We know how Vice President Kamala Harris reportedly reacted when she was told that she wouldn’t be the next president of the United States. It’s part of a new book written by Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple in Uncharted, which details the former vice president’s ascendency to the top of the ticket via an internal coup to her brutal crash on Election Day, where voters told her and the Democrats, they weren’t interested in them continuing this insane agenda that had destroyed the country.
Excerpts were published, and it’s a little interesting how this campaign came together on the kitchen table at Naval One Observatory. Harris had top talent from the Obama operation. Still, not even they, with their exceptional political acumen, could save this woman who was flat-out unqualified and unprepared to be president. Everything seemed to be a struggle for her; Harris was ahead of her skis, but the deed was done. The open primary option that Barack Obama had hoped for quickly died, as Joe Biden endorsed Harris shortly after he stepped down from the 2024 ticket. Was it revenge for the ouster? Who knows, but every call Harris made to the top Democrats didn’t make opposition overtures; she wouldn’t face a primary challenge. The Democrats wanted to avoid a coronation but chose one anyway.
It ended up being a $2 billion-plus boondoggle. What kills me is this feeling of elation on election night. Was drug use rampant, or was this crew so deep in the bubble that reason got squeezed out of this atmosphere? I think it’s the latter. There also appears to be a defined split between the on-air talent and the pollsters, the latter of which thought the former was insane for saying they were winning the race. Reality slammed into Harris when campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told her that she was going to lose the blue wall states (via Vanity Fair): [emphasis mine]:
Though Harris was behind in the battleground states, her spokespeople were oddly upbeat. Appearing on MSNBC back on October 27, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon had declared, “We are very confident we’re going to win this thing.” On Friday, November 1, senior adviser David Plouffe posted on X that late-breaking undecided voters were going for Harris by more than 10 points.
A campaign has a gravitational pull, and chief of staff [Lorraine] Voles was feeling it. “You get sucked into the momentum,” she said. “Like you believe it. I’ve been on winning ones and losing ones, and this felt more like [Bill] Clinton’s [in 1992] than [Michael] Dukakis’s [in 1988].” Voles wasn’t talking poll numbers or analytics, but intangibles. “The rallies were so big and so enthusiastic. People were lining the streets.” But Harris’s pollsters didn’t share the kumbaya cohesion. One ex-Biden campaign official couldn’t understand all the heady talk. “They still had consistent polling results that showed her down by two in every state,” she said, “and Trump always overperforms. How the hell were they going to make that up?”
On election morning Harris gathered with her family in the front part of the house while, in the back, Nix, campaign chief of staff Voles, and others monitored returns. O’Malley Dillon and company were running the campaign nerve center at the Marriott Marquis hotel near Howard University with an army of data crunchers, keeping Harris and her inner circle informed as returns came in.
The vice president was hunkered down with her family. “We saw her maybe one time that whole night,” said one of her close insiders, when the VP “came back” to their section of the house. As the evening wore on, “it was just like, ‘What’s going on?’ The SG [second gentleman] would come in. Doug would say, ‘What’s happening?’ ” The realization grew that it was going to be a difficult night. One key indicator: Voles had summoned a photographer and a videographer. They were supposed to head to the Howard University campus with Harris for her victory speech. Instead, they cooled their heels.
The moment of truth came just after midnight. O’Malley Dillon huddled with her two best analytics experts. They were her barometer, her North Star, and when they told her they did not see a path, O’Malley Dillon knew there wasn’t one. She called the vice president. “We’re down in the blue wall states, and we’re not going to be able to make it up,” she said. “Oh, my God,” said Harris. “What is going to happen to this country?”
Suddenly, the race was over, as though someone had thrown a switch. “We sent people home,” said a Harris aide. “And then, ‘Find Cedric.’ ” Cedric Richmond, a Harris confidant, was tapped to deliver the bad news to the faithful at Howard University. He took the stage at 12:45 a.m. There would be no declaration of victory that night. There would be no Harris presidency.
The piece ends with O’Malley calling her 12-year-old twin daughters to tell them Harris and the Democrats were defeated soundly by Donald J. Trump, who had completed the greatest comeback in American political history. Liberals are obsessed with being on the right side of that arc—they weren’t. We were.
A part of why the Democrats lost is that they don’t know how people think anymore. They were aloof on the unpopularity of the Biden agenda, the anger over the cost of living, and the outrage over the deluge of illegal immigrants. They didn’t know that immigrant voting communities had a 23-point swing to the Republicans and that nonwhite voters who identify as conservative or moderate are now aligning with their white counterparts. What about young people? Gen Z is trending to be the U.S.'s most conservative youth voter bloc in 50 years, a point that makes lefty data cruncher David Shor a bit uneasy when he analyzed the numbers.
What’s more damning for Democrats is that if every registered voter were dragged to the polls, Trump would still win the popular vote, not by 1.7 percent, but closer to 5. It’s the tip of the iceberg of many structural and political issues facing Democrats. If they don’t fix them, post-2030, a Democrat could win every state Harris carried, plus Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and still lose the presidency. For now, the Democrats have zero urgency to fix their appalling brand.