Kamala Harris’ team have doubled down on blaming others for their own election loss, pointing their fingers at President Joe Biden in yet another post-mortem interview—this time with The Atlantic.
In a series of sit-downs the Harris team have parroted the idea that they did all they could have, much to the dismay of progressives and political strategists who pointed to specific decisions made by Harris and her aides that may have hurt her chances with voters: a failure to rhetorically distance herself from the Biden administration, Harris’ open embrace of Republicans like Liz Cheney, and her decision not to address her previous progressive opinions.
The consensus among Kamala Harris’ team seems to be, however, is that no stone was left unturned—and that Biden’s unpopularity doomed Harris from the start.
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Harris’ senior adviser David Plouffe told The Atlantic that Biden’s decision not to drop out earlier was the party’s “cardinal sin.”
“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 said. “If you have six, seven, eight months, you storyboard all this stuff, you have a narrative arc. Everything was smashed and collided here.”
Plouffe still told the outlet that she might have lost regardless of when she entered the race.
“I’m not sure, given the headwinds, any Democrat could have won.”
In an interview on Pod Save America last week, Harris’ top aides—including Plouffe—stuck up for their decisions throughout the race.
He said that the party needed moderates in order to win in the future, constituencies that Barack Obama courted during his successful campaigns in 2008 and 2012 (which Plouffe worked on as well).
Other aides on the podcast included advisers Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter.
“We were very focused on lifting her up. But to win a race like this, given the political atmospherics, which were quite challenging,” Plouffe said, “we had to raise the risk of a Trump second term.”
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