The Kamala campaign is in total denial

Three weeks on from Kamala Harris’s bruising defeat to Donald Trump, four of her top campaign staff appeared on the Pod Save America podcast to discuss where it all went wrong. Anyone expecting an ounce of self-reflection or contrition will be sorely disappointed. Instead, Jen O’Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks and Stephanie Cutter spend the hour-and-a-half-long episode blaming anyone and anything but themselves, the Democratic Party and their dreadful presidential candidate. The podcast is an extended exercise in gaslighting, projection and displacement.

The four aides give an account of the 2024 election that is at odds with reality. They complain, for instance, that they didn’t have enough funding, despite the fact that the Harris-Walz campaign raised nearly a billion dollars, compared with Trump’s $390million.

Incredibly, they even scold the media for being insufficiently deferential to their candidate. Harris ‘got tonnes of shit that she wasn’t doing enough media’, according to Cutter, who was in charge of Harris’s messaging and communications. Campaign chair O’Malley Dillon agrees, noting how Trump did very few mainstream-media interviews and apparently ‘got no shit for that’. There was a ‘double standard’, she claims.

Harris’s team must think we can’t remember the fawning coverage she received off the back of her (uncontested) nomination. They want us to memory-hole all the soft-soap interviews she gave to friendly anchors (in which she still floundered). They want us to pretend that Kamala’s ‘brat summer’ didn’t happen, and forget about all the ‘joy’ and ‘vibes’ we were told she brought to the election campaign. Meanwhile, we’re supposed to believe that Trump, who was routinely presented as Hitler incarnate, was given an easy ride in the media? Do they think we just fell out of a coconut tree?

Ultimately, it’s not the media who Team Harris are angriest with, but the American people. They accuse voters of ‘Trumpnesia’ – that is, of forgetting how bad his first term was. Apparently, the Democrats just needed more time to ‘remind’ the public of his shortcomings. Of course, as we all remember, Harris took every opportunity to call Trump a ‘fascist’ and a threat to American democracy. The problem for Harris was that the voters saw right through it – they could see it was unhinged fear-mongering.

One major sore point for the Democrats in the election was the loss of so many ethnic-minority voters to the supposedly fascistic Donald Trump. Yet it’s clear Harris’s aides have no idea why this happened, and aren’t interested in finding out. Quentin Fulks, the deputy campaign manager, complains that the Republicans were specifically ‘targeting the mailboxes of black male voters’ with campaign flyers. He concludes that this ‘made [our] job harder’ when it came to reaching black men. Presumably, he believes that if only Team Harris had delivered more of their own glossy pamphlets, then these voters’ deep concerns about rampant inflation, rising crime or the Democrats’ incessant identity politicking would have somehow melted away. You could hardly ask for a clearer illustration that the Democrats still take non-white voters for granted.

Harris’s top staffers are similarly clueless about the culture war. The trans issue was ‘at the bottom’ for voters, insists Fulks, while the ‘economy, inflation, crime, immigration’ were what really mattered. But that doesn’t mean gender didn’t matter at all. It clearly did. It served – on top of more immediate economic questions – to demonstrate that the Democratic establishment lives in a totally different world to ordinary voters. The Trump team spent more on ads attacking Harris on trans than on any other subject. That’s because her bizarre pledge to fund, as the Trump campaign put it, ‘sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens’ made her appear out of touch at best, and utterly deranged at worst. Why would anyone entrust serious matters of state to someone who thinks men can magically become women?

These complaints about insufficient funding, media bias and misled voters are not merely excuses – they are delusions. Pod Save America has unwittingly revealed that top Democrats are still in total denial about the decrepit state of their party, and that they continue to be adrift from the values of voters.

If Trump’s thumping election victory isn’t enough to get the Democrats to admit to their failures and drop their elitism and identitarianism, then surely nothing will.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.