How Kamala Harris — and Joe Biden — lost to Donald Trump and left Democrats in shambles

Vice President Kamala Harris walks backstage before speaking at Michigan State University during a campaign rally on Nov. 3 in East Lansing, Michigan. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)

When President Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee, he surrounded himself with an insular circle of longtime aides, often prompting complaints about his operation being a black box. He refused to meet with his pollsters, and many on his campaign saw ads at the same time the public did — when they first ran.

“There was somewhere between never and hardly ever any real strategy conversation,” said one person familiar with the dynamic.

When Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Biden in July, the dynamic flipped. Campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon insisted on having a larger role in the messaging process, and over several weeks in the late fall convened three “step back” messaging Zooms to strategize about how to negatively define former president Donald Trump. But the process, which included several dozen campaign officials, was unwieldy and struggled to alight on a message. Aides just fired ideas into the void — “You’d have someone say, ‘What about ‘Too Risky For Too Long?’” recounted one — and O’Malley Dillon and other senior advisers rejected the pollsters’ push for a single word: “Dangerous.”

Finally, the group settled on what they privately called the “Three U’s” or the “Triple U’s” — “Unhinged, unstable and unchecked.”

Yet regardless of who was at the top of the ticket and who was running the show, it was the voter who got lost in the process. The American people had been crystal clear for months, as voters in other countries had in the face of post-covid inflation.

By a steep margin, Americans did not approve of Biden’s presidency. By an even steeper margin they thought the country was heading in the wrong direction. They were demanding a new direction that Democrats never figured out how to offer.

“The ‘Three U’s’ — no one in the campaign was able to remember it,” said one campaign aide. “How the hell is a voter supposed to remember it?”

A Harris campaign aide declined to comment on this portrait of her defeat.

Following Harris’s loss Tuesday — in which Trump made gains with nearly every single demographic group, leaving him poised to potentially win all seven battleground states and the popular vote — the Democratic Party now finds itself grappling with how it lost so definitively, and how it so thoroughly misunderstood the American electorate.

Democrats expect the party, donors and outside groups will eventually conduct autopsy reports to understand just how the race went awry. Donna Brazile, a Harris ally and former chair of the Democratic National Committee, said “the next step for the Democrats is deep introspection,” adding that there needs to be a process to figure out what went wrong before the party decides on next steps and who should lead it.

“You don’t jump from one horse to another when you are riding on a donkey,” she said.

But a consensus has already emerged that the party failed to understand the average voter and their concerns — and focused too much on Trump, according to interviews with more than two dozen campaign aides, advisers, strategists and others, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid opinions about the party’s loss.

Like with any losing campaign, the finger-pointing and gripes have already begun to leak into public view. Many Democrats view the original sin as Biden’s decision to run for a second term, as well as his and his insular inner circle’s outright dismissal of anyone who raised alarms about his dwindling political prospects.

“Joe Biden is reason one, two and three why we lost,” a Harris aide said, noting that he was “totally underwater” in the polls when Harris replaced him at the top of the ticket.

Trump aides began to joke in the final weeks of the race that Biden was their best surrogate, as he briefly put on a Trump hat at one event less than 24 hours after Harris was viewed as the winner of the debate, later called for Trump to be “locked up … politically” and derisively referred to Trump supporters as “garbage” on a Zoom on the same evening Harris delivered her closing speech. “The guy was incredible,” a Trump adviser said.

Some Biden loyalists, meanwhile, fault the Obama-era technocrats, who they say first sniped at Biden from the outside — hobbling his candidacy — only to join the Harris campaign and cast themselves as saviors, armed with good data but a poor understanding of American anger in this moment. And others still have cast some blame on O’Malley Dillon, who they argue was a micromanager and whose team failed to win over voters on issues they cared about most, like immigration and the economy.

Some Harris allies were also alarmed when O’Malley Dillon appeared to try to engage on transition efforts. A campaign aide disputed that, arguing O’Malley Dillon only discussed necessary coordination between the campaign and transition teams.

Another group has begun to question a key assumption of many party strategists during the Biden years — that the central force in American politics was the backlash to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and the rejection of MAGA politics.

“It’s very simple: If you try to win elections by talking to the elites of this country, you’re going to get your ass kicked — there are not enough Beyonces, Oprahs or Hollywood elites to elect anyone,” said Chris Kofinis, former chief of staff to Sen. Joe Manchin III (I-West Virginia). “Trump is not the disease. He is the symptom. The disease is political, cultural, and economic elites who keep telling the public what they should think, feel and believe — and guess what they told them on Tuesday: Go to hell.”

More broadly, many Democrats view their defeat — with Trump making inroads with Latinos, first-time voters, and lower- and middle-income households, according to preliminary exit polls — not just as a series of tactical campaign blunders, but as evidence of a shattered party with a brand in shambles.

Two days after the election, OpenLabs, a Democratic data firm, produced a “first look” analysis of the results, obtained by The Washington Post. They found the biggest swings away from Harris were in areas with larger populations of Asian American and Hispanic voters. They also found that counties with bigger shares of Muslim and Jewish voters also swung toward Trump. Two Trump advisers said they could not believe that they were able, for example, to beat Harris in Dearborn, Michigan.

“Obviously this is a major reckoning for the Democratic Party in terms of, particularly as it relates to young men, Black and Hispanic voters and rural voters,” said Jef Pollock, a Biden and Harris campaign pollster. “If the economy were perceived by voters as swimming, things might be different. But for now, it’s clear these voters I’m talking about — particularly young men, Black men, Hispanic men, and rural White voters — do not see the Democrats as addressing their everyday needs, and that’s something we need to think about holistically.”

Pollock added: “That is not a Kamala Harris thing. That is a larger thing.”

Adam Jentleson, a Democratic strategist who served as chief of staff to Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania), similarly criticized the Democratic Party for having prioritized “coalition management” — essentially kowtowing to far-left interest groups — over “the smart and effective practice of politics for many, many years.”

The challenge of inflation, Jentleson said, became insurmountable in an environment where large swaths of the country had come to believe that Democrats “are preoccupied with the narrow interests of college-educated elite activists more than everyday working people.”

Trump and Harris aides alike, for instance, agree that comments Harris made during the 2020 Democratic primaries — where, in the words of one Harris aide, Democrats competed for the party’s progressive base by saying “absolutely bananas stuff” — came back to haunt her as her party’s nominee four years later. Specifically, they point to her support for using tax dollars to provide gender-affirming surgeries for federal prisoners and detained immigrants, which provided the Trump campaign with one of its most devastating lines of attack against her. Trump advisers could not believe how well the ad tested.

“Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you,” intoned the narrator on the Trump campaign’s ad that tested best.

Though voters in focus groups said they were not specifically going to base their vote on that issue, it helped perpetuate the Trump campaign message that she was “dangerously liberal,” as well as out of touch with the average American.

At one point, as Harris readied for her debate with Trump, her team prepared an answer on the question of transgender athletes in women’s sports, intended to cast her as more middle-of-the-road on the issue, according to one person familiar with the plan. But the moderators never asked her about the topic, and she did not choose to bring it up on her own in another forum.

In addition to the broader headwinds — including inheriting a campaign built for an unpopular incumbent just over 100 days before Election Day — the Harris campaign also made some tactical blunders, according to aides and outside strategists.

Chief among them, some argue, was the decision to elevate former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who was ousted from her party after she became a vocal Trump critic, as a top surrogate for the vice president’s campaign.

In late October, Harris and Cheney did a joint tour of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan as part of an effort to win over Republican-leaning and independent voters, particularly women. But some aides and many Democrats outside the campaign argued the voters who found Cheney’s message appealing were already going to vote for Harris — she did very little, if anything, to move undecided voters.

The campaign also seized on highly critical comments from some of Trump’s former top aides, specifically John F. Kelly, his former chief of staff, who called Trump a fascist. Some worried that backfired, particularly when Harris said during a CNN town hall that she agreed with Kelly’s assessment.

Aides say it would have been better for her to separate herself from the characterization and encourage voters to listen to the people who knew Trump best. Instead, the headlines from her CNN appearance focused on her calling Trump a fascist, and in turn, her effort to paint Trump as “unhinged, unstable and unchecked” became overtaken by the fascist label.

In a similar vein, Democrats, including former president Barack Obama, had reservations about Harris’s decision to deliver her closing argument speech from the Ellipse, where Trump spoke just before the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Aides were adamant the speech was not centered on Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 — and in her remarks, Harris sought to connect concerns about Trump’s behavior to people’s everyday lives — but the Jan. 6 symbolism carried the day.

The election results, Democrats concede, demonstrate the voters were willing to overlook Trump’s character — and the Democratic Party suffered because they focused too much on bashing Trump, and not on how they would improve voters’ lives.

In other moments, Harris’s campaign found itself caught flat-footed. When she visited the southern border in late September, for instance, she and her aides had no idea that the same afternoon a top official at ICE would release damaging immigration numbers to a Republican congressman. Her team was shocked when the numbers emerged as she was in transit to the border, advisers said.

More broadly, some aides attributed the shift away from Harris in reliably blue states like New York, New Jersey and Illinois as a repudiation of the party’s handling of immigration. Many of those states have seen an influx of migrants, some bused by Republican governors, and Democrats in major cities have struggled to respond.

When some of the major unions did not endorse Harris, it was a red flag, advisers said, not because the unions endorsements on their face would matter that much — but that leadership clearly knew their members were inclined to vote for Trump in large margins. Several advisers said the campaign did not do enough to address those concerns.

In the final weeks of the race, the campaign realized they were hemorrhaging Black and Latino voters, an adviser said, partially driving Harris’s media schedule and economic plans that were meant to cater to those groups. “But it was too little, too late,” this person said.

Another concern in hindsight was the campaign’s decision to spend heavily on celebrity concerts in the final stretch of the campaign, while still failing to achieve their intended goal of demonstrating widespread enthusiasm for Harris across the nation and turning out more pro-Harris voters to the polls.

In some ways, the scale of the wave that returned Trump to office was so striking that Harris advisers and other Democrats argue that no gaffe by the vice president, or strategic decision by the campaign, would have ultimately changed the outcome.

Democratic donors spent more on this presidential election than ever before — likely around $2 billion. They built a campaign with massive financial advantages, a much bigger volunteer footprint, many more ads and a smaller battleground than any election in recent decades. And the campaign had an impact: A Cook Political Report analysis found a three-point swing to Trump across the battlegrounds between 2020 and 2024; across the other 43 states, the swing was nearly seven points.

“My main takeaway from all the post-election analysis is that hindsight is not 20/2o,” said Geoff Garin, a Biden and Harris pollster. “The defining realities for this election were dissatisfaction with the economy and disapproval of President Biden and they created enormous headwinds for Vice President Harris to fight through … Harris had 107 days to introduce herself to a huge swath of the electorate and to litigate a multipart case for her election. No one in the history of American politics has been able to do that.”

Once Harris took over, some aides wanted her to create distance from Biden — believing she could not win unless she drew sharp contrasts with the unpopular president.

One of Harris’s biggest mistakes, advisers said, was an answer she gave on “The View,” a popular morning talk show. When asked if she had any disagreements with Biden, she said she could not think of any, immediately sparking joy among Trump’s advisers.

Furthermore, she was not interested in moving away from Biden, the people said, describing weeks of conversations about the idea that went nowhere. If she was critical, would she seem inauthentic? Would voters believe it? And if she was going to create distance, where? These were all questions the campaign grappled with — and never answered.

In marketing terms, moreover, the Democrats turned out to have a brand problem that could not be overcome by repositioning the product.

“We did okay on the product marketing. We moved the needle in those battleground states but the brand problems persist when people think the country is on the wrong track and are feeling the headwinds of inflation,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who worked for Future Forward, the largest Democratic-leaning super PAC, and other groups. “The best field goal kicker in the world can’t get through the uprights if they are kicking from their own 20-yard line.”