Pod Save America recently brought together senior staff members of the Harris-Walz Campaign for a panel discussion to explain how they lost every swing state and handed Donald Trump another four years in the White House. This was the first time they have publicly reflected on their decisions, making the podcast a useful opportunity to evaluate the campaign and the people behind it. Let me introduce them to you.

• Jen O’Malley Dillon, Campaign Chair: O’Malley Dillon worked for President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and later served as the second campaign manager for Biden’s 2020 run, stepping in just as the COVID-19 pandemic had upended the race. From 2021 to 2023, she served as a “top White House aide” to President Biden before transitioning in early 2024 to manage his reelection campaign. In the aftermath of Joe Biden’s catastrophic debate with Donald Trump, O’Malley Dillon was reportedly a key figure in the push to keep Biden in the race, delaying what would become Harris’s short-lived candidacy. O’Malley Dillon is also the co-founder of Precision Strategies, a consulting firm with clients like CVS, Microsoft, and GE. Among other things, Precision helps giant corporations facing antitrust scrutiny.
• Stephanie Cutter, Senior Advisor: Cutter has spent decades in the upper echelons of Democratic politics, working for figures like Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and John Kerry before becoming a top aide to Barack Obama, as well as the Deputy Campaign Manager of his 2012 reelection bid. Cutter co-founded Precision Strategies with Jen O’Malley Dillon, and the firm later worked for the Clinton campaign in 2016. She also served as a top aide to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, where she played a significant role in defending some of the most controversial bailout policies in American history.
• David Plouffe, Senior Advisor to Kamala Harris: Plouffe was the Campaign Manager for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. He went on to serve as a senior White House adviser before moving into the corporate world, working as Senior Vice President of Policy and Strategy at Uber, where he spearheaded lobbying efforts to ensure that laws and regulations would not force Uber to reclassify its drivers as employees. In 2017, he was fined $90,000 for illegally lobbying Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on behalf of Uber. Sources claim that Plouffe played a central role in convincing Joe Biden not to challenge Hillary Clinton in 2016, reportedly urging him not to end his “remarkable career” in embarrassment with a third-place finish in Iowa. 
• Quentin Fulks, Deputy Harris Campaign Manager: Fulks was the Deputy Campaign Manager for J.B. Pritzker’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign and then served as Campaign Manager for Senator Raphael Warnock’s 2022 reelection campaign. Prior to joining the Harris Campaign to lead her advertising program, Fulks was the Principal Deputy Campaign Manager for Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. In the aftermath of Biden’s debate, Fulks told Jen Psaki that “this campaign is in a strong position” to defeat Donald Trump.

You may have noticed a pattern here: Harris’s staff was composed of establishment political operatives who have spent their entire careers cycling through campaigns, corporate boardrooms, and consulting firms catering to America’s elite. Unsurprisingly, their leadership produced a campaign that failed to inspire or connect. What’s worse, as their Pod Save America interview reveals, they are completely unwilling to take accountability for any of it and seem totally incapable of learning from their mistakes. Here are a few of the lessons that they learned from Harris’s defeat.

Lesson #1: Defend Your Nominee, Even When It’s Obvious They’ll Lose

Dan Pfeiffer (Host)

The defining event of this race was the candidate switch. […] There was a one-month period between the debate and when the president actually dropped out. […] Were you able to do any thinking or planning in that one-month period about what a race with the vice president would look like, or did you have to sort of start cold on that first day the moment you got the call or the statement went out?

Quentin Fulks, Deputy Harris Campaign Manager

We started cold. There was no planning involved. I mean, we were honestly in crisis management mode of keeping President Biden in the race. You know, convincing Democratic allies that he could still do this.

The first 2024 presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump proved what many on the left had long suspected: that Biden was not just an uninspiring leader, but also an incompetent candidate who was utterly incapable of meeting the moment. For weeks following Joe Biden’s disastrous performance, his campaign publicly maintained the illusion that he was still well-positioned to defeat Donald Trump. Privately, they knew otherwise. As Pod Save America co-host Jon Favreau revealed days after the election:

After the debate, the Biden people told us that the polls were fine, and Biden was still the strongest candidate. They were privately telling reporters, at the time, that Kamala Harris couldn’t win. […] Then we find out, when the Biden campaign becomes the Harris campaign, that the Biden campaign’s own internal polling, at the time when they were telling us he was the strongest candidate, showed that Donald Trump was going to win 400 electoral votes.

The implications of this are staggering, and it should be treated as a massive scandal. Prior to the debate, Biden’s approval rating was historically low, and an overwhelming majority of Americans believed that he was too old to serve a second term. In the critical month after Biden’s debate, his team was not preparing for a smooth transition to Kamala Harris, even as several prominent Democrats were pressuring him to step aside. Instead, as Quentin Fulks put it, they were “in crisis management mode,” desperately trying to salvage Biden’s campaign while their internal data showed that Trump was winning in a landslide. By clinging to a candidate that they knew couldn’t win, the Democratic establishment put their loyalty to Biden ahead of the party’s future—and the democratic principles they claimed were at stake. Kamala Harris regularly warned that Trump posed an existential threat to democracy, but this level of political malpractice makes it hard to believe that they ever took this threat seriously.

By the time Biden finally dropped out, the damage had already been done, and internal polling didn't recover, per David Plouffe: “there were these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw [in prior internal polls].” Faced with this, Harris could have seized the opportunity to distinguish herself from Biden and “turn the page” (as she often liked to say). Instead, she doubled down on the same approach that led to his collapse. On October 8, around the time when Plouffe claims their internal polling showed her trailing Trump, Harris appeared on The View, where she was asked the most obvious question imaginable: “Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris replied. “I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.” Harris later clarified that one of the differences between her and Biden is that she would nominate a Republican to her Cabinet. At a moment when her own internal data suggested that she had to present a visionary alternative to both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Harris instead tethered herself to an unpopular predecessor while alienating progressives by offering a nonsensical olive branch to the right. Stephanie Cutter, Senior Advisor to Kamala Harris, acknowledges the contradiction, but stops short of saying that she should have done more to distance herself from Biden: “She had tremendous loyalty to President Biden. […] But, in the end, you know, we’ve all seen the data, too many people thought that she would be a continuation, which, on the economy, was, you know, the incumbent killer.”

We’ll never know whether the result would have been different had Biden stepped aside earlier, but Harris’s team didn’t just fail to adapt—they refused to even recognize the need to. The Pod Save America interview reveals that Democratic leadership is still intent on pandering to voters they will never win, even at the expense of alienating those they can’t afford to lose.

Lesson #2: Chase “Moderates,” Even If It Means Alienating Progressives

David Plouffe, Senior Advisor to Kamala Harris

We have to dominate the moderate vote.

Harris’s selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate was an encouraging sign that signaled that she was serious about delivering results for the working class. In 2022, Walz, as noted by Stephen Prager, “achieved a legislative trifecta by the slimmest of margins: with a 34-33 Senate majority and just a six-vote edge in the House, a situation that gave him even less room for defections than Biden had at the beginning of his term.” Yet, under his leadership, Minnesota passed some of the most ambitious progressive legislation in the country, including a child tax credit, universal free school meals, and free tuition at public colleges for families earning under $80,000 per year. Walz also delivered major labor victories, including paid family and medical leave and worker protections like banning non-compete clauses and anti-union captive audience meetings. Walz was an exciting pick because his success offered a blueprint for a national pro-worker agenda that could have positioned Harris as a genuine alternative to Trump’s fake populism. To her credit, several items in Harris’s policy agenda, such as expanding the child tax credit, guaranteeing paid family and medical leave, and raising the minimum wage, mirrored the initiatives that Walz passed in Minnesota. However, Harris’s broader approach—which often lacked specifics—failed to reflect the same level of ambition. Instead of running on a coherent economic message that might have appealed to struggling Americans, her campaign vacillated between incremental reforms and corporate-friendly tweaks. For example, in a speech aimed at appealing to the middle class, Harris emphasized tax incentives for millionaires who sell stocks and real estate—an odd choice for a campaign claiming to prioritize “an opportunity economy.” Her grocery price-gouging proposal, initially framed as a way to address rising costs, was later watered down after criticism from corporate interests. While her campaign framed these decisions as an effort to deter right-wing attacks that Harris is a left-wing radical, the reality is that her campaign had a cozy relationship with Wall Street, not to mention that they would have called her a left-wing radical no matter how far she campaigned to the right. Many of her economic proposals were shaped heavily by input from business leaders, including her brother-in-law Tony West, who took leave from his role at Uber to advise her campaign.

Jen O’Malley Dillon, Campaign Chair, explains why Harris attempted to strike a balance between appealing to progressives and pandering to corporate donors:

You need to have moderate Republicans and progressives of all ages. We cannot win without these core elements. We don’t have the luxury of choosing one group of voters or another. […] When your opponent is trying to make you more extreme, and to make you dangerously liberal, the ways you can push back on that […] is by having people stand with you that don’t agree with you on everything. […] It wasn’t just that the Republicans that stood with us were saying they were against Trump, they were also saying they were for the vice president and why, and I think that had a real impact.

This is a critical admission that shows Harris’s fear of alienating moderate voters outweighed the opportunity to energize her base with policies that had proven popular and effective under the leadership of her running mate. Any time you hear a strategist for the Democratic Party talk about appealing to “moderate Republicans,” it should instantly raise red flags. As Stephen Prager has previously noted in Current Affairs, the idea that Republicans are moderate is often false, as their agendas are actually quite extreme. So the Democratic establishment’s fixation on so-called “moderates” often leads to disastrous compromises (associations with neoconservative war hawks like Liz Cheney, for instance) that diminish the potential for progressive policies to remain part of the ticket. O’Malley Dillon acknowledges that Harris was afraid of being labeled as “dangerously liberal,” but the way to address this is not by walking back earlier progressive stances like cracking down on corporate price-gouging or supporting Medicare for All but by reframing the terms of the debate entirely. After all, much of what gets called “dangerously liberal” is, by definition, moderate. Sixty-three percent of Americans are in favor of the government providing health coverage for all people. A majority of Americans support a federal jobs guarantee. The Green New Deal has broad support. Why should the Democratic Party worry about being smeared as radical when progressive policies are overwhelmingly popular? Instead of running from the label, Democrats should seize the opportunity to redefine what “moderate” means by making the case that “dangerously liberal” policies are, by any objective standard, the true center of public opinion.

Astonishingly, David Plouffe defends Harris’s strategy of pandering to the right, even in the wake of her devastating loss, arguing that “we have to dominate the moderate vote” in future elections. If Plouffe’s idea of “dominating the moderate vote” is to embrace Liz Cheney, then Democrats are in trouble. Harris participated in four publicly live-streamed events with Cheney (imagine if she had done four campaign events with Shawn Fain or Bernie Sanders instead), and when pressed on this bizarre decision, Plouffe explained: “You make as many decisions as you can based on data. […] It can sound like making excuses, this political environment sucked. We were dealing with ferocious headwinds. […] It was going to take a little bit more independent Republicans than we saw in ’20.” He also said, elsewhere in the interview: “You raise the stakes of what a Trump second term would be like.” Setting aside that an endorsement from Dick Cheney is nothing to be proud of, it turns out that the decision to raise the threat level of a second Trump term was a flawed strategy if it meant abandoning an alternative populist vision. This is perfectly visualized in an analysis from Jacobin, which shows that Trump talked about prices and the cost of living “more than twice as often as Harris.”

Another graph shows that as the campaign progressed, Harris gradually shifted away from using anti-elite rhetoric and instead raised the stakes of a Trump victory by emphasizing the threat to democracy that he represents. To be clear, Donald Trump is undoubtedly a threat to democracy. Harris had a responsibility to remind voters of this, and she was effective at making the case for why Trump is unfit to serve. However, she failed to build the necessary trust with voters who needed to hear more than just anti-Trump rhetoric. According to exit polls, 94 percent of registered Republicans voted for Donald Trump in 2024, which is exactly the same percentage of registered Republicans who voted for Donald Trump in 2020, suggesting that this strategy was a complete failure. In fact, the only gains that Harris saw was among college-educated white voters. It’s difficult to fathom what more Harris could have possibly done to appease the moderate right (short of winning the coveted George W. Bush endorsement, perhaps), and yet she still lost spectacularly.

Another noteworthy thing about the Pod Save America postmortem is that they spent several minutes discussing the impact that trans issues had on the race, but the word “Gaza” was never mentioned in the entire hour-and-a-half discussion. This omission speaks volumes about the Harris campaign’s myopic strategy. Despite claims of wanting to reach all voters, Harris alienated critical blocs like Arab Americans by refusing even the symbolic gesture of allowing a Palestinian delegate to speak at the DNC convention. Moreover, Jamaal Bowman recently revealed to Break Through News journalist Rania Khalek that he offered to campaign in Michigan to engage (rightfully) hesitant Arab American voters, but he was ignored. Instead, the Harris campaign sent Ritchie Torres and Bill Clinton to berate uncommitted voters and scold protesters—hardly a strategy for broad coalition-building. The contradictions are glaring. On one hand, Harris’s team insists they must avoid being painted as “dangerously liberal.” On the other hand, they claim they “don’t have the luxury of choosing one group of voters or another.” Yet, after doubling down on their “moderate” strategy and losing every swing state, the lesson they’ve taken away is to pursue the very center-right bloc that rejected them. This stubborn refusal to acknowledge the failure of their approach is a guarantee that Democrats will continue to lose unless they radically change course.

Lesson #3: We Need More Super PACs

dan pfeiffer

In the history of all of the presidential elections post-Citizens United, the Democrats have had a designated Super PAC. […] There's been one singular entity that was the recipient of all the Super PAC dollars. It was Priorities USA in ’12 and ’16, and then it’s been Future Forward in 2024. Going forward, would your recommendation be that there be, like the Republicans, multiple entities that are all sort of viewed as important places for people looking to donate to go to?

Jen O’Malley Dillon, Campaign Chair

There are a lot of important groups that do shit really well, and they need the resources to go do that. We don’t need to recreate the wheel, and we certainly don’t need to funnel everything through one place. We need to have groups that have the ability to reach these very difficult to reach voters in ways that can be compelling and long-lasting, have the funding that they need to go do that. 

This is a strange excuse considering that Kamala Harris raised significantly more money than Donald Trump. According to OpenSecrets, Harris raised over $500 million more than Trump. Future Forward PAC, the largest pro-Harris Super PAC, spent $517,449,891, while Trump’s largest Super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., spent $376,948,614. Despite her financial advantage, Harris lost. One of the reasons for this was the perception—validated by exit polls and election results—that Harris and the Democratic Party were overly reliant on a donor class detached from the grassroots. Harris underperformed significantly among working-class voters, a demographic Trump has increasingly captured. CNN exit polls indicate that Harris’s support among voters earning less than $50,000 dropped to 48 percent, a seven-point decline from Biden’s 2020 performance. Conversely, Harris made significant gains among affluent voters, capturing 51 percent of the vote among those earning over $100,000 per year—nine points higher than what Biden received in 2020.

Faced with these results, David Plouffe echoes Jen O’Malley Dillon’s advice, saying that “we have to stop playing a different game as it relates to Super PACs than the Republicans. […] They coordinate more than we do. […] Clearly it is not legal what they’re doing, but we are at a disadvantage when our folks are playing by a different set of rules than they are.” But this issue clearly goes beyond fundraising dynamics. Funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into ads and get-out-the-vote operations isn’t a substitute for building a movement that inspires people. Even though his policies will directly harm the working-class voters who supported him, Trump presented himself as a populist champion, offering a narrative of economic and cultural grievance while Harris was obsessed with data-driven messaging that lacked the emotional resonance needed to win over swing voters.

In Missouri, voters simultaneously passed progressive ballot measures like enshrining abortion rights and raising the minimum wage, while also delivering Trump an 18-point victory. This points to a disconnect suggesting that progressive policies are popular, but that voters don’t view the Democratic Party as being willing or capable of delivering on them. In addition to the Missouri results, several labor leaders who endorsed Harris have echoed similar sentiments. AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler tells The Guardian that “when you’re struggling to put food on the table, and you’re still dealing with inflation … the messaging that Trump was saying was effective.” IUPAT President Jimmy Williams tells The New York Times that “when you’re too conflicted between the interest of corporate America and average working-day people, I think this is what you end up with, [...] a message that doesn’t resonate.” Sara Nelson, President of the Association of Flight Attendants Union, adds that “the biggest problem is that people would say, ‘I can’t tell the difference between the parties.’ And they leaned hard into that problem.” Bernie Sanders sums it up: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

Strengthening the Democratic Super PAC ecosystem won’t solve this foundational problem. In fact, it could make it even worse. If Democrats want to compete in 2028, they need to regain voters’ trust by articulating a clear, unapologetic vision for the future—one that addresses the systemic inequalities and economic anxieties that define Americans’ lives. If they fail to address this disconnect, no amount of money will save them in future elections.

How can the Democratic Party win if it keeps hiring these people? At no point does Harris’s staff consider what they would have done differently—because, in their eyes, nothing went wrong. But even Pod Save America’s liberal-leaning audience seems fed up with the excuses. Estimates show that the interview has an 83 percent dislike rate on YouTube. One comment with over 1,100 upvotes reads “as a democrat this video radicalized me more than the actual election did. we cannot afford to let these idiots make decisions for us any longer.” Another comment with over 1,700 upvotes says “after a devastating loss, the Harris campaign just congratulated themselves for 90 minutes, with nearly no pushback from you. Time for me to get my news elsewhere.”

Meanwhile, even New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks admitted that “Maybe Bernie Sanders is Right” in his post-election analysis. And Democratic Senator Chris Murphy has said the Democrats are “out of touch” with voters. If Democratic voters are as angry as some in the Pod Save America audience seem to be, they have every right to be. This represents an important opportunity for the left to emphasize to voters how they were misled by a party leadership that prioritized preserving the status quo over listening to its base. This anger must not dissipate. Instead, it should be channeled into a demand for meaningful change—starting now.