By the time CNN called North Carolina for former President Donald Trump on Tuesday night, the vibe at Vice President Harris’ watch party at Howard University had already soured — so much so that shortly after, the crowd started shouting for the DJ to boost the mood.
So at 11:45 pm, Dr. Dre’s “California Love” was blasting, as some supporters half-heartedly danced, keeping their eyes peeled on a giant screen showing Harris’ dwindling chances to win the presidency.
Staffers were prepping the stage as vote counts from Pennsylvania scrolled in, but Harris never arrived.
Less than 24 hours later, the Democratic nominee — who would have made history as the nation’s first woman president — came to her alma mater, and said she had conceded the race.
“The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for,” Harris said. “But hear me when I say — hear me when I say — the light of America's promise will always burn bright, as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”
Harris’ truncated 107-day campaign started with the dramatic exit of President Biden from the race on July 21 after he flubbed a debate and lost the confidence of key party leaders. But it ended with overwhelming setbacks for the Democratic party.
So how did it happen?
A campaign operation that stayed Biden’s
When Biden dropped out, Harris held on to his campaign staff. That may have been a mistake, several people in her orbit said.
Harris kept in place Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, and other campaign leaders like Quentin Fulks and Michael Tyler. Harris had worked with Biden’s campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez in the past, but didn’t have a track record with the others.
While Harris had her own team members who merged in, there was a disconnect between the team Biden built, and the new candidate they were working with, said Chris Scott, the vice president’s director of coalitions.
“The campaign as it was built was built for a different kind of nominee,” said Scott, who worked on the vice president’s campaign team before she became the nominee in July.
One of the biggest hurdles, Scott said, was that even after Harris became the nominee, voters still didn’t have a grasp on who she was. Biden’s campaign leaders didn’t know her well either and were not as well-equipped to tell her story and play her campaign to her strengths, he said.
Even internally, there seemed to be conflict.
“When the merger came, and I think this would be true for a lot of Black staffers, they felt like it was a harder time for us after that switch, almost like is there a little bit of a punishment now that she’s the nominee over President Biden,” Scott said of Harris.
Harris’ run started with a jolt of energy and rallies with tens of thousands of attendees, but some staffers felt the lack of cohesion contributed to a slowdown in the campaign’s momentum after the convention in Chicago in August.
“With the energy that came out of the DNC, I just think that full click taking it to that next level never fully happened, until it got to October,” Scott said.
Harris tried to be the change candidate. But she didn’t distance herself from Biden
Harris was quick to draw contrasts between her and Trump — but hesitated when it came to Biden.
At the beginning of her campaign, she started off with remarks thanking the president for his leadership and having the crowd applaud his tough decision to leave the race.
Then, in an interview on ABC’s The View in October, Harris was asked if she would do anything differently than Biden had done in the past four years.
“There is nothing that comes to mind,” Harris said. Later in the interview, she changed course.
“You asked me what's the difference between Joe Biden and me?” she said. “I'm going to have a Republican in my cabinet because I don't feel burdened by letting pride get in the way of a good idea.”
But it wasn’t enough for someone who was trying to run as a “change candidate” — voters consistently had concerns over Biden’s handling of the economy, immigration and Israel’s war in Gaza. And Harris struggled to create a new narrative that put distance between her and the president’s agenda.
A delay and disconnect with base voters
Exit polls from the race show Harris wasn’t able to revive the “Obama coalition” of voters that helped propel the former president to the White House twice.
Turnout from key groups like Black voters and young voters was disappointing. And Trump made inroads with Latino and Asian voters.
Scott and others felt like campaign leadership made a calculation that they could focus on other voters — like white women and Republicans who didn’t like Trump – which delayed outreach to groups like Black men.
“There’s a little bit of an assumption there that because the candidate was a Black woman … some things are going to come for granted,” Scott said.
Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, said outreach to Black voters in this election cycle was significantly delayed, well before Harris became the nominee. She said funding and resources coming into independent organizations like hers in this cycle didn't come until this summer — and it led to several months of not connecting with Black communities.
“The resources to do that work did not come until very, very late. And when you're getting a significant part of your budget for the cycle in the last month of the campaign, that's a real problem,” she said.
Still, Shropshire — who spoke with NPR before the results of the election were announced — said Harris’ campaign did a “herculean job” in a short period of time.
“I think that sometimes because it has been so chaotic and so frantic that we lose sight of the fact that this woman became the nominee and had three months to run a campaign,” she said.
“Hopefully, we will look back and have some measure of appreciation for exactly what she was called upon to do in this critical moment in the country's history.”
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