Top aides to Kamala Harris are finally breaking their silence on the catastrophic election failure

The team of Democratic political advisers who led Kamala Harris’ losing campaign against Donald Trump have spoken out for the first time since the election about why things went so terribly wrong for them.

Harris campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, senior political adviser David Plouffe and campaign advisers Quentin Fulks and Stephanie Cutter appeared on the ‘Pod Save America’ podcast with host and former Barack Obama political adviser Dan Pfeiffer to delve into their resounding electoral defeat .

But the quartet of campaign veterans spent most of the 90 minutes blaming everyone but themselves — or their failed candidate — for Trump’s loss.

“This political climate sucked, okay? We were facing strong headwinds,” lamented Plouffe, who led Obama’s 2008 campaign and then served as a White House adviser.

Plouffe, who angrily quit X after Democrats criticized him online over the failed campaign, also stressed that Biden was so unpopular when he dropped out of the race and backed Harris that improving her ratings was a difficult task.

He noted that Harris entered the race with an approval rating of just 33-35 percent and while they improved her numbers by 15 points, they didn’t have enough time to sell her to voters.

And Plouffe strangely complained about how difficult it was for Democrats to win support from independents in battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — even though that was the task, and the team assured Democrats across the country that they would were able. .

“It’s very difficult for Democrats to win battleground states,” Plouffe claimed, noting that those states were more conservative than the average blue state and that even moderates there tended to lean right.

But he admitted they also fell short in big cities like Philadelphia and Detroit.

And he also defended Harris’ decision to campaign with Republicans like former Rep. Liz Cheney as a way to appeal to more moderates — which appeared to backfire.

Liberal supporters of Harris were outraged by the party’s embrace of Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Plouffe emphasized that it was folly for strategists to focus only on pleasing Democratic and left-wing people in the United States.

“The math just doesn’t work,” he said. “Okay?”

Meanwhile, campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon repeatedly complained about the lack of time they had to make Harris a winner in the 107-day campaign that began in July when Biden ultimately dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris.

She defended their approach of emphasizing how Harris was “different” from both Biden and Trump and a candidate for the “future,” rather than trying to differentiate herself from Biden, whose approval rating was epically low.

Campaign adviser Stephanie Cutter confirmed that Harris was “unwilling” to split from Biden.

“She had a huge lack of popularity because people didn’t know about her, or what they did know about her was due to negative media,” she said.

But the campaign veterans did not say what efforts they made to get Harris to split from the president, essentially saddled her with the blame for the two biggest voters’ problems: the rising prices of everyday goods and the burden of massive illegal immigration.

The group agreed on one thing their opponents did that really hurt Harris: Trump’s “they/them” ad highlighting Harris’ support for taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for prisoners.

“She was on the tape. “Surgery for people who wanted to transition into prison was part of the Biden-Harris platform in 2020, it was part of what the administration did,” Plouffe admitted.

Quentin Fulks said the ad was used to suppress the vote of black voters, and that it was effective at sending the message that the Harris campaign didn’t care about voters.

“The way they targeted this ad, they were trying to make our job harder with Black voters, I’m just going to put it bluntly … especially Black men,” he said.

Cutter agreed.

“Their strategy is not to attract new voters, they are trying to mess with us,” Cutter said.

Cutter and O’Malley Dillon also complained about the corporate media for creating a narrative that Harris was unwilling or unable to do interviews.

She hinted that Harris suffered from a “double standard” because the vice president did not do interviews after becoming the nominee.

“The questions were small and process-oriented,” Dillon said.

“Stupid,” Cutter interjected. ‘Just stupid.’

“It’s complete nonsense to be against the story that we did nothing or that we were afraid of interviews…” Dillon said bitterly.

Despite their frustrations with the establishment media, they admitted they were unable to make an impact on popular podcasts the way Trump did.

The group defended the campaign’s decision not to appear on the Joe Rogan podcast, reiterating that it was merely a scheduling and time issue.

‘It’s quite simple. We wanted to do it, but it was a very short race with a limited number of days, but for a candidate who leaves and goes to Houston, it is very important that the timing is right,” Cutter said, reiterating that Rogan, “wanted that we have to stand up.’

They admitted that Harris had taken the day off to go to Houston to campaign for abortion rights with Beyonce, but that they were unable to visit Rogan’s studio in Austin while they were already in Texas.

They said they tried to get Harris on other popular Internet shows like “Hot Ones” but were turned down because of the show’s disinterest in dealing with politics.

Trump reached young voters on TikTok, Cutter admitted, in a way that Harris didn’t break through.

Cutter also said Trump resonated on social media because he portrayed a “very masculine strong figure” who showed up at UFC fights and continued to feud with Democrats.

Democrats, she said, were seen as “squishy” and forced to have conversations about transgender people in bathrooms.

“I’m not saying we’re going to mimic that, we don’t want to mimic that, but we need to pay attention to why people find that attractive,” she concluded.