The Pod Save America troupe spent nearly all of July urging President Joe Biden to step aside this election in favor of someone, anyone—though preferably Kamala Harris—taking his place as the Democratic nominee.
Now, a day after Donald Trump beat Harris to win re-election, some of the hosts admit: Maybe no Democrat could have beat Trump this year.
Hosts Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer, and Tommy Vietor reckoned with Harris‘ loss on Wednesday’s Pod Save America episode and worked through various potential contributors to her loss, including the economy, the war in Gaza, and Biden’s unpopularity. Trump was declared the winner of the presidential election early Wednesday, with forecasts projecting him to win the popular vote for the first time.
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But Lovett noted that, despite the momentum Harris built over her roughly 100-day campaign, neither she nor any other Democrat could have overcome the cemented unpopularity of the Biden administration.
“I’m sure there are ways in which the campaign could have done slightly better, I have no idea,” host Jon Lovett said on a Pod Save America episode Wednesday. “But ultimately, I don‘t know what you could have said to overcome that weight of incumbency, right? Because part of what we‘re talking about here is: It doesn’t matter what she said. People didn’t trust it. They weren’t going to trust Democrats right now and so what I think we had hoped to see, right, is that ’Could Kamala Harris overcome Joe Biden’s liabilities?’ The answer is, maybe she couldn’t.”
Favreau agreed, saying Harris‘ largest issue may have been trying to separate herself from a man who she served with as vice president. “There‘s obviously a lot of reasons why that’s hard to do,” he said.
Pfeiffer pushed back, conceding that Harris’ issues may have been insurmountable but noted that her quest—attempting to succeed a deeply unpopular incumbent president while campaigning against a deeply unpopular former president who commands a large swath of Americans—was “virtually impossible” to do within 100 days.
“I will go to my grave believing that, in the situation in which we found ourselves with a hundred days to go, no one would have done a better job than Kamala Harris did in this race,” Pfeiffer later added.
It was partly on the liberal foursome of Barack Obama veterans that Harris got to the top of the ticket at all. The hosts labeled Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump in June as “f---ing awful“ and a ”f---ing disaster," and they were among the first prominent Democrats to publicly push for Biden to drop out.
Vietor even had a war of words with MSNBC host Joe Scarborough after he accused the Morning Joe star of trying to prop up Biden. “I don’t mean anything against him,” Vietor later told the Daily Beast about the episode. “He has a relationship with Joe Biden. Politics is personal. I understand where he’s coming from. We weren’t trying to make it personal, it’s just about the future of the country.”
Though what final reason Democrats will use to explain Harris' defeat among the many they’re floating, Lovett admitted on Wednesday, may not be easy to nail down.
“It‘s a ’choose your own adventure,‘” he said.
The group didn’t acknowledge their own role in boosting up another candidate to replace Biden, though they said they would use their pedestal to warn about the dangers of an incoming Trump administration.
“We’re all on the same team here, and if we want to figure this out, then I think we’ve got to be good to each other right now, and in the months to come, because I think solidarity is important,” Favreau said.
