In the last few days, four of the senior officials who directed Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign spoke with me about how the race unfolded, from the chaotic first weeks after President Joe Biden’s sudden withdrawal until the final hours of Election Day. My conversations with Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair; David Plouffe, the former Barack Obama campaign manager enlisted as a senior adviser; Quentin Fulks, the principal deputy campaign manager with responsibility for broadcast advertising; and Rob Flaherty, a deputy campaign manager in charge of digital operations and advertising, offered a view into their decision making through every stage of the campaign.
In these interviews, and another one that these principals conducted recently with alumni of the Obama campaigns on the podcast Pod Save America, the senior Harris-campaign leadership was notably unremorseful about the choices it made in Harris’s failed sprint to the White House. Instead, the officials stressed the welter of difficult decisions that rapidly engulfed them from the moment Biden stepped aside. No president in modern times had withdrawn from the race so close to Election Day. Immediately, Harris had to formally secure the Democratic nomination, put her own stamp on the Biden campaign operation, introduce herself to voters, and begin the process of digging out from the deficit in the polls that Biden left after his disastrous June debate performance against Donald Trump.
“Our first week, it was like, Well, we need a biography ad; we need to talk about the border; we need to lay out an economic contrast; we need to get health care in there, abortion,” Plouffe told me. “If you have six, seven, eight months, you storyboard all this stuff, you have a narrative arc. Everything was smashed and collided here.”
The analysis of the race from Harris’s senior team won’t satisfy the shell-shocked Democratic critics who believe that the campaign’s tactical choices and the vice president’s occasional missteps as a candidate contributed materially to her defeat. They described what critics consider her most obvious blunders as largely irrelevant to the outcome.
Some on the left believe that Harris depressed turnout among the party’s core voters by emphasizing her support from anti-Trump Republicans such as former Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Some in the center believe she erred by not renouncing more forcefully the progressive positions she’d adopted during her ill-fated 2020 primary run. Others wonder how her campaign could raise more than $1 billion and still end up losing and in debt. Across the party, the most commonly held criticism has been that Harris should have done more to separate herself from Biden.
Against those complaints, her campaign leadership argued that no matter the tactics or the messages they tried, Harris could never fully escape the vortex of voter discontent with the economy, the country’s overall direction, and Biden’s performance as president. Even as voters remained disenchanted on all those fronts—arguably, because they remained so disenchanted—retrospective assessments of Trump’s first term were rising, to a point where, in the VoteCast survey conducted by the AP and NORC, a 52 percent majority approved of his performance. Only 42 percent of voters approved of Biden’s.
“When I would recite the headwinds [to the campaign staff], they were: right track/wrong track, presidential approval, candidate part of the administration—although I think a lot of voters were willing to give her some room about how she’d be different—and approval of Trump’s first term,” Plouffe told me. “Those are historically ferocious headwinds.”
And in fact, for all the focus on what Harris, Trump, and their teams did or did not do, in the history of modern polling, every time an incumbent president has faced comparable headwinds of discontent, the opposition party has won the White House—just as Trump did last month.
Trump was anything but a normal candidate. As the 2024 race proceeded, however, evidently most voters were treating him as if he were one. Despite all of the controversy constantly swirling around Trump, the usual hydraulics of America’s two-party system reasserted themselves: Voters who had lost faith in a president of one party preponderantly voted for the presidential nominee of the other party. In the history of modern polling, every time a president has been about as unpopular as Biden was, either he has lost reelection (Jimmy Carter in 1980, George H. W. Bush in 1992, Trump himself in 2020) or his party has lost the White House if the incumbent himself could not or did not run again (Harry Truman in 1952, Lyndon Johnson in 1968, and George W. Bush in 2008). Against that history, the most shocking thing about the outcome, paradoxically, was how normal it was.
The predominant view among Democrats has been that Harris generally played well the very poor hand Biden bequeathed her with fewer than four months until Election Day. Harris was a much steadier, engaging, even inspiring public presence than she had been in her 2020 presidential campaign (when she withdrew from the primary race before a single vote was cast) or during her first years as vice president. Since emerging as the administration’s principal voice contesting the rollback of abortion rights and other liberties by red states during Biden’s term, she had developed more confidence as a speaker, and it showed on the campaign trail. By any reasonable measure, Harris aced the biggest moments of the race: her convention speech, the September presidential debate, her closing address at the Washington Ellipse.
But mistakes were made. At times, Harris seemed overly cautious and bound too tightly to talking points, especially in her early media interviews. An almost uniform consensus among Democrats determined that her lowest moment was an answer on ABC’s The View, when she said she could not think of anything she would have done differently from Biden over the past four years. In my interviews, the Harris advisers were more defensive and vague about that moment than on any other point. “It’s hard for me to put myself in the vice president’s mindset,” Fulks said. “But it is hard to differentiate yourself from an administration that you’re part of.”
Harris’s lame response was a misstep that Republicans immediately converted into negative advertising. Even so, the argument that this mistake had a material impact on a race driven by such fundamental forces of discontent with the incumbent president is hard to sustain. That reality, to me, also applies to the other chief criticisms of Harris and her allied super PACs—that, for instance, they did not spend enough money on advertising to remind voters about everything people had disliked about Trump’s presidency.
I’m inclined to agree with that critique, but merely pounding harder at Trump’s vulnerabilities seems unlikely to have overcome voters’ underlying discontent with the status quo. As I’ve written previously, it was not as if voters were unaware of Trump’s flaws. In the exit polls and the VoteCast survey, the two principal sources available so far on voters’ decision making, a majority of voters agreed that Trump was too extreme and would steer the U.S. toward authoritarianism. Yet a decisive slice of voters who held those negative views about Trump voted for him anyway, so strong was their desire for change.
The Harris advisers all stressed that the view among most voters that they had been financially better off under Trump than they were under Biden created an overwhelming imperative for the campaign to persuade the electorate to look toward the potential risks of a second Trump term. “We had to take this conversation into the future and not just make it about the past,” O’Malley Dillon told me. Yet, like other campaigns in a similar situation—Carter against Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Bush against Bill Clinton in 1992—the Harris team found that it could not shift the attention of enough voters from their dissatisfaction with the present. As I wrote during the Bush-Clinton race, when voters are deeply unhappy with current conditions, they see stability as the risk.
Once voters had reached that conclusion, many of them simply did not want to hear negative information about Trump that would cause cognitive dissonance about their choice. As Jackie Payne, the founder and executive director of Galvanize Action, which studies the political attitudes of moderate white women, told me shortly before the election, many female voters who believed that Trump would improve their economic situation simply dismissed any rhetoric and proposals from him that they might find troubling. “They were choosing to believe a vision of him that was aligned with what they wanted to get out of him—a strong economy—and they were absolutely discounting anything that felt extreme as disinformation or hyperbole, even if he said he would do it,” she said.
Amid all the geographic and demographic analyses of the results, one data point stood out to me as perhaps the most revealing about the outcome. The CNN polling unit provided me with an analysis of the exit polls that looked at the voters who supported legal abortion in all or most circumstances but who also viewed the economy in negative terms (as either not so good or poor). That turned out to be a surprisingly large group: 36 percent of all voters held both those views. They were a group simultaneously drawn to each side’s strongest argument: Trump’s case that he could better manage the economy and Harris’s contention that Trump was a threat to abortion rights (as well as other freedoms and democracy itself). In the trial of strength for voters swayed by the two parties’ central claims, the analysis found that slightly more of them backed Trump than Harris.
The preference for Trump among pro-choice, economically pessimistic voters was especially pronounced among white women without a college education: Two-thirds of them with those views supported the former president, the exit poll found. And, just as in 2016, those blue-collar white women proved essential to Trump’s narrow victories in the three former Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which once again decided the outcome. Harris fell short because for too many voters—especially working-class voters living paycheck to paycheck—inflation and economic discontent, reinforced in some cases by unhappiness about immigration and crime, trumped abortion and democracy.
In a race shaped so profoundly by fundamental forces of disaffection with the country’s direction, could anything have changed the outcome? As the Democratic strategist Mike Podhorzer has argued, more voters might have ranked their hesitations about Trump higher if the Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court had not blocked any chance that the former president would face a criminal trial before this election on the charges that he tried to subvert the previous one. Plouffe pointed to another what-if potentially big enough to have changed the result: Biden’s withdrawal from the race much earlier rather than only after his disastrous debate performance in June. If Biden had dropped out last winter, Plouffe argued to me, Democrats could have held a full-fledged primary that would have either produced a nominee more distant from his administration or strengthened Harris by requiring her to establish her independence. Looking back at what contributed to Trump’s victory, Plouffe said pointedly, Biden’s choice not to step aside sooner was “the cardinal sin.”
Even so, Plouffe acknowledged, “I’m not sure, given the headwinds, any Democrat could have won.” For all the difficulties that the atmosphere created for Harris, the election unquestionably raised warning signs for Democrats that extend beyond dissatisfaction with current conditions. It continued an erosion that is ominous for the party in its support among working-class nonwhite voters, particularly Latino men. And as Flaherty, the deputy campaign manager, told me, the Republican Party’s win powerfully demonstrated that it—or at least Trump himself—has built more effective mechanisms for communicating with infrequent voters, especially young men who don’t consume much conventional political news.
Those are real challenges Democrats will debate in the coming months. They will also be pondering the painful question of whether enough voters (including female voters) are willing to elect a woman president—Plouffe and his colleagues acknowledged that this had likely been another obstacle in Harris’s way. But the biggest reason behind the 2024 election result, from any angle, looks more straightforward.
In 2008, when Obama won the election to succeed an unpopular president from the other party, the exit poll found that 62 percent of voters who said they were dissatisfied with conditions in the country voted for him. In 2024, when Trump won the election to succeed an unpopular president from the other party, the exit poll found that, again, 62 percent of voters dissatisfied with conditions in the country voted for him. Even against an opponent carrying as much baggage as Trump, the Harris campaign was never able to overcome the axiomatic principle of presidential elections: When one party sinks in the public’s esteem, the other rises.
The transcript of my conversations with Harris’s team members has been edited for clarity.
Part 1: Early stages
What was the state of the race on the day that Biden withdrew and Harris announced her candidacy?
O’Malley Dillon: We had just come through a tough period, so we were on the outer edges of some of the [polling] margins that we would want to be seeing. We definitely saw fundamental challenges with the national headwinds on the key issues, and we saw a tough battleground map. It was a harder environment than we had faced previously, even [from earlier] in the cycle.
Plouffe: When I got in, it was the first time I saw the actual numbers under the hood. They were pretty gruesome. The Sun Belt was worse than the Blue Wall, but the Blue Wall was bad. And, demographically, young voters across the board—Hispanic voters, Black voters, Asian voters—were in really terrible shape. When the [candidate] switch happened, some of that stuff got a little bit better, but nowhere near where we ended up or where we needed to be. This was a rescue mission. It was catastrophic in terms of where it was.
Fulks: At the time, we were in damage control. We definitely saw a pathway because these are battleground states, and this country is pretty evenly split down the middle. [But] there would have been considerable work to do, motivating people to turn out to vote.
What were voters’ perceptions of Harris when she entered the race?
Fulks: As crazy as it may sound to say, because she’s the vice president, we had a candidate who was relatively unknown—in her bio, where she came from, her value set, her motivation … something I like to call a “voter value proposition” of why are they voting for this person; who is this person? And can they trust them to deliver on what they say that they’re going to deliver on?
O’Malley Dillon: We knew out of the gate that there was a lack of awareness about her, a lack of an awareness about what she did as vice president, which is consistent with most vice presidents. That was a big part of our early strategy and certainly made the 107 days we had more complex than they would traditionally be.
Plouffe: When she got in [the race], her favorable rating, I believe, was 35 or 36 [percent]. When you dug beneath that, there wasn’t much stickiness outside core Democrats. [Voters’ perception of her] was unformed but negative.
What were Harris’s biggest needs as she entered the race?
Fulks: The biggest imperative for her was shoring up Democratic base support—those voters among whom we saw a little less enthusiasm for President Biden. That was a metric we were really watching. Then it was really the race to define herself.
Plouffe: There’s a lot to do in a presidential campaign: biography, contrast, positive economy … We had a condensed time frame, so we weren’t going to be able to do all the things you would have liked. There was the reality of where the race stood with the electorate, and then there were some of the operational challenges we faced.
Fulks: We knew that we had an opportunity to introduce her upbringing and her accomplishments in public service outside the Biden administration. And some of that aligned [as a way to rebut] the attacks that were coming at her—such as on immigration. [We could talk about] her being a prosecutor from a border state, going after cartels, gang members. It was an easy segue into introducing her and at the same time defending her from attacks that had started before she even became the top of the ticket.
Through 2023 and 2024, voters’ retrospective assessments of Trump’s presidency were improving. What did that mean for the race?
O’Malley Dillon: There’s no doubt that we saw him carry higher numbers, and they were more durable for much of the election. And that’s why we had to ensure that we were doing everything in our power to tell the story of the vice president … while doing what we could to be clear that a second term of Donald Trump would be worse for the American people. We felt we couldn’t just do one or the other. And we spent a lot of time [talking about] Project 2025.
Plouffe: It was a massive problem. We had somebody whose approval rating for his first term was about 10 points higher than the current incumbent.
So it was mission critical to raise the stakes of a Trump second term. Why? Because people’s view of the first term was too positive; it meant he was going to win the election. That was a problem when we started this thing, and it was a problem when we ended this thing.
Trump’s retrospective approval ratings were higher in some cases than they ever were when he was president. Why do you think it was improving so much?
Plouffe: One is he was the former president; you had a current president. So people were unhappy, and that [was an] easy reference point between now versus then. Two, there’s no doubt that from a price standpoint, things were lower. Harris is good about this; she understood people’s reality, but too many Democrats would want to lecture about the GDP and unemployment rate and inflation settling down, but [voters still feel that] things are a lot more expensive.
A third piece of this, which we heard particularly with younger voters—not first-time voters but voters who are mid-20s to mid-30s—is the country was still standing. So [to] the argument that the country would end, or democracy would end, people were like, ‘Well, I don’t know. We’re still here.’”
What political considerations went into the selection of the vice-presidential nominee?
Plouffe: I think she thought that if she were to win, Tim Walz was the kind of person she’d want as a counselor. And clearly, he had had political success in the Midwest, so even though Minnesota wasn’t an important battleground, he would be an effective surrogate out there.
Given the uphill nature of the race, was there any thought of a more dramatic pick—like, say, Gretchen Whitmer to create an all-female ticket?
Plouffe: Historically, the vice-presidential selection matters very little in terms of vote. So would even [Governor] Josh Shapiro have delivered us Pennsylvania, given that we were down about 1.8 points? I don’t think so. History suggests that the only place the vice-presidential pick generally has made a difference is when you make a mistake.
As Harris settled into the race through August and September, were there any points where you considered yourself clearly ahead?
O’Malley Dillon: No, not in a durable way. We saw early on … a consolidation of our support, and we saw some key metrics start moving, including, over time, a 10-point increase in the vice president’s favorability. We were very pleased with how strong the vice president was in the debate … and we saw a bump there. But there was no point at all where data told us anything but that this was an extremely close race.
Plouffe: When we came in, Trump was at 48 percent, but Biden was in the high 30s to low 40s. Harris started there. We were getting back Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. So the movement was stuff that was easier for us to move. The tougher stuff to move is true undecideds or lean-Trump [voters], and ultimately we weren’t able to do enough of it.
Part 2: The fall election period
Why did she choose to minimize engagements with the media in the first weeks?
Fulks: I don’t say this to be defensive at all, but our priority was How do we get her into the battleground states? She [had been] traveling, but she was focused on the periphery states when she was the vice president and not the core battleground states, as President Biden was traveling to those places pretty frequently.
Why did she choose right from the outset not to challenge Trump’s plans for mass deportation?
Fulks: Our focus was on really making sure that we were protecting her flank on this. Republicans had done three years of advertising and campaigning against the vice president on immigration. We weren’t afraid to take it on: In her very first speech, she called out Trump for killing the bipartisan border deal and she promised she would bring it back. She went to the border and proposed her own plan to crack down on the flow of fentanyl and illegal crossings. We chose to focus more on the affirmative and shoring her up on the issue than the negative element of [Trump’s mass-deportation plan].
Plouffe: The economy “drove vote,” as we saw it based on our research, but the border did as well. Those were the two main headwinds. Now you see it in exit polls and polling; we saw it in our own research. We narrowed the gap on immigration a lot. But that was still a pronounced headwind.
How did the changing information environment affect your strategy?
Flaherty: We came into this election with a bunch of core assumptions. One was that this is a race that was going to be decided by low-information voters, voters who didn’t consume the news, voters who specifically made decisions to tune out politics in their life. Another [was] that we have an information environment that was defined by not just polarization but personalization, as algorithms are really dictating content selections. All of those things are factoring together to mean it’s harder than ever to reach voters and that the campaign is going to have to be in as many places as possible.
Was the assumption that it was going to be a race decided by low-information voters because presidential races involve a bigger electorate that includes those people? Or was there something about running against Trump that made that even more the case?
Flaherty: It’s a gumbo of the changing dynamics of the media environment since 2020, the nature of running against Donald Trump—who is the absolute best at generating attention for himself—and the fact that a lot of voters only show up in presidential elections. And those voters tend to be less civic-minded; they’ve got jobs, they’ve got better stuff to do than pay attention to politics. For all of those reasons, this was going to be a How do you reach people who don’t want to be reached? election.
How did your ability to reach those voters change when Harris replaced Biden?
Flaherty: The enormous groundswell of enthusiasm for the vice president gave people air cover to go out and talk to their friends and talk to their family, and post for themselves and curate themselves. It also gave air cover to creators and podcasters who didn’t want to get involved with politics before. In all of those corners, it made people start paying attention to the election earlier and made it cooler to engage with us.
We did literally dozens of interviews and short engagements with influencers and content creators. We had content creators in the actual program of our convention. This was a huge part of our strategy all the way through the end. But [the Trump campaign was] laser-focused on one audience: young men. We were focused all over the board on people we needed to consolidate. That was always a challenge.
After the debate, had you moved ahead in the race?
Plouffe: No. There might have been one run of internal analytics that had us up in all three Blue Wall states, but it was by a point. This notion that we had a lead post-debate that we squandered—we never saw that internally.
The Trump campaign and allied super PACs pounded Harris with negative advertising in the swing states, including one memorable ad that attacked her position on transition surgery for transgender inmates. Some of the most pointed second-guessing that the Harris campaign faced was frustration that it did not respond directly to that ad. But Harris’s advisers insisted that a direct response was not the best way to handle those attacks.
Fulks: [The impact of those ads] is probably not as much as people think. The trans issue ranked very low. All of our data, both quantitative and qualitative, said that voters wanted to hear about immigration, the economy, and crime. The [Trump team] really closed this campaign on the economy and immigration.
Flaherty: We tested all of these things, and what we found was that [ads] that specifically rebutted the attack [were less effective] than her just talking about the economy. The trans thing was one plank that sat under a broader argument that she [was too] liberal, and that was damaging, certainly. We worked to counter that with the Liz Cheney events and the videos of Republican people who worked for Trump saying You can’t vote for him; he’s dangerous.
Harris’s appearances with Cheney had some left-leaning activists complaining that they diluted Democratic enthusiasm. How do you respond to that?
O’Malley Dillon: We believe that the coalition to beat Trump requires moderate Republicans, independents, and Democrats of all stripes. It was the strength of her leadership that all of those people could see themselves in this campaign and in her candidacy.
Plouffe: We did it for two reasons: One was to create a permission structure for the type of voters we thought we needed to get to 50 percent in some of these states. Second, it was also a permission structure for the broader electorate. Having all these Republicans out there for us also helped inoculate us—and we saw this in our research—to some of the attacks that she’s a crazy California liberal.
Was support for legal abortion less of a factor in 2024 than it was in 2022, in the first election after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade?
O’Malley Dillon: In ’22, Dobbs was very fresh, and women leaned toward reproductive freedom as a driving force; we saw less of that this time.
Plouffe: I think abortion was still a critical part of why the race was so close despite the negative atmosphere, and [was] what fueled a lot of the activism and financial contributions. But there are going to be some voters who are pro-choice, who care about it, but if they’re pressed economically they may decide to vote more on prices than on concern about a national abortion ban.
Harris campaigned in all seven of the swing states right up until the end, including some that Trump ended up winning decisively, such as Arizona and North Carolina. Did the campaign really feel it could win all of them, or was it trying to project strength by continuing to appear in them?
O’Malley Dillon: We were very clear and very public that we saw the Blue Wall as the most straightforward path to 270, and we never deviated from that vision. At the same time, we were also very clear that while the Sun Belt was a more challenging path, it was still within the margin. We definitely thought they were in play, but we also never lost sight of the Blue Wall being the most straightforward path.
Fulks: When you’re in the last week or two of the campaign, if you’re still seeing a margin-of-error race, pulling out of one of those states could be a huge mistake. You don’t keep a wide map [open] just to close it with a week left.
In the final week of the campaign, Trump seemed to be stepping on land mines every day, starting with his chaotic rally at Madison Square Garden. Yet exit polls found that most voters who said they decided in that final week broke for Trump. What was your read on that?
Plouffe: We’d talk about [how] he’s reminding people about some of the things they don’t like about him; she’s closing well, maybe that means the people who break late will break more in our direction and maybe it’ll hurt him on turnout. But what overwhelmed that was just people’s unhappiness with the current situation and wanting change.
So how, finally, did the race look to you on Election Day?
O’Malley Dillon: We came in ahead in our data in Michigan and Wisconsin, and tied in Pennsylvania; we had seen growth week after week on our direct-voter contact. Our atmospherics were quite strong. That doesn’t make an election victory, but [given] the metrics we were looking at, we felt positioned to win a very, very close race.
Plouffe: Very early, I got up and went to the Lincoln Memorial and spent a little time with Lincoln, and I just said, ‘God, I hope there’s a miracle here.’ So I was hopeful but not super-optimistic.
Fulks: The undecideds that we felt would break for us ultimately broke for Trump. And that is what did it. But you don’t know that until the polls are closing and numbers are being reported.
Part 3: The result and its aftermath
Since the election, many Democrats have focused on the fact that Trump won, by last count, about 2.8 million more votes than he did in 2020 while Harris polled about 6.7 million fewer than Biden. Did Harris fall short in the battleground states because Trump won more votes than you expected or because Harris won fewer?
Fulks: For me, it’s about the votes we didn’t get [rather than] Trump getting so many more. Those undecided voters who make or break elections all the time—they just broke in Trump’s favor.
Plouffe: I will confess to you the headwinds outside those [battlegrounds] surprised me a bit—New Jersey moving double digits, Connecticut moving double digits. The blue-state shifts are hard to get your arms around, because that’s a big shift in four years.
While the Harris team was defensive about the question of whether she should have done more to separate from Biden, it was united in agreeing that the results signaled long-term challenges for the Democratic Party, even if it rejected the assertion from Trump and his allies that his national-popular-vote margin of about 1.6 percentage points constituted a fundamental realignment favoring the GOP.
Plouffe: I don’t think this is a permanent realignment, but we have seen, over a number of elections, some movement. And the math is the math: There are a lot more noncollege voters than there are college [voters] in most states. The math doesn’t work for the Democrats to win national elections, particularly in higher-turnout elections, if you lose much more of the noncollege vote, whether it be white, Black, brown, or Asian.
O’Malley Dillon: It is clear we’re going to need to do the work to reach [some voter segments]. No doubt, a lot of this country is anti-establishment and doesn’t subscribe to political information or traditional media. How do we reach those voters?
Plouffe: I would put the economy at the top of the reasons [for the decline with nonwhite voters]: people feeling their paycheck wasn’t going as far as they’d like. But there is a cultural thing, a sense that Trump [is] not talking like a politician, not being politically correct all the time. That appeals to some of these voters. Some of the most successful Democratic politicians of the past half century—Clinton or Obama—they can communicate with people in a way that is not condescending, that seems connected to their lives.
How much did Harris’s race or gender affect the outcome? Can a woman win the presidency in today’s America?
Plouffe: I’m really eager for political scientists and researchers to try to get an answer to this, because we certainly picked up some headwinds. Maybe statistically this will be disproven, but I think, given the ’16 experience and this experience, it’s probably a bigger burden to be elected president running as a woman than as a person of color.
I think America is ready to elect a woman president. Running for president and winning is an indescribably hard obstacle course. This throws another obstacle into the field. And that makes me incredibly sad to say that.
This year marked a clear turning point as both campaigns shifted their attention from mainstream outlets to niche media sources aimed at more narrow segments of the electorate. How did these new dynamics shape the campaign, and what do they mean for elections going forward?
Fulks: Republicans have a very good echo chamber regarding how they get their information out. Democrats will need to loosen up and take advantage of a changing media environment.
Flaherty: Trump did 30 podcasts to one audience. We did podcasts to a bunch of different audiences, which meant we never really got that frequency. The other lesson is that the nature of attention is fleeting, particularly in this media ecosystem. That is one of the things we struggled with. We were an attention machine for the first four weeks, then it was an open [competition] for attention—and that’s a cage fight with a guy whose entire life has been about getting attention for himself.
We clean up with the most politically engaged people. For folks who don’t have time to engage in politics, or folks who are just receiving a little bit of information here and there, usually from friends and family, the information environment is much more difficult, much more competitive, and much more tied to culture. If we Democrats want to win, particularly nationally, that’s the space that we’ve got to figure out, and quick.
Plouffe: If you had said two years ago Harris will be the nominee and she’ll do as well with seniors as she did, you might have said no. The reason is [that] those tend to be larger consumers of information. They also tended to be the voters who understood the stakes of the second Trump term more. The threat, whether it was abortion or democracy or rule of law, mattered more to them than younger parts of the electorate.
Do Republicans have a systematic advantage in reaching lower-propensity voters?
Flaherty: There’s the conservative ecosystem, which is Fox, Ben Shapiro, [Sean] Hannity, Newsmax—all these folks that are politically and ideologically aligned with Donald Trump and the work of electing conservatives. They built and cultivated that ecosystem. They also built and cultivated an ecosystem that was less political but more cultural. You can call it the “manosphere,” but I don’t think the manosphere is inherently partisan. Joe Rogan talked about politics, but that’s not his whole thing. That was an audience that [Republicans] viewed as key to mobilizing, and so they did a lot of work to migrate information, values, and Trump himself between the conservative ecosystem and this culturally aligned ecosystem.
There’s just not an analogous system on the left. It doesn’t exist because our voters don’t have the same demand signal for alternative media to the mainstream press. There just isn’t the same kind of profit incentive for alternative media.
Does the election signal a lasting electoral advantage for Trump-style conservative populism over the Democratic Party?
Flaherty: It does seem to me this particular version of conservatism has a cultural cachet among young people. I don’t think that’s an immutable fact. But I do think the nexus of Trump-style conservatism and culture is a thing that Democrats, progressives, folks on the left are going to have to grapple with.
O’Malley Dillon: I push against some estimation of this race being a great realignment. This is an anomaly race—because of Trump, and because of a 107-day campaign. The picture about working-class voters in America is pretty nuanced: We definitely saw declines there, but with the white working class we actually saw stability, and we saw increases with seniors.
Plouffe: If you look at the last four elections, there has been a drift [toward Republicans among non-college-educated voters of all races]. You have to arrest their gains, and we’ve got to begin to gain back. I think that’s possible, because we live in an era in which, because of economic inequality, generally there’s economic dissatisfaction. Incumbent parties are falling all over the globe, and then—what has also happened—whoever replaces them becomes unpopular pretty quickly.
I’m not sure, given the headwinds, any Democrat could have won. But if we had a primary in which a bunch of people ran and auditioned … through that process, whoever emerged … would have been a more fully formed person, would have had more time to mount a general election campaign. [Not having that process] is the cardinal sin.