In the final sprint to the election, Kamala Harris’ campaign — at her urging, aides and allies said — began playing Donald Trump’s most inflammatory comments on the jumbotrons at her rallies, using technicolor to express his meandering, racist and sometimes violent rhetoric exhibited.
It was an emphatic reminder of the stakes of the elections. And it hardly seemed to help her. The result Wednesday was brutal for Harris, a bloodbath for Democrats across the map.
Harris inherited a campaign from Joe Biden last summer that appeared to be flat, given the president’s unpopularity and inability to get a message across. And after Democrats excluded Biden from the ticket, she quickly consolidated her moribund party, rallying women, firing up TikTok and Instagram creators with supportive memes and raising eye-popping amounts of money from donors.
But the momentum consultants who insisted she had built up failed to materialize. She never sufficiently buried Biden’s ghost, severely hampering her ability to convince voters that she was the turn-the-page candidate.
It happened simply because Harris refused to make a clean break from the past four years when voters said that’s what they wanted. Worse, she hesitated to draw any light between her and her boss on Biden’s biggest vulnerability — his stewardship of the economy — nor to identify any specific way in which her presidency would differ from his tenure, aside from appointing a Republican to her cabinet.
Some close allies and even a few aides privately wondered why she continued to cling so closely to him, especially since her campaign did not try to make extensive use of their record. Yet Harris showed little appetite within her campaign to bear the brunt of the blame, with aides pointing to how she shifted the battleground numbers in her favor and kept Trump’s margins in check, and a pervasive sense that Biden and the broader anti-sitting fervor pushing her into a difficult, even impossible position.
“We ran the best campaign we could since Joe Biden was president,” grumbled a Harris aide who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “Joe Biden is the only reason Kamala Harris and the Democrats lost tonight.”
Another Harris aide said it was clear that Biden should have gracefully exited much sooner, allowing Democrats to hold a primary that they thought Harris would have won.
So resonant was the pounding that some leaders of the party’s next generation signaled the need for a deep autopsy of the party’s failure to stem the red wave.
“This is not just one province. This isn’t just one storyline. This isn’t just someone using this to explain their past, right? This is quite systematic,” said Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle of Philadelphia. “This is a solid Republican victory, and the biggest Republican victory by a presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984. I don’t think any Democrat who wants to improve this situation should sugar-coat it.”
Even the advantages that Harris’ team had long bragged about — their professional court game against Trump’s band of MAGA activists and billionaire rebels, along with the Democrats’ perceived strength in the suburbs — had dulled. And during the campaign, some elected officials and strategists had warned that their operation was not only lagging behind, but also poorly managed.
Three weeks before Election Day in Pennsylvania, the largest swing state, Jewish Democrats and their allies met behind closed doors with Harris officials in Pittsburgh, according to four people who attended or were briefed on the discussion. They said the surrogate operation was inadequate, a complaint echoed in other key states. They said the Pennsylvania team had no relationships with key elected officials; that this mattered because it meant validators weren’t being used effectively to convince voters to support a candidate they barely knew.
The mutual struggle and doubts had already begun.
One Democrat granted anonymity to describe a private conversation who called the meeting “a vent.” At that time, people were already voting by mail.
“There’s no amount of social media ads or TV ads or podcast interviews or anything you can do that’s going to influence people because their ballots have been cast and they can’t go back and change it,” said a second Democrat .
Across the state, in Philadelphia, Latino and Black Democrats held similar private meetings with Harris’ team in the weeks leading up to Election Day, where they aired many of the same complaints.
And on Wednesday, Democrats also began pointing fingers at Harris’ data team. A Pennsylvania Democratic strategist, granted anonymity to speak freely, said the Harris campaign projected higher turnout in key counties such as Chester and Montgomery in suburban Philadelphia.
“This looks like Robby Mook 2.0,” the person said.
It was not lost on them that organizing had to be a place where they had a clear advantage. And that wasn’t the only department that failed to meet expectations under the radar.
In a close race where the two candidates’ daily activities often overshadowed the mechanics, Harris went with or even trailed Trump on TV and streaming services for weeks. The bold and unstrategic Trump seemed to mask the quieter yet ultimately effective campaign his advisers waged in ads that battered Harris for days without strong reactions.
While Democrats led by the Future Forward PAC launched unprecedented battlefield spending with an emphasis on Harris as a middle-class fighter, Trump and his allies spent tens of millions in places that left a deeper impression — like those with Harris’ support . to provide taxpayer-funded gender transition-related medical care to detained immigrants and federal prisoners. Others captured her reluctance to split from Biden.
It wasn’t that Democrats weren’t issuing warnings about what they portrayed as Trump’s oligarchic intentions, a Democrat close to the campaign explained. Rather, they feared that it was already so well defined that more attention should have gone into defining its priorities and making specific appeals to black and Latinx voters.
Harris had just over 100 days to build her campaign — something seen as an advantage by Democrats who know her best, freeing her from an ideologically contentious primary and the rigors of a lengthy election campaign.
And her plan was relatively simple. Even before Democrats pushed Biden from the top of the ticket, Harris had quietly laid the groundwork for her campaign weeks earlier as she gathered some of her top advisers and a few close allies to prepare for what they thought would be the vice presidential debate would be.
Biden was still active at the time. And because Trump had yet to choose a running mate, Harris had no opponent for the vice presidential debate. So they began loosely crafting messages that framed the choice as between a longtime prosecutor serving ordinary Americans and Trump, a convicted felon out for himself, according to five people involved in the initial discussions.
The plan they formulated was to try to focus the vice presidential debate largely on Trump, with his choice merely as a stand-in; someone who would portray Harris as loyal to the former president and not the country. It was how they envisioned her becoming Biden’s No. 2: making the election a referendum on Trump and not her unpopular boss, who was at odds with Democrats.
Harris and her team had an extremely compressed timeline to execute. She had to organize her new staff in Wilmington and crucial battlefields and assemble a nuclear core; channeling the flood of donations that began pouring into the campaign’s coffers; select a running mate; prepare for the debate with Trump; give an acceptance speech at the DNC and then implement her debate plan. Everything went according to plan.
At the heart of Harris’ pitch, and from which her tactical decisions flowed, was the idea that she represented the safer option.
That’s why she spent so much time campaigning with Republicans and never-Trumpers; why she rhetorically wrapped herself in the American flag and relentlessly promoted her own middle-class upbringing while bombarding the airwaves with messages about Trump’s dangerous economic policies. That’s why she wanted to act as the law-and-order candidate bent on preventing the country from being taken over by a convicted criminal. That’s why she didn’t talk about the historic nature of her candidacy and nomination.
After the initial elation among Democrats subsided, Harris faced questions from the media — and criticism from Trump and his campaign — for not attending interviews with major news outlets. It took Harris more than a month to sit down for her first extended interview, going on to only a few select shows and friendly media outlets.
Harris chose not to provide a detailed explanation, or sometimes no reason at all, for the yawning chasm between many of her previous policy positions on everything from hydraulic fracturing (a big problem in Pennsylvania) and clean car mandates (a big problem in Michigan) to provide citizenship to unauthorized immigrants brought to the US as children. She led with a “my principles haven’t changed” approach that should serve as a comprehensive starting point.
Most around her supported the strategic decision, seeing it as “less is more” and claiming that giving lengthy explanations would subject her to new questions from the news media and provide new fodder for Trump and Republicans to launch relentless attacks . However, it missed an opportunity to show even the slightest hint that she understood that people might still have questions about how she could stray so far, issue after issue.
And other calculations that Harris made at least internally seemed even riskier — most notably refusing to split from Biden even after the president publicly offered her his permission to do so. Harris’ aides during the campaign emphasized that this was a line she did not want to cross, indicating it would undermine a litany of public statements she had made about the president and blow holes in her own record in White House.
Eugene Daniels contributed to this report.
