Democratic strategists are still patting themselves on the back for the catastrophic defeat.
Being angry all the time is not good for your mental health, but the world provides provocations of anger that overwhelm any attempts at calmness. For anyone who has been following the 2024 presidential election and sees Donald Trump’s victory as a huge tragedy for the US and the world, the great enemy of peace is listening to interviews with Democratic Party strategists. This is a group that has shown a stunning reluctance to accept any responsibility for losing—for the second time in eight years—to Trump, the bully and con man everyone hates.
Last Thursday, Sheila Nix, chief of staff to Vice President Kamala Harris, participated at this year’s bipartisan presidential campaign staff conference, where she made a stunning statement. “I would bet that she ran a pretty flawless campaign and she took all the steps that (were) necessary to be successful,” Nix said. “And I think obviously we didn’t win, but I think we hit all the marks.”
Chris LaCivita, Trump’s campaign manager, made the obvious answer. “Flawless Companies Don’t Lose,” LaCivita told The New York Times. “You can run a great campaign — you can run a good campaign — and still lose. But you can’t have a flawless campaign and lose.”
Nix isn’t the only Harris employee patting herself on the back for a job well done. The same notes of complacency and self-satisfaction dominate a great episode of Under to save America podcast that aired in late November featuring four senior advisers to the Harris campaign: Jen O’Malley Dillion, Quentin Fulks, Stephanie Cutter and David Plouffe.
How Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr pointed outthese four strategists “continued to say that they do not make excuses or blame others, but do both.”
Bacon continued to observe:
The four never made direct admissions of their serious mistakes. “We had to really get Harris to distance himself from President Biden”; “Maybe we spent too much time in Arizona” (Harris lost there by 6 percentage points); “We were supposed to have a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic National Convention.” There were no such rude statements.
Instead, staffers repeatedly defended their work, noting that Harris lost less in the seven states she campaigned in than the rest of the country.
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The chorus, which Harris performed in swing states, often sounded in defense of the company. But this, it turns out, is not true. How Vox writer Eric Levitz, based on the observations of strategist David Shore, notes“Democrats’ outperformance in the swing largely reflects how poorly the party performed in New York, Texas, Florida and California.” In other words, Harris’ performance in swing states was in line with her performance in the rest of the country — except for solid blue states, which saw a massive drop in support for the Democratic nominee. This is a particularly telling admission of Shore’s, for he was senior advisor to the outside group which made for great publicity in the swing states.
Many other criticisms could be made of the Harris campaign: its strategy of embracing Liz Cheney and other far-right Republicans; her use of wealthy surrogates like Mark Cuban, which undermined her economic message; her closeness to Wall Street donors who (along with Cuban) forced her to tone down any economic populism.
The original sin of the 2024 election was Joe Biden’s selfish decision to run again, which meant that when he finally stepped down in the summer, Democrats had to scramble to replace him with Kamala Harris.
Many of Harris’ strategists also worked for Joe Biden — and they remain reluctant to hold their former boss accountable or explain their own complicity in Biden’s disastrous selfishness.
Like CNN notes about Under to save America Interview: “None of the campaign executives called out Biden by name, but they repeatedly mentioned political ‘headwinds’ and touted how much Harris needed to fight back to make the race competitive.”
Quentin Fulks said Under to save America“Frankly, we were in crisis management mode to keep President Biden in the race … As Plouffe said, Trump’s support was growing and we had to do something about that as well. And so there was a lot of walking and chewing gum at the same time, but there really wasn’t any contingency plan to give her the race right after this debate or at any point until President Biden finally says he’s not going to continue.”
The fact that there was no contingency planning even after the terrible Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump debate in June is shocking. Nevertheless, it is confirmed Time magazine which reports: “On July 21, Biden told his top brass that he was dropping out of the race. O’Malley Dillon said she and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez cried that day and insisted there was no planning at the time. “Not one ounce,” said O’Malley Dillon.
These Biden loyalists took over the Harris campaign and continued to display the same recklessness.
Stephanie Cutter said Under to save America that “the congress showed a lot of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris, a lot of freshness, a focus on the future, bringing together different coalitions. We’ve had independent candidates, Republicans, Democrats, business leaders, athletes all come together around a new way forward and finally turn the page.” It is incredibly telling that Cutter believes that the Democratic coalition that will win is made up of “independents, Republicans, Democrats, business leaders, sports people,” rather than a multiracial coalition of union members, the broader working class, youth, civil rights activists, feminists, environmentalists and anti-war activists. Her deeply depoliticized view of the Democratic Party as a vehicle for the bipartisan establishment, rather than a coalition fighting to change America. This depoliticized ideology permeated the Harris campaign and doomed it to failure.
The cutter gives an equally revealing answer to the “Biden question” (why didn’t Harris differentiate herself from Joe Biden since voters told voters they wanted to see it?). According to Kater:
As for the Biden question, we certainly got that wherever 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, not try to re-sing the past. But she also felt part of the administration. And if we hadn’t said something like, “Well, I would have handled the border very differently.” We never set out to please anyone. So we talked about things like, she’s a different generation, most of her career is outside of Washington, not in Washington. That way, she knows there are a lot of great ideas from around the country. Her career has been about reaching across the aisle, finding healthy ways to accomplish tasks. It is not based on ideological politics. All these things we were trying to tell the story and give the impression that it was different without pointing out a specific problem.
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The last sentence is telling: “we tried to tell the story and give the impression that it was different without pointing out a specific problem.” In other words, the goal was an empty campaign that would not involve a concrete commitment to real politics. It was all about branding, not politics. But the story that Cutter and her colleagues wanted to sell was not one that the American people fell in love with. The public wanted real politics, which Harris failed to deliver.
The Democratic Party needs a fundamental overhaul to recover from the 2024 debacle. The party needs to come to terms with the fact that Trump’s loss was not an accident that befell the party, but the result of bad decisions made by Joe Biden and his staff that put Harris in an almost impossible position. But Harris made this bad situation even worse by hiring Biden staffers and taking their advice to run a content-free campaign.
The Democrats will never recover unless the leaders responsible for this disaster are held accountable.
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