able to hold off this time. So I think there is a lot more work to do to kind of understand this more and think about it, but I don’t think it is the work of just a 107 day campaign or even a presidential campaign, and I think that’s probably the biggest answer of where do we go from here on all of this.

How do we ensure that people in this country see themselves in what we’re selling and that we have solutions that make sense to people and that we can understand what they’re going through and that they see themselves reflected in those solutions. And you know, I think there’s just a lot of work that to me, it is never going to be, we have to make choices about one type of voter versus another, but everyone has to see, you know, not just our brand as a party, but more importantly, our candidates as people who are providing solutions and really can make connections and that there’s a path for that. And I think the vice president, to her credit, was exceptional at this at every turn during this campaign. Very clear on her vision, very clear on who she was, very clear on the issues that she understood people cared about and really how to do something about it.

And I think that really broke through. But I think these younger voters in particular that, you know, fundamentally are hard to reach to begin with. And part of our conversation earlier, you have the same challenges with these different cohorts to reach voters and have an impact and in a way that they can feel connected to what we’re doing, but also just finding them to have that conversation, I think was complicated.

Dan Pfeiffer: Stephanie, it felt like one of the driving forces of this campaign was that there was a segment of voters, primarily young men, who were simply and seemed almost impossible to reach with the traditional tools that Democrats have. Linear TV to some extent, certainly earned media as you mentioned. It appears that Trump had some ability to reach them.

And, you know, there is a argument I very much buy, which is the difference between the national and the battleground states was because you guys were in the battleground states campaigning. But there’s also an alarming version of that, which is where we are not spending a billion dollars in field and TV, the country is moving farther to the right because organically some groups of voters are getting right leaning messaging or anti-democratic messaging.

Just what did you guys sort of see about that group of voters that are hard to reach? And any thoughts you have yet, and I would not blame you for not having them yet, about how we can reach those folks going forward? 

Stephanie Cutter: Well, I would say a couple of things. Like you said, this race was, you know, a little different than most anything else.

Trump is a different kind of candidate. We had a Democratic candidate, get in 107 days out, part of an administration, coming out of COVID, inflation, etc. Trump, you know, obviously it’s important to him that he portray this very masculine, strong figure. And so how does that show up for people?

It shows up at UFC fights. It shows up with Dana White speaking at the convention. It shows up with the kind of podcasts that he’s doing. It shows up in his rhetoric, he’s constantly picking a fight and showing that he’s going to take something on. I’m not saying we mimic that. We don’t want to mimic that.

But we have to pay attention to why people find that appealing. And his use of TikTok in specifically reaching those younger men. I can’t tell you how many friends of mine or nieces and nephews would say to me, “You know, I’m getting these things from Trump all the time on TikTok?” And they’re not political people.

They weren’t signing up for that stuff, but Trump was reaching them. So there is a lot for us to learn in that. But I will also say a lot of that was very specific to that candidate, you know, in his messaging and why people were open to that messaging. We can go really deep into why, and we can go into a conversation on people thinking that Democrats are squishy and, you know, are you know, the conversation we just had about transgender and the conversation that Republicans in the House are trying to make us have on bathrooms right now. Or we can talk about how we’re going to get people’s wages up, how we’re going to, you know, create programs for people that don’t go to college, but still can figure out how to build their careers. About how we finally, you know, address the sandwich generations, like the vice president was trying to have of caring for kids and being able to afford child care, but also having to care for ailing parents.

These are the types of issues that aren’t squishy or masculine, but they are real life. And I think if there’s one conversation that we should have as Democrats, we’ve got to get back to those issues. Because those are our issues. We’re the ones to find the solutions to those. And, you know, in my coming up in politics, we’re the only ones that cared about them.

We have to get back to those bread and butter type issues that change people’s lives. Even that 35-year-old man who finds the masculine rhetoric and TikToks and YouTubers appealing, still has to pay his kids’ child care bills. So it’s a choice that we have to make. 

Quentin Fulks: Jen said earlier that this isn’t the problem of a 107 day campaign to solve.

It’s a party problem. Republicans don’t make Trump apologize. And as Stephanie said, we don’t have to mimic it, but I think that there are a lot of times where if you’re in the Democratic Party and you step out of line…

Stephanie Cutter: Yeah

Quentin Fulks: You get punished for it. Not by – 

Stephanie Cutter: And that was what I was trying to say. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Thank you for being more direct, Quentin.

Quentin Fulks: You get punished for it by your own party. 

Stephanie Cutter: I mean.. 

Quentin Fulks: Republicans do not do that. They stay in line 

Stephanie Cutter: Look at Kamala Harris’s comments in the 2019 primary, you know, the reason why even that was being discussed is because of interest based politics. 

Quentin Fulks: I mean, we put out an ad with a cuss word in it and the amount of feedback that we got.

Jen O’Malley Dillon: That’s true. 

Quentin Fulks: Was insane. 

Dan Pfeiffer: From people within the party? 

Quentin Fulks: From people in the party and like Republicans are— and it’s like we we have to. Where we have to respond to that obviously we take that stuff seriously. We reach out to the people who have concerns, that takes time from us. They’re getting calls from people like Jen, people like myself. Apologizing for this so that we’re keeping our coalition together. Meanwhile Trump is putting these Republicans in the worst possible political or what would seem to be and they support it, because at the end of the day, they understand that it weakens Trump.

And, you know, this may sound like a shot across the bow, but it should be. Democrats are eating our own, to a very high degree. And until that stops, we’re not going to be able to address a lot of the things that just need to be said. And like, for the masculinity piece of it, men don’t like people that apologize.

I don’t know what age bracket, but it’s called like standing on business. If you say something, you mean it. Trump does not apologize. If he says something, he means it, and his party stands behind him and they don’t make him backtrack it, and that type of infrastructure doesn’t exist. We’re also getting creamed online.

I think one of the things about how even in the states that we’re not playing in, it bleeds over. The Republicans have a well tuned, well oiled, well invested echo chamber that exists beyond where they’re campaigning. And it’s online. It reverberates through TikTok. It reverberates through the culture.

There is a cultural dynamic that’s at play in politics today where it is converging like we’ve never seen. 

Dan Pfeiffer: And we’re losing the culture war. 

Quentin Fulks: And we’re losing the culture war. And whatever it is, woke, whatever words you want to use, I’m not, you know, I leave that to anybody to define on whatever value. But we are not aligned on where we can be within that because there’s always an opportunity.

It may be very different for you in your state where you are, but at the end of the day, we’re all Democrats. And I think that people are very advantageous to throw someone else under the bus, a fellow Democrat, if it means that they can rise above it in their own state, but we’re missing the sort of forest for the trees.

And I think we have to be better about that. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Jen, this is the third campaign in a row where Trump has not invested, what appears to be not invested, significant money into a traditional field organization, and yet still gotten incredibly high turnout. You guys invested a ton of money and time in the field, particularly in this election.

Is there, and that obviously bore fruit, so I’m not suggesting it didn’t, but is there anything you take from this that makes you question how we have traditionally done field in the Democratic Party in terms of efficiency or efficacy? 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Well—

Dan Pfeiffer: I know that I know this is a loaded question for you. 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Yeah. So first of all, I don’t, I think against national headwinds, we would not have come as close as we did without organizing. I think that part of what we have to do as Democrats on our side is, you know, do the work of having the conversations and reaching people. I just think that is a part of our party and a part of the people lower propensity that we are trying to reach, that we can reach effectively through programs.

At the same time, I think that, and I think Republicans generally have not had that same challenge because for the most part, their folks have kind of turned out pretty consistently. I think Trump, again, is an anomaly, so I would be careful to put tactics to him that could work for someone else because I’m not sure on his side that that’s possible.

But what is true and what I do think we need the answer to is how do we reach people in ways that isn’t just about traditional field. And we worked very hard at this, but I’m not sure we sort of solved all of it. You know, there’s the door knocking, there’s the phone calls, there’s the texting, there’s the ways to reach people.

We do that effectively, we know how to do it. We have volunteers, like we had extraordinary people that came from all over that were part of the battleground states that did the work, did the trainings. We did contrast at the doors and on the calls. You don’t typically do that. Our folks were able to handle all of that and it was a testament to the overall organization and the organization could scale as we had just growing support, which is exactly what you want to see.

We spent a lot of time, even earlier in the year when President Biden was at the top of the ticket working on, and I hate fucking terms for field, so I can’t, like, relational organizing. 

Dan Pfeiffer: You invented most of them. 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: I just, it’s like all organizing, or field, I still say field, but anyway, whatever, relational.

The bottom line is, we know, especially in this environment that we’re talking about where people are tuned out to politics, they want to stay away from the chaos of Trump, they don’t trust institutions, they don’t trust parties, how do you reach them? You reach them by people they trust in their own lives.

So, so much of what we were trying to do was to get to the young people, not just to talk to them, but to give them the tools and empower them to speak to other people in their lives. And I think that we made some progress here. I think, you know, there’s lots of technical things that help us do that.

But at the end of the day, there is no doubt that Donald Trump figured out how to do that and did that to young people, young men in a way that he, you know, created some of this coolness to folks and most of the people that wouldn’t be harmed are the ones that felt like that he was cool and they would respond in the podcast and so on. 

Dan Pfeiffer: This is young men?

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Young men in particular. Yeah, young white men in particular, too. But this isn’t to say this is all just about young white men. From a— how you reach people, I actually think you know, we worked a lot on sharing content. We worked on trying to talk not just to our own people, right, which is one of the problems and the limitations of platforms that you’re just speaking to the chorus.

It’s part of the challenge. How do we try to get people to then be inspired to speak to people in their own lives and to do it in a way that is not political and not partisan? And I think we had some hits and misses, but we’ve got to solve this because you cannot put enough money into social media and digital advertising and paid programming to have the impact that organic reach has when people are empowered to speak in their own lives and are willing to take that on.

And we saw that and we saw our people do it. It just wasn’t getting far enough and it wasn’t actually infiltrating at the level that we’ve been talking about. So there are systemic issues here. There is also just elements that, you know, we just got to figure out from a campaign standpoint, like it’s easy to do doorknocking, well, doorknocking is hard, but when you know how to track it, and you know how to be accountable to it, like there are structural challenges that we have to work on for sharing content that that has as much power as it does doing a doorknock. And so there’s things that we really tried to implement this time, but I think we still have work to do to understand.

And there are groups that do this, do this well. Do not have to just be part of the political campaign environment. We have to pull ideas from everywhere because at its essence, it is figuring out how you reach someone that doesn’t really want to be reached about topics maybe that they don’t know that they really want to engage on and that they retain it and carry it forward to then be willing to take an action and that really is going to require more community, more inputs from different parts of your life to ultimately get people to do that.

Dan Pfeiffer: Okay, I have tortured you guys probably long enough. But before we go, I just want to ask, is there anything else, any final lessons, or thoughts that any of you want to offer about what happened and what comes next?

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Can I do one? 

Dan Pfeiffer: Of course. 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Okay. So, we lost and that really sucks and we came really close and obviously we believed that we could pull this off.

And that is something we all have to live with and we’ll have to live with for the next four years. But that does not mean that the people that did the work on the campaign as volunteers in these states, that that work didn’t matter. It was so important. And I, if I spend the rest of my life just doing this, like I hope people here, especially people that listen to your podcast and your audience, that there is so much power in being involved in a campaign like this and, and doing a job that you can believe in every day and going to talk to regular people and make your case for why you care about something and why you hope they care about it too, that even though we didn’t get it over the finish line, we got it closer because of those volunteers and because of those young staff that moved to Wilmington, that moved to all these places in the country that they didn’t have to.

And during COVID, it was really hard. I think our industry, a campaign industry, you know, we sort of lost some of the pipeline of people that did this cycle after cycle. I am only here today because I started a long time ago doing campaigns and I have stayed with them for a long time. But I just hope people don’t look at what happened and think, “Well, what I did didn’t matter,” or, “The campaign didn’t matter,” or, “The vice president wasn’t exceptional,” because she was and because what they did did matter.

And that does not also mean that you have to keep fighting every day. We are in a long haul right now and we’re going to have to take care of ourselves and fight in the way we can fight when the fighting needs to be done. But I just, like, the people that stood with us on this campaign are the ones that are going to get us through this next hurdle.

And they’re the ones that we’re all going to follow behind because they are that good and that exceptional and have learned so much and are the future. And I just want to make sure that every single person, even if you did one text or one phone call, you know that what you did really mattered and made a difference here, even when the ultimate result wasn’t what we had hoped for.

Dan Pfeiffer: That seems like a great place to end in. That’s also true for the four of you who did incredible work under impossible circumstances. None of you had to do this, and you did it because it was important, and so I’m very grateful to you. It was very, what you did was very impressive. So thank you to Jen, Quentin, Stephanie and David. This was fascinating and illuminating. 

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Thanks, Dan.

Stephanie Cutter: Thanks.

Quentin Fulks: Thank you.

David Plouffe: Thanks, Dan.

Dan Pfeiffer: That’s our show for today. One final note, I’m gonna be doing a Q and A about this interview for our Friends of the Pod subscribers that will publish later on Tuesday. Sign up at crooked.com/friends to participate in that Q and A and get ad free versions of our shows and more. But more importantly, I hope you’ll sign up because as we just heard in this conversation, one of the dominant forces in this election was a powerful right wing media machine that helped tip the election to Trump. It’s absolutely essential that Democrats push back against that, and Crooked is going to play a huge part in that. Your support as a subscriber allows us to invest in new shows, new content, and new initiatives to continue to be an important, independent, progressive voice in this crazy media ecosystem. So again, the link is crooked.com/friends, or you can sign up directly through Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back with a new show on Wednesday.