Staffers to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are blaming each other for the Democrats’ defeat in the US presidential election, Axios has reported.
Republican candidate Donald Trump won decisively on Tuesday, sweeping every swing state and taking the popular vote as well. The GOP has regained control of the Senate and looks likely to retain its House of Representatives majority as well.
“We dug out of a deep hole but not enough,” David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and a top adviser to Harris, posted on X on Thursday, calling the outcome “a devastating loss.” He then deleted his account, after backlash from the Biden camp.
“The 107-day Harris campaign was nearly flawless. The Biden campaign that preceded it was the opposite,” one member of the Harris team told Axios, a Washington-based insider politics outlet.
“We did what we could. I think the odds against us were insurmountable,” said another person involved in the Harris campaign.
Biden spokesperson Andrew Bates blamed “the same trend that incumbent parties have all over the world” and insisted that anyone criticizing the Harris campaign was “at odds” with his boss.
In a conference call on Thursday night, campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon pleaded with staff not to talk to reporters, four people who were on the call told Axios. She also cried at one point, according to a recording provided to the outlet, telling the staff they had “done a great thing” and “came really close.”
One staffer told Axios that such sentiments were “detached from the reality of what happened,” after the narrative that democracy itself had been at stake.
According to one Democrat, some of Biden’s aides resented Harris for not using the president more during the campaign. Harris aides, meanwhile, blamed Biden’s failures when it came to the economy, inflation and immigration. A former administration official said it was less of a communications problem and more of a governing one.
“It’s very clear we got it wrong on economic policy. People feel squeezed and when they do, they pick change. Our policy position and execution wasn’t palpable to voters,” the former official said.
Another former official said that the party was “lied to” about Biden by the same leadership that didn’t bother listening to voters, “or why the Biden economy wasn’t working for them even if it looked good on paper.”
One former Biden staffer dismissed the criticism from the Harris team as making up excuses for her defeat. “How did you spend $1 billion and not win? What the f***?” the person asked Axios.
The Harris campaign raised record sums of money in the three months prior to the election, far more than Trump, but reportedly managed to end the race in debt, according to Politico.
Harris took over Biden’s war chest when the president bowed out of the race in July, reportedly under pressure from fellow Democrats, three weeks after his disastrous debate performance and just a week after Trump survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.
One person involved in the Harris campaign described its structure as “a Rubik’s cube,” meaning a complex mix of the original Biden campaign staff, people Harris trusted, and veterans of former President Barack Obama’s campaigns and administrations.