HOW KAMALA RESPONDED WHEN HER TEAM TOLD HER THERE WAS NO WAY SHE COULD BEAT TRUMP:
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?”
Biden reportedly demanded of Harris, “let there be no daylight between us,” but it sounds like his camp was far more rational about what the internal polling was saying than hers. Still, her team must have known that the iceberg was coming, and would hit hard. Did they not warn Harris? Did she not inquire as to how her campaign was doing?