Kamala campaign manager blames ‘catastrophic’ Biden for election loss
Like the old Irish joke about asking a local for directions, Kamala Harris’s advisers have one explanation for their defeat by Donald Trump: they started from the wrong place.
In yet another post-election interview in which he passed the buck, senior adviser David Plouffe claimed that no Democratic candidate could have won without a proper primary process — what he called “the cardinal sin” of this race.
And he said he was shocked by the internal polling when he finally joined the team after Joe Biden quit with less than four months to go, a situation he described as “catastrophic.”
‘When I got in, I saw the real figures under the hood for the first time. They were quite horrific,” he told The Atlantic.
“The Sun Belt was worse than the Blue Wall, but the Blue Wall was bad. And demographically, young voters across the board — Hispanic voters, black voters, Asian voters — were in really terrible shape.
“When the transition happened, some things got a little better, but nowhere near where we ended up or where we needed to be. This was a rescue mission.
“It was catastrophic in terms of where it was.”
Biden ultimately bowed to pressure from his allies and stepped aside on July 21.
Kamala Harris’ campaign team has a clear picture of who is responsible for her defeat: not her. In an interview with the Atlantic, senior adviser David Plouffe said the campaign was in a “catastrophic” position by the time Joe Biden dropped out and they took over.
Biden ultimately succumbed to the pressure and dropped out of the race on July 21
With votes still being counted, Donald Trump has 76.9 million votes, compared to Kamala Harris’ 74.4 million.
The party quickly coalesced around its vice president to become the nominee, avoiding a protracted battle that some feared would divide Democrats and leave the election to Trump.
Still, the former president stormed to victory, capturing all seven battleground states and becoming the first Republican in two decades to win the popular vote.
With votes still being counted, Trump has 76.9 million votes, compared to Harris’ 74.4 million. That puts him 2.8 million votes ahead of his 2020 tally, while Harris has about 6.7 million fewer votes than Biden.
“I’m not sure, given the headwinds, that a Democrat could have won,” Plouffe said.
“But if we had had a primary in which a group of people auditioned… through that process whoever emerged… would have been a more fully formed person and would have had more time to build a general election campaign.”
“(Not having that process) is the cardinal sin.”
And then they had to cut a campaign down to just over 100 days.
“Our first week I thought, ‘We need a biography ad, we need to talk about the border, we need to create an economic contrast, we need to get health care in there, abortion,’” Plouffe said. .
“If you have six, seven, eight months, you make a storyboard of all these things, then you have a storyline. Everything here has been destroyed and collided.’