The NPR Politics Podcast - Harris' Failure To Differentiate From Biden Hurt Her Odds

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

Vice President Harris conceded the race to President-elect Trump and implored her supporters to carry on the fight to make the country better. What forces hindered her campaign?This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, national political correspondent Sarah McCammon, and White House correspondent Deepa Shivaram.The podcast is produced by Jeongyoon Han, Casey Morell and Kelli Wessinger. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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Spinach puffs. That's a cute way to spend your birthday though. I like that. I'm so shocked by that. Emperor's New Groove, a great, great movie and a great Disney Channel original series if you ever watched the TV version of it. We were just talking about snacks and I feel like she can do better than a spinach puff.

It's your birthday girl, treat yourself. Seriously. Oh, I get it. Producer's saying in my ear it's a snack from the movie. You know what? Spinach puff away. Okay, you do you. Hey there, it's the MPR Politics podcast.

I'm Susan Davis, I cover politics. I'm Deepa Shivram. I cover the White House. And I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the campaign. And Vice President Harris publicly conceded to former President Trump on Wednesday afternoon. She addressed her supporters at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington, DC. Now I know folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now. I get it. and experiencing a range of emotions right now. I get it. But we must accept the results of this election. Earlier today, I spoke with President-elect Trump and congratulated him on his victory. I also told him that we will help him and his team with their transition. Deepa, yesterday on the pod, we talked through how Trump won the campaign. Today, we should talk a little bit more about why Harris and how Harris lost.

You covered her campaign in 2019. You covered this campaign. There's not one reason. There's a lot of reasons. But what does Harris's campaign see as the reasons why she lost this race? I think there's a lot of folks who I've been talking to, and not just in the last two days since this has all shaken out, but even before the election, people kind of start to have their odd takes and they start sharing like, oh, if we lose, this

is gonna be wide, right? And the thing that I kept hearing over and over again from a lot of folks on the campaign and who've worked with Harris is that this was not her campaign team. They point a lot of fingers at the leadership of this campaign, people like Jen O'Malley-Dillon, who was running the operation, because this was not supposed to be a Harris campaign, right? This was supposed to be a Biden campaign. And the thought processes and the decisions and the strategies that came with that, largely from what I understand, held over. And there wasn't a significant shift to addressing the fact that they not only had a different candidate, they had a candidate of a different

gender, of a different race, who had a different political background, experience, strengths, things that she brought to the table. And that was not really factored in as much as a lot of folks really thought was needed. I talked to Chris Scott, who was Kamala Harris's coalition's director when she was still the vice president, hadn't been the nominee yet. So he worked solely with the vice president's team before she was the nominee and then of course stayed after everything switched around in July. And this is what he said. The campaign as it was originally built was built for a different type of nominee. And so why you can feel that magic in the crowd sizes and

that energy of how she just filled arenas. I think a lot of those, especially that started with the Obama campaign, expected that also switch and organizing and that never fully happened. His background is as an organizer. He spent the last month of the campaign on the ground in Michigan, really talking to a lot of black voters as well. And one thing he pointed out to me that really stuck in my brain was that he thinks that there was a large assumption made by campaign leadership that because their nominee was

now someone who is a black woman, an Asian woman, they could spend less time bringing out some of those voters. And that's kind of something we saw as the you know, the campaign really, really, really tried to target what they saw as these reachable Republicans, right? So like suburban white women, folks who were, you know, really not, they had voted for Trump in the past, didn't want to vote for him this time around. Nikki Haley Republicans, folks like that. They spent really a lot of focus on those groups.

And there were some folks in the campaign who thought that was just not really on brand for Kamala Harris as a candidate, to be honest. I mean, Sarah, that was our lived reality. That was something we were both looking for on the campaign trail was who is this elusive, centrist, moderate, Republican-leaning voter that's coming into the Democratic coalition? They were hard to find. We both went to these events that were designed around these kinds of voters. And there weren't many of those voters there. It was a lot of Democrats and independents who'd already voted Democrat in the past. And to your point, Deepa, this was a part of the campaign's

strategy before Harris was on the ticket. When Biden was still the nominee, they brought in someone to lead Republican outreach. And it still seemed to be an important part of the campaign strategy even after the switch. And they really thought that they might have a shot at bringing out some of these like very key, like young voters, right, who were super disillusioned with Biden, black voters, Latinos, like voters of color who have typically stood strong with the Democratic Party because

this campaign was very clear once Harris became the nominee that their paths to 270 had just hugely expanded. They were very optimistic about that, that like, oh, she's opened up so many more doors for us. And then in the 11th hour on Tuesday night, you get that memo that came out from General Malley-Dillon that was publicized by the campaign that was like, our path is the Blue Wall States. And it was like, what happened? Where was your calculus this whole time?

I mean, we brought up Joe Biden. And the thing I keep going back to is like, isn't that the original sin here is that Kamala Harris ran, I think I think it's fair to say, a pretty competent campaign. It was a strong convention. Yeah, there wasn't a lot of blunders. She ran a strong campaign. They had a good convention. She had a great debate performance. She raised an ungodly sum of money in a really short period of time. She had a professionalized national infrastructure. Get out the, you know what I mean? Like, but she tried to do something

almost no one has done in American politics is run a hundred day sprint to the White House. And I think, look, we will never know this, but if Joe Biden last year had said, I will not stand for reelection, let the Democratic Party work its will, would Democrats have had a better chance? Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. She always had a really tough hill to climb here. And she said that from the beginning, right, that this was going to be a tough battle, that it was going to be a close election, that she was the underdog. And she was right about that. 107 days, Deepa, is not very long to get a campaign off the ground, regardless of who

you are. But this was also, you know, I talked to another source who is in a swing state, has worked in Democratic politics, close with Harris, etc., etc., and said something that really stood out to me too, which he said the results of this are not a reflection of her 100-day campaign. This is a reflection of four years of a Biden presidency and the lack of communication, you know, and well-communicated information out to the public. Another frustration that I heard from a lot of folks was that why is it that even though she had a hundred days, right, and this was after four years of a Biden administration,

she still had to introduce herself to the country. She still had to go out on the campaign trail and spend a good first half of those hundred something days telling people who she was and her background and like her and people weren't familiar with who she was. And a lot of people blame, you know, Biden officials for not having put her in a position as vice president to share her story. That was something that was really striking to me in the focus groups we did with Trump to Biden voters, is that she was very gauzy to them. She wasn't this like sharply well-defined political figure in the way that Joe Biden and Donald Trump were. And like, one of the hardest things to do in national politics is build a brand. And once it's built, the hardest, the second hardest thing to do is get people to change the way they think about you.

And I felt like a lot of the country and a lot of the voters we talked to seemed much more engaged at the idea of defeating Donald Trump than necessarily having a firm affirmative sense of who she was and what she was gonna do. You know, I also listened to some focus groups. These were organized by a group called Galvanize Action

and the polling group Ipsos, focused on self-described white moderate women. And that was something I heard from several of those who were leaning toward Trump was this idea that they just didn't know who Kamala Harris was or that she was all over the place in terms of her messaging that she'd flip-flopped. It was a feeling that they just couldn't figure out what she would stand for. I think part of our job as political correspondents is to talk to smart people and then take their ideas and frame them as our own analysis. So I will offer this as something someone smart said to me that they thought that Democrats lose when it looks like they're anointing

candidates and they win when they have rough and tumble primaries. And they made the point of Barack Obama in 2008, wide open field, big race, big upsets, that Hillary Clinton was largely seen as an anointed candidate in 2016. Joe Biden won in 2020 after a rough and tumble primary in which he had to like go through the trials. And that you need that process to build a brand and define a candidate. And again, Kamala Harris wasn't a great presidential candidate back when she had to do that process. I mean, fundamentally, she might just not have been a very strong candidate for the Democratic Party.

That became a talking point on the right, this idea that there hadn't been a primary. Now, there were no rules that were broken in choosing Harris as a nominee, but it is true that she wasn't the product of a primary. If this was a referendum on four years of a Biden presidency, Harris herself

made a mistake in the last 107 days of not distancing herself from that presidency, right? And even when she was asked, like she did that interview with The View, you know, about a month ago at this point, and she was directly asked, like, how would your presidency be different than a Biden presidency? And she sat there on live television and said, I can't really think of anything. When you have large swats of the Democratic Party and Democratic voters who found Joe Biden to be an enormously unpopular candidate, there is enough data that that is backed up in fact. And to say that I'm not going to be a separation

from that, while also trying to brand yourself as the change candidate, how does that, you can't fit a square, whatever the saying is, the square peg round hole, whatever. That was never going to be a sound argument to be made. And she really, you know, she has a lot of personal loyalty to Joe Biden. And I think that clouded some of this decision making here where it was like, you need to run your own campaign. And based on the leadership that she had, and also based on her own, you know, maybe loyalty to the president, she didn't. All right, let's take a quick break and when we get back we'll talk about abortion politics. NPR brings you the updates you need on the day's biggest headlines. The Senate narrowly passed the debt ceiling bill that will prevent the country from defaulting on

its loans. Stories from across the world. Knowing how to forage and to live with the land is integral to Amis culture. And down your block. From CPR News, this is Colorado Matters. And you can find all of that and more in your pocket. Download the NPR app today. And we're back. And one of the many fascinating dynamics that played out across the country on Election Day is where voters all over the country affirmed rights to abortion access and then voted against the Democratic Party in their respective states. Sarah, you've covered the issue of abortion access and reproductive rights extensively. First, can we talk about what were some of these ballot measures and where were they? So there were 10 states that had abortion on the ballot. Most of them had to do with essentially protecting abortion access or expanding access, putting

that in the state constitution in some form. Nebraska was a weird state because it had one that was essentially protecting abortion rights and another one that would have done the opposite. So seven out of 10 of these passed the pro-abortion rights measures. Three of them failed. And, you know, on the one hand, this is sort of a continuation of what we've seen since the Dobbs decision two years ago. Every time since then, up until now, that abortion was on the ballot, voters signaled support for abortion rights. They either voted to protect abortion access or to reject efforts to restrict it. In many ways, this is in keeping with that trend. At the same time, there were these three states where these measures didn't succeed. In Nebraska, the pro-abortion rights one failed, the one

to restrict abortion succeeded. In South Dakota, an abortion rights measure failed. And in Florida, a measure to protect abortion in the state constitution got majority support, but not 60%, which is the threshold to pass. What this tells us, if you look at the numbers in a little more detail, is that people were, on the one hand, voting in many states to protect abortion rights, but at the same time voting for Donald Trump. Do you have a sense of the why there? Because I think that Democrats spent basically all campaigns since the Dobbs decision trying

to tie restricting abortion access to the Republican Party and running as the party of abortion rights. That didn't matter to voters in the end. Right. I mean, voters in a presidential election are looking at a range of issues. And as we've talked about so much, the economy and immigration were higher priorities for most people. I mean, there are groups of voters for whom abortion rates really high. Those are typical Democratic constituencies, women, younger voters, voters of color tend to put that issue higher on the list. And one other thing I'll say, if you just look closely at these numbers, our colleague Daniel Wood did an analysis based on Associated Press data.

In some cases, the split between the vote for Harris and the vote for abortion rights was in the double digits. Just take Florida, for example. It was about a 14-point split. Now that's a state where Trump did really well, and abortion rights almost passed. And that is huge. And I think what it says is that there are voters

who are willing and able to disentangle a variety of issues. That's really interesting. There's one conversation I had with a voter a while back, and I wonder how much of this may be played in, is this point where, you know, I was talking to this person, she's young, it was actually her first election, and her perception of the Democratic Party was, you keep talking about why, you know, Roe v. Wade was scaled back, you're in the White House, why aren't you doing anything about it? Right? And that, of course, is a lack of full understanding of how this works literally on the ground.

But the other thing that I also am kind of tracking in my head is that it goes back to some of the conversations I had with staffers on the campaign, which was this choice to also really paint reproductive rights and abortion rights as a white women's issue. Mm. Say more. Yes. If you look at most of the ads and the kind of faces that the Harris campaign chose to have tell their stories, they didn't make it about those people's political opinions

necessarily. It was all pretty much white women. Yeah, you're right. As you're saying that, I'm thinking about the ads and it was mostly white women. Yes. And it was this big push to win over or win back those white women in the suburbs who they thought were these convinceable Nikki Haley Republican folks to be like, look at my family. Like it could happen to your family.

Like these are folks who are trying to expand their families. They're already mothers. When in reality, like we also know that yes, abortion and the curtailing of abortion rights affects a lot of people in a lot of ways. It is a specific issue that impacts black and brown women in enormous ways compared to white women. And that is something, an element of this that Harris did talk about a lot when she was the vice president and

kind of fell off the cliff when she became the nominee. Well, two things are true. Statistically, black and brown women are more likely to get abortions than white women. At the same time, the stories that we heard told by these white women, as you mentioned, were usually women who had complicated pregnancies that left them in a medical crisis in a state like Texas where they couldn't get abortion care, women who had been victims of rape or incest and could talk about what that was like and what it might be like to need an abortion in that situation. Those are the kinds of situations in which there is overwhelming, I mean, not quite unanimous, but overwhelming support for access to abortion,

even among many Republicans. So it seems to me that perhaps the campaign was focusing on sort of the safe examples of abortion, the types of abortion that are widely palatable to most voters, including white voters, including more conservative voters as part of that larger strategy to try to reach the middle. But as you said, they weren't speaking to the breadth of reasons and situations in which people

do see portions. No. And most of those women whose stories they highlighted were from places like Texas, Kentucky. And to be clear, they didn't ignore women of color and black women, right? Like they specifically talked about Amber Thurman, who was the woman from Georgia who died of medical complications from her pregnancy. I mean, there were other black women whose voices were featured, but it was for a long time a predominantly framed white women's issue. Although, white women with college degrees is one of the groups of people that Kamala

Harris did better with, although she also did well with black women. All right, we're going to leave it there for today, but we will be back tomorrow. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Deepa Shibharan. I cover the White House. And I'm Sarah McKim and I cover the campaign. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Listen to this podcast sponsor free on Amazon Music with a Prime membership or any podcast app by subscribing to NPR Politics Plus

at plus.npr.org. That's plus.npr.org.