What Was the Harris Campaign Thinking?

David Plouffe really told on the campaign this week:

Senior advisers to Vice President Kamala Harris’ failed presidential campaign suggested this week that there just wasn’t much else Harris could have done to beat Donald Trump.

Harris couldn’t have distanced herself from President Joe Biden, they said, because she was loyal. She couldn’t have responded more forcefully to attacks over trans rights, because doing so would have been playing Trump’s game.

And she might not have had much chance of winning anyway, given the deficit she inherited from Biden when he dropped out of the race in July.

“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],” David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the campaign, said Tuesday on the “Pod Save America” podcast in a joint interview with fellow Harris campaign alums Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks and Stephanie Cutter.

Plouffe said the campaign’s internal polling never had Harris ahead of Trump.

“We didn’t get the breaks we needed on Election Day,” he said. “I think it surprised people, because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.”

There’s no doubt that voter anger over high prices hurt Harris, just as it has hurt incumbent politicians all over the world. Since Trump’s victory, however, Democrats have debated the relative impacts of other factors, such as the campaign’s muted response to Trump’s anti-trans TV ads and Harris’ decision not to say how she’d be different from Biden.

…

Since Election Day, Democrats have also debated the impact of Trump’s anti-trans messaging, with some lawmakers questioning the party’s fealty to trans rights activists with uncompromising positions. The Trump campaign spent significant resources on ads highlighting Harris’ past support for gender-affirming care, including surgery, for people incarcerated in federal prisons.

Fulks, Harris’ former deputy campaign manager, called those ads “very effective,” though he and Plouffe said they doubted whether the ads actually moved voters. Some polling has shown the issue moved independent voters who broke for Trump.

Look, we know that it was an extremely difficult climate for incumbent parties everywhere. We always have to keep the global context in mind when we are discussing what happened earlier this month (already feels like a year ago; lord the next 4 years are going to be long). But just shrugging and being like, “welp, we are getting paid a lot of money to run this campaign and we got nothin’.” What the hell is this? If I was running a campaign that where my internal polls never had me ahead of Trump, I don’t know, I might have tried something? Anything? But no, let’s just sit back and hope for the best.

Christ.