‘Go away’: Kamala staff slammed for refusing to take responsibility for election loss in podcast interview

Top Kamala Harris advisers have been widely slammed by Democrats over a “delusional” interview about “what went wrong” in the election.

Top advisers to Kamala Harris’ failed campaign have been widely mocked by Democrats over a “delusional” interview about what went wrong in the election in which they largely refused to accept personal responsibility for the defeat.

Jen O’Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks and Stephanie Cutter, who have largely remained silent since Donald Trump’s decisive victory on November 5, sat down with the popular left-wing podcast Pod Save America for an election post-mortem released on Tuesday.

Backlash began to grow on Monday to a teaser clip on X featuring Mr Plouffe, who famously ran Barack Obama’s successful 2008 campaign, arguing that Democrats “have to dominate the moderate vote”.

“It’s always worth reminding people, it’s really hard for Democrats to win battleground states,” he said.

“You want to maximise your base, of course, but you’ve got to couple that with dominating in the middle. And I think as we look ahead to ‘26 and ‘28, particularly where you have seen drift amongst non-college voters generally, particularly those of colour, we obviously have to get some of that back. We can’t afford any more erosion there. The math just doesn’t f**king work.”

David Plouffe, senior adviser to the Harris-Walz campaign. Picture: YouTube

One user replied, “WE LITERALLY JUST LOST WITH THIS STUPID ATTITUDE.”

Another wrote, “All Dem Party ‘advisers’ from this horrific, awful 2024 campaign should go away and never be heard from again.”

Reaction to the full interview was equally scathing.

“About halfway through this episode now and it seems more delusional than normal for the Pod Save crowd,” one X user said.

The guests discussed the “headwinds” faced by the campaign and talked of the difficulty of mounting a successful challenge in 107 days after Joe Biden pulled out, but generally offered little in the way of specific admissions on areas they fell short.

“I think people when they vote for President want to vote about the future, and they saw in the Vice President someone they didn’t know a lot about, so in every step of what we were trying to do we had to tell a pretty robust story,” Ms O’Malley Dillon said.

Asked by host Dan Pfeiffer whether it was a mistake to campaign with the Cheney family, Mr Plouffe insisted that it was “not an issue” that caused Democrat voters to stay home.

“This political envinroment sucked, OK?” Mr Plouffe said.

“We were dealing with ferocious headwinds and I think people’s instinct was to give the Republicans and even Donald Trump another chance, so we had a complicated puzzle to put together here in terms of the voters and it was going to take a little bit more indepdenent Republicans than we saw in ‘20, maybe a per cent more.”

Dan Pfeiffer with Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks and Stephanie Cutter. Picture: YouTube

One YouTube viewer wrote, “The long and the short of it is that none of these people should ever run a national campaign ever again. The Obama era is over.”

Another said, “It almost feels like they’re gaslighting themselves into thinking they didn’t do much wrong. There’s a lot of toxic positivity. All smiles, no accountability or genuine self reflection.”

A third wrote, “This interview was absolutely bananas. They admit zero fault. What a disaster.”

Another added, “Let me save you 90 minutes. They learned nothing.”

During the interview, the campaign aides also suggested that Donald Trump’s sit-down with podcaster Joe Rogan was the reason the Vice President did not ultimately appear on the hugely influential show.

They suggested that Rogan had leveraged the Harris campaign’s offer to do the interview to get the former President into his Austin, Texas studio.

“We had discussions with Joe Rogan’s team, they were great, they wanted us to come on, we wanted to come on, we tried to get a date to make it work and, ultimately, we just weren’t able to find a date,” Ms Cutter said.

“We were hoping to fit it in around that but ultimately weren’t able to do it. As it turns out, that was the day that Trump was taping his Joe Rogan [appearance], which they had never confirmed to us. We just kind of figured that out in the lead-up to it.”

Vice President Kamala Harris. Picture: Saul Loeb/AFP

Mr Plouffe added, “So what’s clear is we offered to do it in Austin, people should know that. It didn’t work out. Maybe they leveraged that to get Trump in studio, I don’t know, and then we were obviously not going to be back in Texas, but offered to do it on the road.”

Ms Cutter said it was not clear whether it would have “changed anything”.

“You know, it would have broken through, not because of the conversation with Joe Rogan, but the fact that she was doing it and that was really the benefit of it,” she said.

“Will she do it sometime in the future? Maybe. Who knows? It didn’t ultimately impact the outcome one way or another, but she was willing to do whatever it takes.”

Rogan has previously said the campaign requested a number of conditions for an interview, including a shorter time limit and that he travel to meet Ms Harris.

“You could look at this and you can say, oh, you’re being a diva, but she had an opportunity to come here when she was in Texas, and I literally gave them an open invitation,” he said. “I said anytime.”

Jennifer Palmieri, a senior adviser to Ms Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff, previously told the Financial Times that talks to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience fell through due to “backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it”.

Old-school Democratic strategist James Carville, in his own election post-mortem on Tuesday, was particularly scathing of the decision not to appear on Rogan’s show.

“When you put a campaign together and you hire young people to do work, let me tell you exactly what you tell these people — not only am I not interested in your f**king opinion, I’m not even going to call you by your name,” he said.

“You’re 23 years old, I don’t really give a s**t what you think. And let me tell you another huge error, huge f**king error that was made is when people said, campaigns need to reflect progressive values. No, they don’t! Campaigns are authoritarian by their nature.”

Mr Carville said if he were running a 2028 campaign “and I had some little snot-nosed 23-year-old saying, I’m going to resign if you [do] this, not only would I fire that motherf**ker on the spot, I would find out who hired him and fire that person on the spot”.

“I’m really not interested in your uninformed, stupid, jacka** opinion as to whether you go on Joe Rogan or not,” he said.

Rogan ultimately endorsed Mr Trump shortly before the election.