Kamala Harris’ top aides have spoken out about their election loss but largely didn’t accept personal responsibility for the defeat—much to the ire of progressives online.
Backlash arrived hard and fast for the group on Tuesday. That began shortly after Pod Save America teased its sit-down interview with a clip of senior adviser David Plouffe asserting that Democrats need to “dominate the moderate vote” if they want to win future elections.
“I think as we look ahead to ‘26 and ‘28, particularly where you have seen drift amongst non-college voters generally, particularly those of color specifically, we obviously have to get some of that back,” he said. “We can’t afford any more erosion there. The math just doesn’t f—ing work.”
Plouffe, who famously orchestrated Barack Obama’s campaign wins in 2008 and 2012, was criticized on social media for lecturing Democrats on how to move forward so soon after he was a top figure involved in Harris’ sweeping electoral defeat.
“We are listening to someone talk about how to win an election that they literally just lost,” responded Keith Orejel, a political history professor at Wilmington College.
The progressive strategist Don Ford was even more pointed in his criticism, writing, “WE LITERALLY JUST LOST WITH THIS STUPID ATTITUDE.”
Others called the group “delusional” and mocked the politicos for doling out advice, largely without introspection, on how to win a presidential election while still less than a month removed from, in fact, losing a presidential election.
Plouffe, like the others interviewed, spent more time detailing the Harris campaign’s “headwinds”—like its late start after Joe Biden bowed out, which gave voters less time to get to know her—than he did breaking down any of its potential mistakes on the home stretch.
That included him brushing off the suggestion that Harris’ team was wrong to prop up the support of the Cheney family. Plouffe said that the backing from Liz Cheney wasn’t the reason any potential Harris voters stayed home. He said the GOP lawmaker was the sort of figure the campaign needed to win over moderates in swing states—a voting bloc he said Harris couldn’t realistically win without pulling from.
“This political environment sucked, OK,” Plouffe said. “We were dealing with ferocious headwinds and I think people’s instinct was to give the Republicans and even Donald Trump another chance. So we had a complicated puzzle to put together here in terms of the voters and it was gonna take a little bit more independent Republicans than we saw in ‘20, maybe a percent more Republican voters for us.”
Joining Plouffe on the podcast was Harris advisers Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter. None in the quartet were pressed too hard to answer for Harris’ campaign shortcomings, and they appeared hesitant to offer up their own thoughts on where they may have fallen flat.
That’s quite the contrast to the Democratic strategist James Carville. He gave a scathing post-mortem of the campaign on Tuesday and said he was particularly peeved that Harris didn’t make the trip to sit down with the podcaster Joe Rogan in Texas as both Donald Trump and J.D. Vance did.
“And let me tell you another error, a huge f—ing error that was made is when people said, campaigns need to reflect progressive values,” Carville said. “No, they don’t! No, they don’t! Campaigns are authoritarian by their nature. If I were running a 2028 campaign and I had some little snot-nosed 23 year old saying, ‘I’m going to resign if you do this,’ not only would I fire that motherf—er on the spot, I would find out who hired him and fire that person on the spot. I’m really not interested in your uninformed, stupid, jack–s opinion as to whether to go on Joe Rogan or not.”
Cutter, who was in charge of messaging and communications for Harris, told Pod Save America that Harris was “ready” and “willing” to go on Rogan but couldn’t land on a date that worked. She said the one day that made sense—when Harris held a rally with Beyoncé in Houston—happened to be the date that Rogan had already scheduled to sit with Trump.
Plouffe, meanwhile, miffed at criticisms that claimed the campaign didn’t focus on the economy enough and was too centered on the dangers of Trump. He called those claims “nonsense” and suggested his critics didn’t have the same polling data.
The adviser said the latter strategy was necessary to cut into Trump’s favorability rating while also making in-roads on the economy in battleground states.
David Plouffe was one of Barack Obama’s top advisers.
“I think at the end of the day, we had to raise people’s concern and the threat level of a Trump second term,” Plouffe said. “I think if you look at our internal data…we did a lot of that. We just didn’t get it to the extent that we needed to win. But at the end of the day, I think people—you know—it was the price of eggs that drove a lot of the debate here.”
Plouffe, 57, also pointed out that listeners in places like California, New York, Florida, and Alabama likely experienced this latest election cycle much differently than those who live in a swing state.
In battleground states, he said, voters had Harris’ economic vision driven into them via political advertisements and rallies there. When it became clear that message alone wasn’t breaking through, Plouffe said they focussed on Project 2025 and abortion in part because they had no other choice.
“So, I think that that is an incredibly faulty reading that what we should have done is just lift up Kamala Harris. We clearly did—her favorability rating increased by, I believe, 15 points,” he said. “So we were very focused on lifting her up.But to win a race like this, given the political atmospherics, which were quite challenging, we had to raise the risk of a Trump second term.”
