Some Democratic figures have accused Kamala Harris’s campaign of being self-congratulatory after a series of recent public appearances from the candidate and her senior staff in which they declined to admit making any errors that could have contributed to her defeat.
Some of the criticism was aimed at Harris herself, following a video call to thank campaign donors in which the vice-president expressed pride in her failed race for the White House.
She appeared to boast that the coalition assembled during her three-and-a-half-month campaign after succeeding Joe Biden as the Democrats’ nominee ranked among the “best political movements”. She insisted it would have “a lasting effect”, despite it ending in a decisive loss to Donald Trump, something she and her supporters warned beforehand would be a catastrophe.
“I am proud of the race we ran, and your role in this was critical,” the vice-president said in a 10-minute address. “What we did in 107 days was unprecedented. Think about the coalition that we built, and we were so intentional about that – you would hear me talk about it all the time.”
Although she admitted the election “didn’t turn out like we wanted”, she noted that the campaign raised nearly $1.5bn dollars, a record, and praised the success in fundraising from grassroots donors – despite reportedly ending the race $20m in debt and sending post-election fundraising emails to donors.
After some of the vice-president’s key staffers also appeared on a podcast billed as dissecting reasons for the defeat, one member of the Democratic National Committee’s finance team called the Harris campaign “self-congratulatory” .
Lindy Li told NewsNation she was “stunned that there was no sort of postmortem or analysis of the disastrous campaign”.
“It was just patting each other on the back,” she said. “They praised Harris as a visionary leader, and at one moment during the call, she was talking about her Thanksgiving recipe.”
Referring to a Pod Save America podcast posted on Tuesday in which Harris’s key aides discussed the $1bn-plus campaign spend, Li said: “They failed to mention that hundreds of millions of dollars went to them and their friends right through these consulting firms.
“These consultants were the primary beneficiaries of the Harris campaign, not the American people.”
One explanation on the podcast by Stephanie Cutter, a Harris adviser, on why the vice-president had declined to break with Biden despite the president’s persistently low approval ratings drew criticism.
“She felt like she was part of the administration. So why should she look back and cherry pick some things that she would have done differently when she was part of it?” Cutter told the podcast. “She had tremendous loyalty to President Biden. So the best we could do, and the most that she felt comfortable with was saying like, look, vice-presidents never break with their presidents.”
One X user posted: “If the guys at pod save America don’t have an episode just straight shit talking all these losers who helped us lose im never listening to another episode. [Because] wtf was this nonsense.”
Another podcast guest, David Plouffe, a former adviser to Barack Obama, was criticised after claiming that “it’s really hard for Democrats to win battleground states.” He said the party needed “to dominate the moderate” to win future elections.
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Jeet Heer, a writer for the leftwing Nation magazine responded: “Is it too much to ask for a little humility and self-reflection from the people whose strategies failed badly?”
Another social media user posted: “Anybody with more than two brain cells who’s committed to building up the democratic party would be analyzing the depressed voter turnout numbers. But the dudes at pod save America have no goal other than reliving their glory days”
The discussion, which also included Harris’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, and Quentin Fulks, the campaign’s deputy manager, was also ridiculed by some on the right.
Bill O’Reilly, a former Fox News host, told NewsNation: “It’s kind of like the New York Jets. You guys follow the football, nobody did anything wrong, and they’re 3-8 … I hope people see the absurdity of this.”
James Carville, a veteran Democratic strategist and the architect of Bill Clinton’s 1992 election win, criticised aides who advised Harris not to go on the Joe Rogan podcast before election. Trump, by contrast, granted a three-hour interview to Rogan.
“If I were running a 2028 campaign and I had some little snot-nosed 23 year old saying, ‘I’m going to resign if you don’t do this,’ not only would I fire that motherfucker on the spot, I would find out who hired them and fire that person on the spot,” Carville said in a foul-mouthed video rant posted on social media. “I’m really not interested in your uninformed, stupid, jackass opinion as to whether you go on Joe Rogan or not.”
