Senior advisers to Kamala Harris’s campaign joined the liberal podcast Pod Save America this week to offer their takes on why their candidate suffered a crushing defeat this election—and seemed to have no real humility about where they went wrong.
Stephanie Cutter, one senior aide who sat down for the joint interview, said the vice president was correct in her refusal to set herself apart from President Biden during the presidential race. Cutter said that Harris “felt like she was part of the administration, so why should she look back and cherry-pick some things that she would have done differently, when she was part of it?”
Cutter added that the thinking within the campaign was that if Harris broke with Biden on a specific issue like immigration, stories would come out from administration staffers questioning why she didn’t take different stances in meetings or challenge specific policies to the president.
Eventually, Harris settled on a prevailing campaign strategy that vice presidents almost never break with their presidents, with the exception of Mike Pence with Donald Trump. Cutler and the podcast hosts, former Obama administration staffers Jon Favreau, Dan Pfeiffer, and Tommy Vietor, then laughed over a “murder” and “ripping up the Constitution” exception.
Harris Campaign Senior Advisor @StefCutter explains why Kamala Harris was unwilling to differentiate herself more from Joe Biden on policy. In an exclusive interview with PSA, top Harris campaign staff reflect on the 2024 election. Out now wherever you get your podcasts.… pic.twitter.com/iqyjycjEWs
— Pod Save America (@PodSaveAmerica) November 26, 2024
The clip has drawn indignation and vehement criticism on X for being tone-deaf to voters’ concerns.
One commentator pointed out that there was a good example of a vice president who broke with a president besides Trump and Pence: Hubert Humphrey with Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 election, amid Americans’ outrage and exhaustion over the Vietnam War.
There are many policies in which Harris could have and should have broken with the Biden administration during her campaign, whether it was over steadfast U.S. support for Israel’s war on Gaza or the flawed approach to immigration. But Cutter’s revelation about the Harris campaign’s internal discussions show that there’s also a greater problem: groupthink among Democratic staffers and party leadership. Until the Democrats can express a willingness to dump so-called “conventional wisdom” and aggressively address the issues voters care about, they won’t be able to win again. The hosts of Pod Save America don’t seem to be getting it.
