Kamala Harris Campaign Admits Defeat Was Always Looming

By Gloria Ogbonna

Senior advisers from Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign have revealed that the vice president’s bid for the White House lacked a clear path to victory from the start.

Speaking candidly on the Pod Save America podcast, several of her campaign’s top strategists reflected on the challenges they faced and the hard truths they had to confront, even if they couldn’t admit them publicly during the race.

David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the campaign, acknowledged the uphill battle Harris faced, even as internal and public polling told conflicting stories.

“We were hopeful. I don’t know how optimistic we were, but we thought, OK, this is tied, and if a couple things break our way [we could win],” Plouffe said. However, he admitted that Harris never took the lead over Donald Trump in internal polling.

The public polls showing her in the lead were puzzling to him. “We didn’t get the breaks we needed on Election Day,” Plouffe said. “I think it surprised people because there were public polls in late September and early October showing us with leads that we never saw internally.”

Plouffe was joined by campaign staffers Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter, who reflected on the campaign’s struggles to define Harris as a candidate distinct from President Joe Biden.

Some Democrats had criticized Harris for not carving out her own identity during the race. Her interview on The View, where she claimed she would have done “nothing” differently from Biden in her administration, became a point of contention.

Stephanie Cutter defended Harris’s loyalty to Biden while acknowledging the challenge it posed to the campaign. “We knew we had to show her as her own person and point to the future, not try to rehash the past,” Cutter explained.

“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.”

Cutter added, “She had tremendous loyalty to President Biden. Imagine if we said, ‘Well, we would have taken this approach on the border.’ Imagine the stories that would’ve come out: ‘She never said that in the meeting.’”

Quentin Fulks shed light on the impact of Trump’s targeted attack ads, which portrayed Harris as out of touch, especially regarding controversial issues like transgender rights. One ad criticized her for supporting taxpayer-funded gender transition procedures for incarcerated individuals.

“I ultimately don’t believe it was about the issue of ‘trans,’” Fulks said. “I think it made her seem out of touch. It was a pseudo-economic ad, suggesting taxpayer money was being wasted.”

Fulks explained the campaign’s decision to avoid directly countering these attacks, instead focusing on presenting Harris in a positive light. “We tested a ton of responses to this, direct responses, and none of them ever tested as well as her talking about what she would do—the future, the type of president she would be,” he said.

“If we spent this entire race pushing back on immigration attacks, crime attacks, and 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.”

Ultimately, the advisers admitted the campaign’s strategy couldn’t overcome the obstacles it faced. With Harris’s deep loyalty to Biden and the challenges of addressing attacks without losing focus on her vision, the campaign never found the winning formula.

The reflections from these senior advisers paint a picture of a campaign struggling to find its footing in a highly polarized political environment.

Source Breitbrat