In early October, Kamala Harris was supposed to film fundraising videos for her campaign, which in a month’s time would be defunct and in debt.
Going over the script ahead of time, Harris read, “We missed our fundraising deadline.” Then she stopped and told aides, “We can’t lie to people” by saying they missed their fundraising goals, according to four people with knowledge of the conversation.
One junior level aide later had to tell Harris’ campaign chief of staff, Sheila Nix, the truth: The campaign had missed its fundraising goals.
There had been rumblings about the financial situation since September, said one Democrat. Another said the campaign had missed its fundraising goal in September, after money slowed in August and the boon from the convention wasn’t as high as the campaign expected. Now, the second Democrat said, Harris has begun to ask questions about where the money went.
Some blamed the major hole on TV reservations and consultant contracts that were agreed to while President Joe Biden was still on the ticket and in charge of this behemoth organization that the Harris campaign then fulfilled. Others blamed a fear within the campaign that missed deadlines would go public, so it began spending more on fundraising appeals with a negative return on their investments.
Others say it was a by-product of the disorganization of a campaign that was unable to register voters’ anger, find a persuasive message to answer it or effectively harness the momentum Harris generated until the very end.
“I’m amazed that we even got close,” said one Democratic official close to the campaign. “The campaign has been broken since the beginning.”
Nearly all of the more than a dozen campaign aides, Democratic operatives, strategists and White House officials NOTUS spoke with for this story rested the brunt of the blame on a political climate that punished the Biden administration and all those attached to it. Few, if any, Democrats or campaigns could have overcome that fundamental issue, they said.
They also blamed Biden for staying in the race so long, after he initially billed himself as a transitional candidate, and then, once he decided he would campaign for reelection, for failing to articulate a case against Trump. And they blamed him for building a campaign with inexperienced aides who many who spoke to NOTUS believe weren’t equipped for the Herculean task of getting an unpopular incumbent reelected.
“We dug out of a deep hole, but not enough,” David Plouffe, a senior adviser for Harris, wrote on X. Soon after posting the message, he deleted his account.
But many also directed blame at campaign leaders like Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’ campaign chair, and her deputy, Rob Flaherty. The Democrats who spoke to NOTUS say the campaign leadership failed the vice president by creating a campaign that was over-reliant on analytics. It was so insular and micromanaged, they say, that it required O’Malley Dillon to make all the decisions, with leadership resistant to advice or change from Harris aides. And they ultimately fault the leadership for being financially irresponsible.
Even the best, smoothest campaign operation isn’t enough on its own to win an election. But in tight races, with close margins in the right states, they can make a difference.
“If you believe that campaigns matter — and if you look at Tammy Baldwin, Jacky Rosen, Ruben Gallego and even Bob Casey in many ways — if you believe that campaigns matter and that’s why the results are a little different, then you have to say that she lost because of her campaign,” said an operative close to the campaign.
“The other way to do it is, maybe campaigns don’t matter at all,” they said. “Then why are we even campaigning at all on anything?”
Multiple sources who spoke with NOTUS lamented how difficult it was to hire staff at the inception of Biden’s reelection campaign. Few wanted to work for Biden and even fewer wanted to move to Wilmington, where the campaign was headquartered. One campaign aide said a few of those who were hired for senior roles were, in reality, years too junior for their responsibilities. Even when Biden was still on the ticket, aides who had run national campaigns noticed that the infrastructure was severely lacking. And when the candidate switch occurred, seasoned people who wanted to come on found it difficult to navigate the existing infrastructure. They believed that it was unlikely that Harris understood the teetering giant she inherited. And even if she did, it would have been too costly timewise to rebuild in 100 days.
The Biden campaign was also not ready for the energy and support that rushed in from Democrats when Harris first took over. One operative outside the campaign told NOTUS that during the first hours after Harris got into the race, thousands of donors who contributed to ActBlue were prompted to tip the service after they donated. When asked by Harris aides if a volunteer registration form could replace it to capture the newly interested Democrats, the campaign didn’t have such a form available. (The campaign said the link was added to the site several hours later and able to capture 170,000 volunteers that day.)
“There were things that could not be operationalized because the infrastructure was so limited,” said a second outside ally. Another said it was impossible to scale up at the pace required to keep up with the surge of enthusiastic Democrats wanting to volunteer and give money to Harris, because of the complicated way the campaign was initially stood up by Biden.
In the end, more than 1.3 million donors who signed up to donate to Harris unsubscribed from the messaging program run by Flaherty by Election Day, the first outside operative said. Half of those people lived in battleground states, and were therefore cut off not just from donating money but important information, like how to volunteer.
The campaign said this was a “normal churn” of voters in a list of more than 25 million.
Because of its inability to get a mass amount of people to donate multiple times, the campaign continued to miss and revise its fundraising goals, two operatives told NOTUS. At one point, the campaign even temporarily cut its mail program. (Meanwhile, Black men in Georgia were receiving more than 10 pieces of mail from Trump’s team, per the operative close to the Harris campaign.)
When Biden dropped out and endorsed the vice president, multiple people told NOTUS that he asked Harris to “take care of his people.” O’Malley Dillon requested a meeting with Harris and asked to remain on as campaign chair. Fearing critical stories about staffing similar to those that plagued Harris’ first campaign and first years as vice president, Harris relented.
“Kamala did not want to shake things up. She thought that what she could do is install certain people into leadership roles to make sure that she got the campaign that she wanted,” said the operative close to the campaign.
Others say that because of the structure of the complicated campaign, there was no way to turn O’Malley Dillon out. Her critics cite her leadership and the implosion of Beto O’Rourke’s 2020 Democratic primary campaign — which raised $6.1 million on its first day but ended months later due to major financial strain — as a precursor to this campaign.
O’Malley Dillon’s critics say she was insular and wanted to own all the decision-making, creating a bottleneck. In her role, she had centralized a major part of the Democratic Party’s power. She was effectively the head of the White House political arm; was in control of decision making at the DNC, despite Jaime Harrison serving as its official leader, according to two sources familiar; and chaired the campaign’s political operation.
When it was clear Harris’ brother-in-law, Tony West, would be a dominating force on the campaign, O’Malley Dillon was initially welcoming, two people with an understanding of the dynamics said, but then she tried to box him out by picking his chief of staff for him and pushing West to travel the country as a surrogate. (A source familiar said they brought in their own “chief,” who they had a long-standing relationship with, after being provided a senior adviser.)
Before the election, O’Malley Dillon told multiple people that she would not seek another role in government even if Harris won, according to two sources.
Flaherty, who is a major O’Malley Dillon ally, disparaged Harris and her team, three people familiar with his behavior said (though no one wanted to specify what he said). Another campaign aide said the digital team lacked direction. Defending Flaherty, one campaign official said he came into the campaign on “good terms” with Harris aides and another said the digital team lacking direction was “a mischaracterization.”
“We had a pretty clear directive of what needs to get done,” said the aide. “And we did what we could within the context of the confines that we were operating in.”
The morning after the election, department heads met with their teams to prepare them for the reality that they had lost. To open the meeting, Flaherty said, “There were strong headwinds against us and it would have been even worse if it wasn’t for us.” Some perceived the remark as callous and detached from the gravity of the loss.
The culture of the campaign was also a problem, said four Democrats. After melding the Biden loyalists with Harris’ longtime aides and new hires, the group wanted to move on from July’s drama. But campaign aides and outsiders complained to NOTUS for months that there was a lack of a defined leadership structure. Black aides felt routinely mistreated and demoralized, multiple people told NOTUS. Some had even wanted to make formal complaints and refrained for fear of retaliation.
Senior allies to Harris pushed the campaign and the DNC to have a Palestinian speaker onstage at the August convention, trying to further the goodwill Harris had earned from the Arab and Muslim communities furious over Gaza, but they were denied. One person said it was at the behest of the national security team.
The second campaign staffer said aides had “gallows humor,” and some had a nine-to-five work mentality.
Harris hired an onslaught of high-profile operatives from former President Barack Obama’s successful 2008 and 2012 campaigns, hoping they could harness the late summer excitement and turn it into a winning outcome. But many saw the additions of Plouffe and others as just back up for O’Malley Dillon, as they had all come from Obamaworld.
“There was no one who had a different viewpoint. And anybody who had a different viewpoint was always sidelined,” said the operative close to the campaign. In the days since the blowout election, Democrats have criticized Plouffe’s focus on white people in the suburbs and moderates, calling the strategies like small-intimate town halls with former Rep. Liz Cheney, a failure, since Harris did not make significant gains with Republicans or people in the suburbs (though she did increase her numbers with college-educated white women).
“David Plouffe wanted to run a 2008 campaign for a 2024 election,” the operative said. “He wanted to win the middle. He wanted to win white moderates. He wanted to have people vote for Kamala despite what their tendencies would be. [He] wanted to treat Kamala Harris as Barack Obama, and she’s not Barack Obama.”
Harris’ campaign went into election night confident that it had outworked its opponent. It had massive numbers to point to, including 90,000 volunteers over the weekend knocking on 3 million doors.
But four sources who NOTUS spoke with said getting the volunteer program to that capacity was difficult. (Trump’s campaign outsourced much of its door-knocking operation which drew its own headlines. Still, that campaign was successful.)
Sources who spoke with NOTUS say volunteers did not have proper talking points or literature until late into the campaign. More than 1.5 million yard signs weren’t printed until late October. There weren’t basic reporting structures for organizers and volunteers in states until the end. It was not until around five weeks before the election that any of the states hit their voter contact goals, one person familiar with operations told NOTUS. Some volunteers had to organize themselves. And scripts were asinine, with some having to be approved by O’Malley Dillon and asking the voter, “Do you know there’s a presidential election this year?”
An all-staff call on Thursday infuriated dejected staffers, as O’Malley Dillon praised the data team and described the outcome as close, when Harris in reality lost every battleground state. She said that she, too, needed to find a new job, to the dismay of already disgruntled employees. And she defended their strategy with the fact that, because Harris lost more in left-leaning states like New York and New Jersey than in battleground states, it showed that their efforts worked in places where they were focused.
“The fact that she lost more states outside of battleground states is an indictment of every other part of the campaign,” one Democrat who heard her remarks told NOTUS, noting the lack of branding, communication and ability to separate Harris from Biden.
“Until the end they were projecting confidence,” said the operative close to the campaign. “But the data was wrong.”
It’s unclear whether the data and analytics teams were working with incorrect data or if it was misinterpreted. For instance, leadership had privately told other Democrats that Detroit would have the highest turnout based on early voting data. But according to The Detroit News, it fell in expected voter participation.
On a staff call the Friday before the election that was attended by senior leadership, campaign leaders projected confidence they would win based on the early voting models. “When you looked at the results on Tuesday, you quickly found out that they were completely wrong. But once again, the analytics failed, and somehow we still don’t learn from it,” said the operative.
The campaign maintains that leadership always conveyed that the race was within the margin of error.
The data team also worked in an insular fashion, aides complained. Multiple departments whose work would have benefited from it didn’t always have access to the polling information. And when concerns were raised about a negative Trump ad that slammed Harris for her position on taxpayer funds to pay for surgeries for incarcerated transgender people, deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks told people that based on the campaign’s research, “It wasn’t having much effect.”
The campaign clarified that it broadly did not see voters moving over the anti-trans attacks, and Fulks, who runs paid media, said they did not need to go up with an ad to defend it.
It ended up being one of the Trump campaign’s most successful ads to castigate Harris as a “dangerous liberal.”
Harris is not without her own blame, people say. She refused to create distance from Biden, despite voters showing how unhappy they were with the status quo. She failed to provide a clear rationale for why she wanted to be president. But aides hope that, over time, Harris won’t bear the brunt of the blame for this devastating loss.
“She wasn’t handed much of a campaign infrastructure,” one campaign aide. “And it was very difficult for that infrastructure to actually reflect her.”
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Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS.