The post-mortems explaining Kamala Harris’ loss have been ongoing since election night, and after weeks of radio silence, the top brass of her failed presidential campaign have finally weighed in — to claim there’s little they could have done differently to defeat Donald Trump. 

In an exclusive interview given to the podcast Pod Save America, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, senior adviser David Plouffe, deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks, and senior adviser Stephanie Cutter sat down with host Dan Pfeiffer to answer questions about the strategic choices made by the campaign. 

In an interview that felt decisively light on introspection and self accountability, the strategists repeatedly highlighted that the campaign had been saddled with a “a jump ball race” in a “pretty brutal” electoral atmosphere. 

“The truth is that we really thought this was a very close race. We talked about the entire time we saw it as a margin of error race, almost the entire time the vice president was in the race,” O’Malley Dillon said. “But, you know, we expected this to be close.” 

When asked about the decision to bring in prominent Republican figures like former Rep. Liz Cheney to act as surrogates for Harris — and hopefully draw in moderates or disaffected Republicans — the vice president’s campaign team argued that the blowback to Cheney’s involvement was overstated. 

“We’d spent a lot of time with voters who we were concerned weren’t going to vote. And the fact that Liz Cheney was supporting Kamala Harris was not an issue raised by any of them,” Plouffe said. “We needed some percentage of Republicans, but I think what people forget is, it’s more the independents who act like Republicans, where issues of democracy, of how unhinged he is, Project 2025, mattered to them, even as some conservative Democrats.” 

“It can sound like making excuses,” he continued. “This political environment sucked, OK? At the end of the day, we had to raise people’s concern and the threat level of a Trump second term. I think if you look at our internal data, and Quentin can speak to this, we did a lot of that. We just didn’t get it to the extent that we needed to to win.” 

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According to exit polls, the Harris campaign’s efforts to win over Republican voters and even moderates were not successful. This year, Harris only won 5 percent of Republican votes — a smaller percentage than Democrats won in either 2016 or 2020. Harris also won a smaller percentage of moderates and independents than Joe Biden did when he beat Trump last election cycle. 

At the same time, Democratic turnout cratered: the percentage of the electorate who identified as Democrats this year was down substantially from recent elections. 

Plouffe acknowledged that the campaign anticipated that it needed to win more independent voters and Republicans than Democrats did in 2020, but did not explain why so many fewer Democrats voted this year and was not asked to clarify that, either. 

In the Harris team’s view, her campaign could not overcome Trump’s sprawling Super PAC funding apparatus (despite Democrats holding record-breaking campaign coffers), digital dominance, and control of culture war narratives. 

Plouffe attributed that to the Trump campaign and Republican outside groups more actively coordinating their strategies together than Democrats do.

“We have to stop playing a different game as it relates to Super PACs than the Republicans,” he said. “Love our Democratic lawyers. I’m tired of them. They coordinate more than we do. I think amongst themselves, I think with the presidential campaign. I’m just sick and tired of it, OK?”

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Outside groups like Super PACs are supposed to be independent from political candidates; this is the supposed basis of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. But the Federal Election Commission this year ruled that campaigns and outside groups can coordinate on their canvassing operations. Soon after, the Trump campaign effectively outsourced its field operations to Elon Musk’s America PAC and the conservative youth-focused outside group Turning Point USA.  

“He had an army of Super PACs that were so coordinated. I’m sure there’s some legal way they were communicated, coordinated,” O’Malley Dillon said, adding that “our side was completely mismatched when it came to the ecosystem of Trump and his super PACs and ours.” 

In probably the most introspective moment of the conversation, Fulks stated point blank that Democrats’ fixation on policing internal rhetoric within the party is damaging their overall ability to maintain strong candidacies. 

“Democrats are eating our own, to a very high degree,” he said. “And until that stops, we’re not going to be able to address a lot of the things that just need to be said. And like, for the masculinity piece of it, men don’t like people that apologize. I don’t know what age bracket, but it’s called standing on business. If you say something, you mean it. Trump does not apologize. If he says something, he means it, and his party stands behind him and they don’t make him backtrack it.”