Where Harris’ campaign went wrong

It was a moment that encapsulated one of the biggest challenges facing her campaign – which, in the end, proved insurmountable.

“What, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” co-host of ABC’s “The View” Sunny Hostin asked Harris, looking to give her a set for her to spike over the net.

“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she said.

Even Harris realized she had a problem, trying to adjust a moment later by saying she would put a Republican in her Cabinet.

Aides didn’t wait until Harris was off the set to start trying to clean it up. A Democrat who had spoken with her told CNN at the time that she didn’t want to name her differences with President Joe Biden – including a higher capital gains tax rate, a bigger child tax credit and a tougher border policy – because she thought it would look disloyal to the man who had picked her as his running mate and then stepped aside for her.

The thud fell in a campaign already struggling with a listless October, which had replaced the late summer exuberance and a September debate that nearly everyone political observer other than Donald Trump acknowledged she crushed. As aides new to the Harris orbit exerted control, she struggled with preparation. She grew hesitant, losing some of the confidence and swagger that had defined the early weeks of her reintroduction to the country. Aides who had successfully pushed her out of her comfort zone earlier in the year felt like they were running into the kind of walls she used to put up.

CNN spoke with over a dozen senior Harris campaign aides both in the Wilmington, Delaware, campaign headquarters and on the ground in the states, as well as multiple volunteers and local elected officials, over the course of the final weeks of the race.

A country crying out for change got a candidate who, at a crucial moment as more voters were tuning in, decided to soft-pedal the change she knew she represented.

In the scope of a Democratic ticket that pulled off the biggest turnaround in approval ratings and the fastest consolidation around a new candidate in the history of modern presidential politics, this may have seemed like a minor moment. But it reflected deeper problems: some, like with the staff around her, that she might have been able to adjust; and one, with Biden, that she could never shake, with internal polls showing overwhelming majorities of voters thought the country was on the wrong track.

 

By the time Harris got a clearer, sharper contrast answer out on the Biden question, the situation had congealed in ways she never got past – both among voters wavering in the center who wanted to hear her rebuff the president on his handling of the economy and voters on the left who wanted to hear her more forcefully disavow Biden’s support for Israel.

But perhaps the bigger problem with Biden, top Democrats fumed in the aftermath of that fateful debate in June and then again as they watched the results turn red on Tuesday, is that he should have never been anywhere near the 2024 race. If he had stepped aside after the midterms, as some aides urged him to, the Democratic Party process could have played out in a primary campaign. Candidates’ kinks could have been worked out – or not. Almost certainly whoever emerged as the nominee would have gone into the final weeks without so many Americans complaining they didn’t know enough, as they said about Harris. Biden could have taken on a role as steward and elder statesman, rather than a guy the Harris campaign never knew quite what do with.

Late surge of optimism crashes

If the election had been two weeks ago, senior aides to Harris were admitting in recent days, the vice president probably would have lost. But they went into Tuesday feeling like she had gotten herself to a likely squeaker victory. One-on-one conversations volunteers were having as they knocked on doors seemed to be clicking. For the first time in his nine years dominating American politics, Trump’s character seemed to be breaking through as an actual weight on people who wanted to vote for him.

Leading Democrats smiled just thinking about what it would mean to beat Trump with the first female president — a woman of color, a child of two immigrants, a prosecutor, and a candidate who talked about joy and offered up her smile against the scowl that had become his most common expression. Her candidacy sparked in them the unfamiliar feeling of hope.

That sentiment evaporated by 11 p.m. on Tuesday. But for many anxious Democrats, this is just the beginning. Going into Election Day, many top Democratic operatives across the campaign and in the states told CNN different versions of the same thought: If this didn’t work – with the massive campaign they’d put together, with millions of doors knocked by volunteers who flooded into battleground states, with GOP former Rep. Liz Cheney and former President Bill Clinton united under the same tent stumping hard for her, with celebrities from Bad Bunny and Arnold Schwarzenegger throwing their cultural weight behind her – what will?

“I can’t imagine, I can’t even get my mind around what it would be like if Donald Trump won, because he is telling us such dark and sinister things that he’s going to do, and I believe him,” Sen. Cory Booker told CNN after a campaign stop late Monday afternoon in Bucks County, Pennsylvania – one of the key swing districts in the crucial battleground state.

The New Jersey Democrat said he had already warned his own staff about not giving up.

“We need to get up the next morning and forge forward,” Booker said. “I told them how much I don’t like hearing people say, ‘Oh, if so-and-so wins, I’m going to go to Canada. That’s just not our history. We’ve seen really bad outcomes out of bad historical events in our country, and we’re here because of the resiliency, the toughness, the strength of our country — and people even in the worst of times dug in and tried to do the best for our country.”

Simmering internal fights and a revealing pick in Walz

Harris’ team would have gladly taken more time to introduce the vice president to the country, or to put together an operation, which, after the ticket switch in July, woke up every morning at campaign headquarters and in the states feeling behind on planning.

But by the time the campaign pulled off its multi-state simultaneous rally across battleground states Monday evening – which ended with Lady Gaga singing her song “The Edge of Glory” and adding in, “I’m an American woman on the edge” on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art – a nervous feeling of maybe having made a movement happen was spreading among Harris aides and top supporters.

Those aides were a hodgepodge. Biden hadn’t just struggled as a candidate, but had failed to attract some top talent to his campaign because a generation of up-and-coming Democrats could never get excited about him. Harris tried to graft some of her own team onto them, even overlooking tensions between them from the early days of the Biden administration with campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and keeping her in charge.

But some of those who had been in Wilmington for a year before Harris became the candidate bucked at their new bosses. Alumni of Barack Obama – most prominently his 2008, campaign manager David Plouffe, but also many others who moved into state operations – tried to flex a sometimes dated but often more incisive sense of how to win voters.

Along the way, multiple aides told CNN how much they were grinding on one another. But the mission to beat Trump and the short timeline to try to get there helped paper over a lot of the infighting that might have exploded in a longer campaign. It instead just raged behind the scenes as aides like Stephanie Cutter moved to exert dominance over defining how and what Harris said what she said.

And those tensions manifested from almost the start of this short campaign, in the internal wrangling over who Harris should pick as her running mate. The case for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was strong, and not just because Harris’ brother-in-law Tony West was telling her they looked like the future of the Democratic Party together, and that the popular governor would make sure she won Pennsylvania. Right-wing media types weren’t the only ones who noticed how much Shapiro had made himself into an Obama clone, as much a Jewish guy from the Philadelphia suburbs could be: The Obama alumni suddenly rushing onto her campaign were pushing for Shapiro.

Harris liked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, though. She liked his line about Republicans being weird. She liked the way he came off as easy and unassuming. She liked the way they’d gotten along in their interview, including his very open stress that he would mess up in a debate with Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. And she liked the way Walz had been so deferential to however she would define the job for him.

 

In the end, Harris made a decision that simultaneously reflected her newfound confidence and her long-standing insecurity, solid with trusting her own instincts, fine with going against her family and against the Obama orbit, but also with no interest in having anyone who would possibly outshine her.

Then, as top aides kept Harris away from interviews and unscripted moments for weeks longer than many on the campaign thought made sense, Walz was necessarily kept in a box too, so that he didn’t come off more accessible than she was.

Tuesday morning, outside a canvas launch in northeast Philadelphia, Shapiro deflected a question about whether Pennsylvania — and the race — would have looked different had he been the choice.

“I think she made a great pick in Tim Walz,” he said.

Democrats try to make sense of gut punch

Biden, most Democrats were confident going into Tuesday, would have never even been in contention. The president watched the results come in from the White House, making a few calls to local winning candidates back in Delaware. Some who spoke with him as he made the decision to drop out in July briefly lingered on what might have been – maybe he could have won by keeping his numbers even in counties where he ended up outperforming Harris, or if he’d lost anyway, at least it wouldn’t have put the burden on a Black woman. He said nothing publicly.

Harris ran on positivity. She ran on inclusivity. She convinced a party full of insiders who had gone into the year ready to write her off for the 2028 Democratic nomination that they should go all in on her for 2024.

At the beginning of the night Tuesday, when victory seemed just hours away, the people who came to what was supposed to be Harris’ celebration were dancing. A Howard University graduate seemed about to walk into history in the heart of her old HBCU campus. At one point, the camera found the student body president in the crowd and she blushed as she saw herself projected on the big screen. Anticipation mounted and cheers went out with every state called for Harris.

Seconds after North Carolina was called for Trump, the audio was switched off the big screens and music blasted through the speakers to try to salvage the energy. Most kept staring silently at the numbers, trying to make sense of what had happened.

 

In state capitals with Democratic governors, break-glass plans that they had started to believe they would never need are getting yanked off the shelves – to protect access to abortion medications, but also to work up other protections from what they believe will be not just a stringent, but vindictive, administration. Early thoughts about who will be running and how in 2028 are starting to circulate.

That was not on the minds of the people who started streaming out of the Howard campus early Wednesday before campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond had even finished telling them that there was still counting to be done.

“We try to do it right, we try to be good Christians,” one woman said to the man walking with her. “We’ve got to take a page out of their book.”