Exclusive: The Harris Campaign On What Went Wrong
In this candid interview, the leaders of the Harris-Walz Campaign speak for the first time about the challenges they faced and why they made the decisions they did. Dan sits down with Jen O'Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter to talk about the campaign's roadmap, their approach to nontraditional media outlets like Joe Rogan, the voters they most needed to win over, why they fell short in the end, and what Democrats should do differently next time.
- Duration
- 1h 32m
- Broadcast on
- 26 Nov 2024
- Audio Format
- other
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(upbeat music) - Welcome to Pod Safe America, I'm Dan Pfeiffer. We have a special show for you today. I am here in Washington, D.C. where I'm about to sit down with the leadership of the Harris Walls Campaign for their first interview about what happened in the election. Last week, Michael Tyler, who's a communications director of the campaign called me and said that they were ready to speak and that they wanted to have that conversation on Pod Safe America. This is the first time that any of them have done an interview since the election. They don't pretend to have all the answers here. There's way more to cover than we could possibly cover in one podcast. This is the beginning of a conversation about understanding what happened in 2024 and learning the lessons that Democrats are gonna need going forward. Here in Washington with me are Harris Walls Campaign Manager, Jenna Malladillan, Quentin Folks, who is the Deputy Campaign Manager and oversaw paid advertising, Stephanie Cutter, who oversaw messaging and communications and joining by Zoom is David Ploth, who consulted on all of it. Jen, Quentin, Stephanie, David. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for doing this. Very much appreciate you having this conversation with us here on Pod Safe America. Just a level set, Jenna, I'll start with you. How did you feel going into election day? And at what point did you have a sense of things were beginning to break Trump's way? Was there a county result, something about the turnout? Like was there a moment when you sort of understood that how it was gonna end? Well, the truth is that we really thought this was a very close race. We talked about the entire time we saw it as a margin of error race, almost the entire time the vice president was in the race. And we knew we had to have strong turnout on election day. We saw early vote really ending strong for us and saw the types of voters we wanted to see turnout. But we expected this to be close. We also expected that Florida was gonna come in a bit redder.
Transcription truncated.
In this candid interview, the leaders of the Harris-Walz Campaign speak for the first time about the challenges they faced and why they made the decisions they did. Dan sits down with Jen O'Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter to talk about the campaign's roadmap, their approach to nontraditional media outlets like Joe Rogan, the voters they most needed to win over, why they fell short in the end, and what Democrats should do differently next time.