The Democrat recriminations and post-mortems on Vice President and selected Democrat nominee Kamala Harris’ campaign continue apace. The beauty part: there will be legions of tell-all books and exposes, and hopefully some of the lower-level staffers can make some money, since they are currently persona non grata in the political space. But they continue to sound off to the legacy press, spilling the tea on the finger-pointing and food fights between The Democrat Party betters, the Biden administration, and the Harris campaign.
The billion-dollar question currently being thrown around: How does one manage to raise one billion dollars yet end up losing the presidential race in a spectacular fashion, while simultaneously racking up 20 million in debt?
In a NOTUS exclusive, Harris campaign staffers and others around the campaign place the blame squarely on the Biden administration. They needed a BMW-level candidate and apparatus, but thanks to Biden, what they got stuck with was a PT Cruiser.
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.
No matter how much the Democrats want to blame white women, working-class Hispanics, Black men, and every other stupid American they despise for their failures, they signed on for this when they coup-ed Biden and got him off the campaign and then installed his vice president as the nominee. Smooth criminal Biden managed to do two things: First, he hung Kamala Harris around their necks like an albatross by endorsing her candidacy, and second, he made sure he hung the failures of the Biden-Harris administration around her neck too. Now staffers are admitting as much, especially the ones connected with former President and albatross-extraordinaire Barack Obama. The deputy who helped win him two elections played the blame game on Biden before turning tail and running.
“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.
If all the collective wisdom of three winning campaigns could not pull this off, how then do they have the audacity to be asking for more money?
Many people are wondering why there have not been more “spontaneous” mass protests over Trump’s sweeping landslide. My suspicion is that the big pockets that organize and fund these astroturf events are not answering the phone. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice… you know the thing. These donors are clearly indicating that unless they see some accountability and strategy from whoever is in charge on the Democrat side about how they plan to win in 2026 and 2028, they will be funneling their money elsewhere.
