Kamala Harris allies pointed fingers after her loss to Donald Trump, but they also agreed that she started her abbreviated campaign from the bottom of a "deep hole."
More than a dozen campaign aides, Democratic operatives, strategists and White House officials told NOTUS that the vice president was punished for her involvement in President Joe Biden's administration, and they also blamed the 81-year-old chief executive for remaining in the race after billing himself as a transitional candidate and for failing to clearly articulate a case against Trump.
“I’m amazed that we even got close,” said one Democratic official close to the campaign. “The campaign has been broken since the beginning.”
Few operatives wanted to work for Biden and even fewer wanted to relocate to campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, and one campaign aide said the president's team was forced to elevate junior staffers to senior roles, and more experienced operatives who signed after Harris became the nominee had trouble working with the existing infrastructure.
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“Kamala did not want to shake things up," said an operative close to the campaign. "She thought that what she could do is install certain people into leadership roles to make sure that she got the campaign that she wanted."
Harris hired numerous high-profile veterans from Barack Obama's two successful campaigns, including campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and senior adviser David Plouffe, but some of her allies criticized their strategies to chase moderate Republicans and suburban voters.
“David Plouffe wanted to run a 2008 campaign for a 2024 election,” the operative said. “He wanted to win the middle. He wanted to win white moderates. He wanted to have people vote for Kamala despite what their tendencies would be. [He] wanted to treat Kamala Harris as Barack Obama, and she’s not Barack Obama.”
The campaign went into Election Night projecting confidence they had outworked Trump's operation, but four sources said the vice president's volunteer program lacked talking points or literature until far too late, and staffers were infuriated when O’Malley Dillon praised the data team during an all-staff five days before the election and described the race as close – when in reality it wasn't.
“The fact that she lost more states outside of battleground states is an indictment of every other part of the campaign,” said one Democrat who heard her remarks.
