Harris’s postelection relaunch turns out to be a Thanksgiving turkey

Vice President Kamala Harris’s attempts to “chart a new way forward,” as her doomed campaign slogan went, after her recent election loss has many crying foul. 

After Harris conceded the election to President-elect Donald Trump, she headed to Hawaii to recharge as the Democratic Party did some soul-searching about why they lost the popular vote and every battleground and saw nearly every state trend more red. While her colleagues at the Democratic National Committee concluded that the vice president’s campaign was a “$1 billion disaster” and “a damning indictment on our party brand,” Harris came back from her island vacation to say, “I am staying in the fight.” 

Despite her determined spirit, former top Democratic allies are suggesting her hopeful comeback could be in jeopardy, while a series of missteps since she returned from vacation have pundits speculating her party is trying to end her career.

Donors don’t trust

Reacting to news that Harris blew through more than a billion dollars in campaign donations and ended with $20 million in debt, Democratic megadonor John Morgan on Monday said, “I think this disqualifies her forever.” 

“If you can’t run a campaign, you can’t run America,” Morgan told NewsNation. “The same thing is going to follow Harris for the rest of her career. She cannot be trusted with the money, and the donors are going to be, like, ‘Where is this money?’”

Harris’s campaign outraised and outspent Trump’s, only to see her perform worse than President Joe Biden did four years previously.

Her 100-day sprint to the finish looked like a smashing success until the bills came due, and reporting revealed the enormous sums of cash she spent on building a set for a podcast appearance.

Similar to Democrats running against unpopular Republicans, such as Beto O’Rourke’s challenge to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in 2018, donors might have been happy to dump money into the race not for her but to try and stop her opponent.

“It wasn’t pouring in for Harris, it was pouring in against Trump,” Morgan said. “Everybody that was voting and supporting Harris was really voting against Trump, and everybody that was for Trump was voting for Trump.”

Drinking up criticism

Another rough point for Harris came after the Democratic Party posted a video to its X account Tuesday featuring the vice president speaking to supporters disheartened by her loss. 

“I just have to remind you, don’t let anybody take your power from you. You have the same power that you did before Nov. 5, and you have the same purpose that you did. And you have the same ability to engage and inspire. So don’t ever let anybody or any circumstance take your power from you,” she said.

Vice President @KamalaHarris’ message to supporters. pic.twitter.com/x5xMUGTtkz

— The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) November 26, 2024

While the video was meant to provide encouragement to followers, social media users went wild, with a flood of viewers blasting her appearance, suggesting Harris was intoxicated, and speculating as to why it was released. 

Echoing a theory floated by Fox News contributor Caitlyn Jenner, political commentator Anna Watson said, “I’ve never accused Kamala Harris of being a drunk. I like to stick only to facts. But man, this video is not helping her.” 

Watson later suggested Democrats were trying to “intentionally” sabotage Harris’s reported hopes of mounting either a presidential run in 2028 or a California gubernatorial run in 2026, writing that they are “way too organized to allow a video like that to be released of Kamala Harris … this was their way of ending her career for good.”

Senior National Review Online writer Dan McLaughlin added, “No video like this would ever have been released by a politician who is not hated by her staff.”

Staff speak out

The same day her party released the ill-received video, a host of senior Harris campaign advisers made an appearance on Pod Save America, making damning concessions about many of the criticisms and fears Democrats had about the vice president.

One of the biggest problems the vice president ran into on the campaign trail was her difficulty in separating herself from Biden. While she tried to brand herself as an agent of change, there were often concerns about her remarks that there was “not a thing” she would have done differently than her boss. 

Stephanie Cutter, who oversaw messaging and communications for the Harris campaign, admitted her boss refused to make a clean break with the president, explaining, “We were never going to satisfy anybody” because the vice president had “tremendous loyalty” to Biden.

Cutter also agreed that perceptions the campaign focused too much on conducting media outreach with legacy outlets and was “just sort of talking to our own people all the time” were real.

“In terms of who the targets were, the persuadable voters, which were largely young men, they’re not watching the evening news. They’re not watching cable. They definitely do not watch 60 Minutes,” Cutter said before suggesting it “screw[ed] with our narrative.”

Meanwhile, David Plouffe, who served as an overall consultant for the campaign, admitted that internal polling data never showed Harris leading Trump. 

“I think it surprised people because there were these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw,” he said. 

Quentin Fulks, who is Harris’s deputy campaign manager and oversaw paid advertising, conceded that Trump’s campaign ad attacking Harris over supporting transgender operations for illegal immigrants, including prisoners, was “very effective.”  

After noting that 7% of Trump allies’ total ad spending was built around the transgender ad buy, Fulks said, “I think that it made her seem out of touch.”

“And it was in her own words, and that’s something,” he added, voicing a sentiment that was backed by Plouffe, who suggested it was hard to fight back against a “fact pattern.” 

Harris faced fire from Democrats for not directly addressing the ads, which flipped the race 2.7 percentage points in Trump’s favor, but Plouffe said Democrats were in a rough position.

“If we could have just said, ‘That’s a lie’ — It’s not anything she’s ever believed.’ You know, she was on tape. Surgery for people who want to transition in prison was part of the Biden-Harris platform in 2020. It was part of what the administration did, right?” he said. 

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Plouffe also admitted the Trump campaign’s messaging on attaching Harris to “Bidenomics” and inflation was hugely effective “because that was kind of core to people’s concern.” 

“It was like, well, maybe you’re not change. You’re defending an economic program that I don’t think has helped me,” he said. “Listen, I think we’re all very proud of what Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Democrats did to help us dig out of the pandemic, but people weren’t feeling it.”