Harris campaign officials explain what went wrong – and what Trump did right: report

Top Democrats in Vice President Harris’ campaign say their efforts to sway voters simply weren’t enough in the face of a general dissatisfaction with the direction of the country among the electorate.

Officials who worked on the campaign offered a post-mortem to the Washington Post on Thursday, saying that former President Trump also took advantage of new media opportunities that Harris left mostly untouched.

“There are certain things we’re looking at to understand if we made the right call,” campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told the Post. “But fundamentally, there wasn’t just one audience of voters that would have impacted this, or one program. The headwinds were just too great for us to overcome, especially in 107 days. But we came very close to what we anticipated, both in terms of turnout and in terms of support.”

Campaign officials said their own internal models going into Election Day had Harris with slim leads in Wisconsin and Michigan, and virtually tied in Pennsylvania, according to the Post. Their models had Trump leading in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.

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Vice President Kamala Harris was unable to overcome a general dissatisfaction with the current administration, her staff say. (AP/Jacquelyn Martin)

“We are very focused on understanding what happened,” O’Malley Dillon said. “We were laser-focused on the battleground states. We knew it would be a margin-of-error race, but with the organization we had and the movement we saw, we thought it was possible.”

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Campaign officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, also credited the Trump campaign and GOP in general for increasing their outreach to young men across the U.S.

“I think what we have seen is that the folks on the other side, on Team Red, have been doing a lot of this work for years,” the official told the Post. “And there’s just, like, a lot of ground for us to make up in … where young men in particular are going to receive their information, particularly young men who are explicitly not looking for political content.”

President-elect Donald Trump waves at UFC 309 at Madison Square Garden, Saturday, Nov. 16, 2024, in New York, with Kid Rock, Dana White and Elon Musk.  (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

During the campaign, Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, made regular appearances on wide-reaching podcasts with major personalities, many of them comedians like Theo Von and Tim Dillon. That culminated with Trump and Vance having near back-to-back appearances on the largest podcast in the world, the Joe Rogan Experience, just before Election Day.

Former President Trump sat down for a three-hour interview with podcast giant Joe Rogan on “The Joe Rogan Experience” just before Election Day. (Screenshot/The Joe Rogan Experience)

Harris made an attempt at similar forms of media with her appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast, which appeals far more to young women.

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“We are not here to tell you everything was perfect,” O’Malley Dillon said. “We lost. But some of the ascribing the loss to singular things, like if we had just done [an interview with] Joe Rogan, then that would have solved the problem with young men. That is too simplistic and doesn’t solve anything and certainly doesn’t solve the path forward.”