Thread by @QuasLacrimas

Listening to Harris postmortem podcast now - one interesting point Harris flaks raise is they knew they needed to pivot to the center on several issues, but they judged attempting wouldn’t be credible, would only draw attention to how leftwing her actual policy commitments are

Plouffe says the top five people on the Harris campaign spend hundreds(??) of hours trying to decide how to respond to the they/them ad

The Dem flaks believe that the Trump campaign was explicitly targeting the they/them ad at blacks in Philly and Atlanta markets, but they seem to imply the ultimate effect of the ad was not on blacks but (therefore by implication) on whites

They don’t say this outright but trans issue was tough for them because real problem was voters both (1) hated the Biden/Harris trans policy, and (2) hated that it was a higher policy priority than the economy. I can see how it’s hard to run “I don’t care” ads

Lol. Remember how a few weeks ago Trump’s non-campaign led GOTV effort was pathetically, historically bad? Now it is “so well coordinated it must be criminal”

This is so bizarre. They are so frustrated by the coordination issue. Apparently Dem non-profits are really terrible

Maybe this is why everyone got 30 text messages a day and dozens of flyers, it wasn’t a deliberate strategy but a clusterfudge? (They seem shocked that GOP orgs could take turns doing certain states on alternate weeks or something, so Dems must have been unable to divide tasks)

They are discussing dumb podcast stuff now, so I’m just stewing about how mendacious Dems/journos are. They were gaslighting everyone about how Trump was going to flop because of the “weird” GOTV strategy while privately seething about how good it was.

https://x.com/QuasLacrimas/status/1861612211837264307

The Cheneys / neocons / generals / CIA stuff was apparently how the Dem flaks think about median voter theory. They knew they needed to peel away right-leaning voters, didn’t want to debate policy, and thought ex-GOP hawks was the right way to do it. Strange!

Subtext in this whole conversation is all of these flaks knew the economy and especially inflation was a major issue. Zero ambivalence, none of this sad inflation denialism low-level Dem loyalists on twitter feel compelled to engage in

A motif they keep returning to, and one lady is now hitting explicitly, is they think the Harris campaign did “well” because the swing to Trump was way harder in non-battleground states (where they weren’t campaigning). Idk if that’s right, but it’s a reasonable cope

Another theme they return to again and again is “not enough time”. The Harris campaign apparently had shamefully time-intensive management practices - everything burnt time, apparently nothing could be delegated to subordinates despite the huge size of their staff

Earlier they were talking about how the initial weeks of the campaign were dead bc they needed to re-plan the convention. First that’s stupid, second we know they didn’t do it carefully because they didn’t even bother to rewrite the damn DNC platform, ctrl-F “Biden”

… so they must have been dealing with truly criminal shiftlessness and malfeasance from low-level campaign staff. They also discuss internal pushback on ads in a way that suggests all kinds of griping were elevated to the top level… what? That’s a choice and imo a terrible one

All right that’s it. Many ppl are asking, this is Pod Save America “Top Harris Staff reveal what went wrong” (the one where Plouffe admits in the first few minutes their polling always had Kamala behind in all the battleground states)

https://x.com/Silily_Agent/status/1861623262108901709