Harris suffered a brutal defeat on election day. She may never politically recover from it.
And the Kamala Harris campaign team has revealed the disturbing reason why she lost the 2024 election.
A recent report from The New York Times has shed light on concerns among Kamala Harris’ campaign staffers regarding a perceived lack of outreach to Black and Latino voters in Philadelphia—the largest city in one of the nation’s most pivotal swing states.
“I was the first one knocking on these doors,” Amelia Pernell, a former Harris campaign organizer, told The Times. “They hadn’t talked to anybody. It was like: ‘Hey, nobody has come to our neighborhood. The campaign doesn’t care about us.’”
Pernell and other Harris campaign volunteers believed that the campaign’s leadership prioritized white suburban voters at the expense of engaging Black and Latino communities.
This sentiment was echoed in The Times’ report, which detailed “deep frustration” and even “extraordinary acts of insubordination” by Black staffers who opted to deviate from the campaign’s official strategy.
According to the report, Philadelphia organizers were instructed to avoid traditional voter engagement methods in Black and Latino neighborhoods.
These methods included attending community events, registering new voters, building relationships with individuals who are leaders on the local level, and contacting voters directly.
Many staffers described their working conditions as inadequate, with field offices lacking essential supplies like tables and chairs. In some cases, offices designated for majority-Black areas were located far from the communities they aimed to serve.
Frustrated by these shortcomings, some organizers took matters into their own hands, establishing independent headquarters to conduct door-knocking efforts in neglected neighborhoods.
Philadelphia City Council member Isaiah Thomas criticized the campaign’s failure to sustain momentum. “The blitz that happened at the end of the campaign was too little, too late,” Thomas said to The Times. “The momentum got down because there was no activity happening.”
The lack of visibility also drew criticism from volunteers like Donnel Baird. “There were no yard signs, there was no visibility, there were no T-shirts,” Baird said. “There was nobody handing out literature. There were no bumper stickers. There was no sign that we were in the fight of our lives in the most important city in a presidential campaign.”
Harris ultimately lost Pennsylvania, along with other critical battleground states, to President-elect Donald Trump. This mirrored Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat, which was partly attributed to underperformance in urban areas.
“You know politics is local,” said Mayor Dwan B. Walker of Aliquippa. “We keep saying that. But this campaign didn’t touch it.”
Philadelphia labor leader Ryan Boyer Sr. pointed to the campaign’s messaging shortcomings as a key factor in Harris’ loss. “I think that we had a lot of reproductive-rights commercials and not enough bread-and-butter economic messaging,” Boyer said.
Despite these criticisms, some senior campaign advisers rejected the notion that Black and Latino voters were neglected.
“This campaign did more in Philadelphia to reach Black and Latino voters than any campaign has done in a long time,” Kellan White, a senior Harris campaign adviser in Pennsylvania, explained to The Times.
“The issue is not that we didn’t knock on these doors — we knocked on a ton of doors. The problem was that the message itself didn’t connect — and that’s what we as a party need to spend our time and energy on, trying to understand why when we knocked these doors, what we had to say didn’t resonate with enough voters.”
But no matter how you slice it, the Kamala Harris campaign simply failed at relating to voters who were sick and tired of the Democrats’ radical policies that brought nothing but high prices and high crime.
Stay tuned to The Federalist Wire.
