Top staffers from Vice President Kamala Harris‘ failed White House bid disclosed how their subtle efforts to differentiate Harris from her boss, President Joe Biden, during the 2024 campaign were “never going to satisfy anybody” because voters wanted change.
In a post-mortem discussion on the “Pod Save America” podcast, host Dan Pfeiffer, who was a senior adviser to former President Barack Obama, asked whether Harris could or should have done more to “distance herself” from the “unpopular, incumbent president.”
Pfeiffer noted how Harris appeared “personally uncomfortable” with the situation, “as evidenced” by an interview on ABC’s “The View” in which the VP failed to provide a substantive answer when pressed on how she would set herself apart from the Biden presidency.
Jen O’Malley Dillon, who made the jump from chairing Biden’s re-election campaign to leading Harris’ campaign after Biden dropped out in July, argued that voters did not know Harris very well and Harris’ team only had a 107-day campaign to share the VP’s story.
“I do think that we really focused, from the get-go, on how she was different than everyone else — different than Joe Biden, different than [President-elect] Donald Trump,” O’Malley Dillon said before claiming that “at the end of the day, the choice was her versus Donald Trump.”
Harris “put her own stamp” on issues “in a deeper what than I think probably we got the kind of full breadth of coverage on it,” O’Malley Dillon said, adding the VP was part of the “progress” made under Biden and “it’s complicated when you’re asked questions in certain ways.”
Stephanie Cutter, a former Obama aide who became senior adviser for strategy messaging for Harris, said the campaign got the “Biden question” all the time, but they had to grapple with how Harris “felt that she was part of” the administration and had “tremendous loyalty” to Biden.
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“Unless we said something like, ‘Well I would have handled the border completely differently,’ we were never going to satisfy anybody,” Cutter said. Instead, they focused on Harris being from a “different generation” and building “most of” her career outside of Washington, she added.
Cutter explained the Harris team sought to “tell a story and give the impression that she was different without pointing to a specific issue,” but ultimately the data showed “too many people thought” Harris would be a “continuation — which on the economy was the incumbent killer.”