Officials from the Trump and Harris campaigns gathered last week at Harvard’s Institute of Politics for its Campaign Managers Conference. Held every four years since 1972, this deep dive into the presidential race is part a peek backstage, part locker-room taunts and part psychotherapy.
I found reasons not to be part of the George W. Bush contingent in both 2000 and 2004 (transition and official duties called). But the IOP’s transcripts of its conferences are crack for political junkies. The sessions are often personal, raw and revealing. This year’s conference was no exception.
Kamala Harris’s campaign chief of staff, Sheila Nix, jolted the conference Thursday night by boasting that Democrats ran a “pretty flawless campaign.” Ms. Harris “did all the steps that [were] required to be successful,” she claimed. “We hit all the marks.” This earned derision from Trump campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita. As it should have.
There were four great flaws in Ms. Harris’s effort. First, while her campaign chairman, Jen O’Malley Dillon, claimed the vice president “created differentiation” from President Biden, the rest of us know better. Ms. Harris came across as more of the same. That was a serious problem in an election in which nearly two-thirds of voters thought America was on the wrong track and the president’s approval ratings on such key issues as the economy, inflation and immigration were all in the 30s.
Ms. Harris’s inability to create daylight with Mr. Biden came to the fore in her Oct. 8 appearance on “The View,” when co-host Sunny Hostin asked, “Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” This was the moment when Ms. Harris could have started achieving escape velocity from the unpopular incumbent. Instead, after hesitating, Ms. Harris replied, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” That comment burrowed deep into many voters’ consciousness.
It was essential for Ms. Harris to break with Mr. Biden on several important issues, even if only by being new and bolder. Her failure to do so doomed her candidacy. She represented continuity when voters demanded change.
The second big flaw was Ms. Harris’s presentation of her message. One of her better lines: “If elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list. When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list.” It was undermined by her campaign’s paucity of events in which voters could learn more about that list or her. Ms. Harris’s priorities—and, more important, the values and vision that informed them—were overshadowed by all the celebrities around her. There was too little from her that sounded authentic and too much from pop idols.
Where was that unscripted appearance that allowed voters to know more about her, as Americans did in Mr. Trump’s three-hour interview with Joe Rogan? Why weren’t there more moments when people could sense they were seeing the real Kamala Harris? She was constantly surrounded by well-known stars who outshined her. Many of these household names represented an elite culture that didn’t sway voters, especially rural Americans.
These luminaries didn’t help with her third shortcoming: Disaffected voters didn’t feel she related to them. Ms. Harris wasn’t as condescending as Barack Obama was in 2008, when he mocked people who “cling to guns or religion.” Nor did she say anything close to what Hillary Clinton did in 2016, when she characterized Trump supporters as “deplorables.” But not directly insulting voters wasn’t enough. She had to connect with them, and she wasn’t able to in the numbers she needed.
