Democratic officials and voters have accused Kamala Harris and her top team of failing to realistically assess why her campaign collapsed.
One Democratic National Committee adviser who participated in a recent call with top donors said she was “stunned that there was no sort of postmortem or analysis of the disastrous campaign.”
“It was just patting each other on the back,” Lindy Li told NewsNation. “They praised Harris as a visionary leader, and at one moment during the call, she was talking about her Thanksgiving recipe.”
A podcast appearance featuring top Harris aides “failed to mention that hundreds of millions of dollars went to them and their friends right through these consulting firms,” Li said.
“These consultants were the primary beneficiaries of the Harris campaign, not the American people,” she added.
A recent episode of Pod Save America, hosted by former aides for Barack Obama, featured top Harris advisers Stephanie Cutter, Quentin Fulks, Jen O’Malley Dillon and David Plouffe, who have been accused of chasing scapegoats and a striking lack of self-reflection.
An avalanche of comments on the podcast’s YouTube channel accused the campaign of failing to listen to voters while self-aggrandizing over what worked despite a loss that is now ushering in Trump’s retribution-fueled administration.
Plouffe’s suggestion that Democratic candidates should try to “dominate the moderate vote” in future elections drew overwhelming backlash on social media.
“Is it too much to ask for a little humility and self-reflection from the people whose strategies failed badly?” asked The Nation’s Jeet Heer.
The New York Times’ political reporter Astead Herndon wrote that the episode was “a good ad for the importance of independent media.”
“Have you not gotten enough credit for breaking the news that Joe Biden is old?” Pod Save America host Jon Favreau fired back.
“You’d think you’d have more shame, but I understand this is just like a game of sims for you,” Herndon replied.
“The Harris campaign folks are the most non-agentic people I’ve encountered in a position of comparable decision-making authority,” wrote polling analyst Nate Silver. “They don’t even see themselves as victims so much as Non-Player Characters with no will of their own.”
Former Democratic pollster Adam Carlson said “talking about ‘what happened’ for 100 min [and] not saying anything they would’ve done differently in hindsight is insane.”
“It came across as extremely tone deaf and filled with self-absolution,” he wrote. “Maybe it’s too soon after the election for them to get there, but then maybe don’t do a post-mortem so soon.”
Harris filmed a 10-minute video message shared by the Democratic National Committee to thank donors and her supporters, whose work has had a “lasting impact” in a campaign that was “about empowering people,” despite her campaign’s insistent message that a second Trump presidency would pose a significant threat to democracy.
“I am proud of the race we ran, and your role in this was critical,” she said. “What we did in 107 days was unprecedented. Think about the coalition that we built, and we were so intentional about that. You would hear me talk about it all the time.”
While she conceded that the race “didn’t turn out like we wanted,” she highlighted her campaign’s record-breaking $1.5 billion fundraising effort, although the campaign reportedly ended the race $20 million in debt while donors and supporters continue to receive fundraising messages weeks after her defeat.
Democratic strategist and veteran political commentator James Carville criticized Harris aides who told the vice president to avoid Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. Trump gave a three-hour interview. Harris turned it down.
“If I were running a 2028 campaign and I had some little snot-nosed 23-year-old saying, ‘I’m going to resign if you don’t do this,’ not only would I fire that mother***** on the spot, I would find out who hired them and fire that person on the spot,” Carville said in a furious rant on social media. “I’m really not interested in your uninformed, stupid, jackass opinion as to whether you go on Joe Rogan or not.”
A more sober take on Harris’s failures from a former campaign adviser addressed her reluctance to distance herself from Biden and if Harris embracing newer media and the right-wing-driven podcast universe could have helped her in the long run.
“Voters were looking for change, and we didn’t represent that,” Mike Nellis wrote.
Popular progressive streamer Hasan Piker appeared on Pod Save America after Harris’s team.
“I think that they need to change their policies,” Piker told CNN this week. “It’s 100 percent a policy thing. It’s a boring answer. Although it would be very self-serving for me to say, ‘I’m the left’s Joe Rogan; the Democratic Party should give me millions of dollars,’ that’s not gonna solve this problem. What will solve this problem is if the Democratic Party actually adopts real left-wing economic populist messaging instead of purposefully avoiding that stuff because they’re terrified of upsetting their corporate donors.”
