The Election Was Never Close

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, November 27, 2024

 

From almost the moment Joe Biden settled into the ejector seat that rocketed him into political oblivion, the race for the White House seemed like a competitive contest again.

 

Now that the truth can be told, however, Kamala Harris’s campaign adviser, David Plouffe, confessed that the tight public polling punctuated by even the occasional Harris lead didn’t match the campaign’s data.

 

During a roundtable postmortem discussion with the hosts of Pod Save America, Plouffe admitted that the campaign was “hopeful” but not necessarily “optimistic” about Harris’s chances despite some shock surveys that found Harris performing well. “I think it surprised people,” he said of the polling landscape, “because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.”

 

Preliminary exit polling of voters in the 2024 race found that the vast majority of voters settled on their preferred candidate over the summer, which suggests that a stable but modest Trump lead was the state of play throughout Harris’s candidacy. And Harris didn’t do much to change those circumstances, as the campaign chair she inherited from Joe Biden — Jen O’Malley Dillon — tacitly admitted, albeit amid a lot of excuse-making.

 

“We women don’t get far in life talking about double standards, so that’s not the point,” O’Malley Dillon stressed in her appearance on that same podcast. That uncharitable characterization of her fellow Americans lacquered with a heavy gloss of self-pity aside, she proceeded to do just that. “One-hundred and seven days. Two weeks f***ed up because of a hurricane. Two weeks talking about how she didn’t do interviews — which, you know, she was doing plenty, but we were doing — in our own way.”

 

“We had to be the nominee,” she continued. “We had to find a running mate and do a rollout.” In sum, the candidate was expected to run for the presidency. The unmitigated gall of it all!

 

O’Malley Dillon’s victimization narrative is belied by the timeline of events she’s attempting to revise retroactively. Harris’s campaign didn’t spend two measly weeks avoiding the press. That avoidance became a conspicuous feature of her candidacy long after she became the presumptive nominee and even after her party formally nominated her. She didn’t give her first solo interview as her party’s presidential nominee until September 14. And when she deigned to make herself available to interviewers, it was the soft-focus sort set against friendly interlocutors. That dynamic prevailed into October. Her first (and, really, only) adversarial interview took place on October 16 — past the point at which voters in key states had already begun casting their ballot and far beyond the point at which most voters had already made up their minds.

 

Harris’s failed media strategy was, in O’Malley Dillon’s estimation, the political press’s fault. She complained that “real people heard in some way that we were not going to have interviews, which was both not true and also so counter to any kind of standard that was put on Trump.” And when the candidate did speak to the press, “the questions were small and process-y,” O’Malley Dillon complained. “They were not informing a voter who was trying to learn more or to understand.”

 

“Being up against a narrative that we weren’t doing anything or we were afraid to have interviews is completely bulls**t, and also, like, took hold a little bit,” O’Malley Dillon mourned wistfully. “And we just gave us another thing we had to fight back for that Trump never had to worry about.”

 

Say what you will about Trump’s successful effort to mobilize low-propensity voters via his appearances on unconventional media outlets (a strategy the Harris campaign did eventually mimic), Trump has developed a reputation for being available to the mainstream press. Sometimes, to hear his advisers tell it, too available. It was Harris who cultivated an air of fragility around her by delicately curating a stable of genial reporters and refusing to break out of that cocoon until it was too late.

 

Presuming Plouffe is correct, all this table setting is valueless. It serves only to absolve the campaign of its strategic mistakes. Harris didn’t lose because she declined to go on the right podcasts. She lost because she needed to change the dynamic of a race that never favored her candidacy.

 

Either out of timidity or a clear-eyed assessment of Harris’s capabilities, the campaign settled into a level of risk-aversion that voters noticed. The campaign let Trump be the star of the show, relegating itself to the role of responding to the tempo of events the Republican nominee set. Harris didn’t run to win; she ran to not lose. It was a gamble that didn’t pay off. But the candidate doesn’t bear all the blame for that failure. As her campaign staff’s defensive posture suggests, history will find that there is plenty of blame to go around.