Election autopsy: POLITICO campaign reporters on what mattered most

In the day-to-day of covering a presidential campaign, it’s sometimes hard to see through to the end to know what made a difference along the way. And there were a lot of twists and turns — from the Democratic Party’s ticket switch and two apparent assassination attempts to union non-endorsements and bomb threats on Election Day.

Now that the election is over, our politics editor Kay Steiger asked five of our campaign reporters to tell us what actually mattered. Hint: Tt wasn’t the news cycles over a comedian calling Puerto Rico “garbage” at one of his closing rallies or the celebrity endorsements. It might not have even been ground game.

Steiger: Let’s start with the obvious: This was such a messy election cycle. But the immediate analysis seems to be that this was really just about the economy (and immigration). Do you think that’s right? Or is there more to it?

Holly Otterbein: Democrats are just starting to digest the results and ask these very questions. In the top battleground of Pennsylvania, where I’m based, inflation was a major concern for so many voters I talked to. We’ve had some of the worst food inflation in the country here. And working-class voters make up a huge portion of the state’s electorate.

One thing I keep thinking about: The Friday before the election, I went to a barbershop event full of mostly Black men in West Philadelphia with former Attorney General Eric Holder, who was a Kamala Harris surrogate. Holder made the case that the Biden administration had been good for Black workers, and one voter just was not having it. He told Holder it was “wishful thinking” versus “reality.” I think a lot of voters felt that way.

Meridith McGraw: The economy and immigration really dominated. I talked to a lot of voters who had reservations about Donald Trump’s personality but said they felt like they couldn’t afford things or buy a home, or even that they felt like their concerns about immigration were being dismissed by the left. Trump’s team always told me that if the election is about policy and not personality, they felt like they had the upper hand. I guess their estimation was true.

Adam Wren: I think it depends on which part of the ticket we’re talking about. Many Democratic Senate candidates, even if they lost, outperformed Harris. I have spent almost every week in Michigan since Labor Day. Look at someone like Elissa Slotkin. She won an open Senate seat in a Blue Wall state that Trump flipped. Clearly, voters ascribed more blame to the Biden-Harris White House — and Harris in particular — than they did down-ballot Democrats.

Myah Ward: Yeah, I’m with Holly and Meridith. Even as the vibes may have felt like a number of things were pushing the momentum toward Harris in those final weeks — whether it be the Madison Square Garden rally or the democracy issue — it all came back to the same issue we were talking about plaguing Joe Biden a year ago: High prices. It’s more expensive to live, to take care of kids, to rent or buy a home. Voters would point to what their life was like pre-Covid under the first Trump administration. They had more money in their pockets. Life didn’t feel as hard. As Democrats unpack what went wrong here, some of the criticism is that she should’ve done more to distance herself from Biden.

Natalie Allison: I think we all heard from voters all year (and earlier than that, of course) about how dissatisfied they were with the cost of living, and it was almost always the first concern out of voters’ mouths. But yes, Holly is right, that it seems like Democrats now have to face what all else in their message to voters failed to resonate.

Otterbein: To Meridith’s point, I think immigration — and the feeling that the world is spinning out of control re: wars, the Afghanistan withdrawal, etc. — were also important issues.

Ward: I’ll just add on immigration, it took Democrats until this year to finally coalesce around a consistent argument, pulling a page from Rep. Tom Suozzi’s playbook. Republicans have long dominated the immigration messaging war. Democrats were catching up.

Steiger: Let’s take an uncomfortable question head on: Harris performed worse than Hillary Clinton and much worse than Biden. Do we think that her race and/or gender had anything to do with how she lost?

Otterbein: What’s interesting to me is that I am not seeing a consensus on the answer to that question among Democratic women politicians, strategists, etc. Some are saying, yes, gender — sexism — was part of why she lost. Others are saying it wasn’t — it was about these bigger issues around the economy and immigration. Harris herself did not lean into her gender. Yet Harris was still plagued by criticism that she effectively became vice president in the first place because of her identity.

Allison: It’s not really the kind of thing a poll could capture accurately or that everyone would necessarily answer honestly. When you see how the polls moved to show a closer race once Harris was at the top of the ticket, I think it’s difficult to argue that sexism was at work — voters were saying they preferred her more than Biden. But I’ve also spoken to a handful of voters over the years who have voiced concerns with the notion of a woman being president.

McGraw: Look, I think a lot of other factors were at play here, like her inability to ever really distance herself from Biden and explain to people how her administration would be any different.

Wren: As a white man based in the Midwest, I’m not exactly sure certain readers are clamoring to hear my take, nor am I sure I have one that is all that original. Talking to voters — even from white and older working-class women on the trail in places like Flint and even in Indiana — I did hear some gendered attacks on her, ranging from her voice to her laugh. While it certainly likely played a role, Democrats’ defeat across the nation seems so resounding and total that I wonder if this was a secondary or tertiary issue.

Ward: Following on Holly’s point, many of these women politicians and strategists would also note that sexism and racism are embedded in the country’s politics, even if they disagree with how these factors played in Harris’ race against Trump. And pollsters and strategists time and time again pointed to Trump’s effectiveness in leaning into masculinity and shoring up his support among men.

Steiger: Let’s run it back on the assassination attempt. It was such an uncertain moment for the campaign in general, but as I watched that rally it was genuinely shocking to see it happen. Do you think this moment actually broke through to voters?

Otterbein: Without a doubt. It outraged and motivated Trump’s base to turn out.

Wren: One hundred percent. Holly is right. But not just with his base. Even Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos at the time wrote on X that he “showed tremendous grace and courage under literal fire.” It gave him a certain kind of gravitas that he didn’t possess before. The raised fist, the “fight, fight, fight,” of it all. That’s why, at least in part, the campaign went back to Butler, Pennsylvania: to regain some of that.

Otterbein: And one of Trump’s closing ads featured that image of him with the raised fist — it was used to get out the vote.

McGraw: Thinking back to the RNC, that moment really helped unify the party in ways I have never seen. At the same time, I was surprised by how quickly it disappeared from the conversation during the campaign.

Ward: Yeah, and that iconic photo of him raising his fist was EVERYWHERE until the very end. I will say, it was difficult to measure the impact at that moment because of how quickly things moved in the days after. Trump was shot, the RNC happened in Milwaukee, then that next weekend Biden dropped out of the race and elevated Harris. (I’m tired just typing this.)

McGraw: What a year that week was!

Allison: Yes. For example, when I was reporting on young Black voters in Georgia who were considering a Trump vote for the first time, someone told me it was something he heard talked about fairly regularly at his gym. Young guys who had never been Trump supporters before, who would discuss what they saw as some kind of conspiracy against the former president — that “they” were out to get him, and that it was a reason to back Trump. And the shoot itself prompted two of Trump’s most prominent independent endorsers — Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — to come out and support him.

Steiger: Natalie, that’s an interesting point about RFK Jr. Do you think his candidacy ultimately mattered?

Of course. His candidacy, as some Democrats feared from the beginning, was a terrific asset for Trump. Kennedy in the final stretch helped Trump secure support from independent voters, including suburban moms concerned about childhood health. I talked to a number of voters who were finally swayed to back Trump because of RFK Jr.

Steiger: Harris made championing democracy her closing argument against Trump? Was this a mistake?

Wren: Sure seems like it in retrospect. She careened from mocking him and rolling her eyes at him to saying he was dangerous. I would like to see the simulation where she broke from Biden more forcefully on economic issues from the outset, and whether that would’ve moved any voters. But with 107 days to make the case, I’m not sure it would’ve made a difference.

Allison: That message from Biden had failed to resonate with the masses, and it clearly just still wasn’t enough to sway enough of the moderates and the Trump-skeptical Republicans she needed.

McGraw: I think some Democrats would say Harris should have spent more time trying to appeal to her base, but their data told them that talking about democracy could help inspire some moderate Republicans and independents to break their way. I wonder how many of those voters simply held their nose and voted for Trump or didn’t vote at all.

Ward: Dems were definitely split on this in the closing weeks. But in the end, democracy wasn’t the entirety of her closing argument, especially if you watch back her speech at the Ellipse and in battleground states in the last week. The campaign’s response in mid-October was also reactionary to the John Kelly report and Trump’s “enemy from within” rhetoric. Just a guess, but I imagine Dems would’ve also been complaining if Harris hadn’t seized on these things.

Steiger: Let’s close out with this: What’s the thing that was overrated — maybe the thing you saw that dominated the news but ultimately didn’t seem to matter?

Ward: I’ve been thinking a lot about what this race tells us about the future of campaigns. The Harris campaign raised money like crazy, appeared to have a much stronger ground game, pulled in major endorsements — but at the end of the day, how much does all of this still matter? Social media has changed politics. And Republicans have dominated this space, building a robust online infrastructure since 2015 on Youtube, in the podcast space and on the airwaves. I was talking to an immigration advocate yesterday who said they have even seen this at play in their own space. Republicans are winning the online messaging war.

Allison: In terms of what mattered to voters, I’d say the stories about Trump’s rhetoric (and much ink was spilled on this) failed to influence many people’s opinions on him. Reporters parsed his phrasing and noted how many violent terms or what not he used compared to years past, but it just didn’t matter. Few persuadable voters were shocked by any of it.

Wren: I share Myah’s questions about fundraising and ground game. Harris raised a billion dollars; she finished $20 million in debt. The Trump campaign said they would have the money they need to run the race they wanted to run. They were met with eyerolls. There were serious questions about Trump’s ad hoc, duct tape-and-bailing-twine ground game. Harris’ camp was wrong; Trump’s camp was right.

But also I think a lot about the hurly burly of the daily narrative — particularly examples like Springfield, Ohio, and Trump’s baseless comments about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs and geese, and then the Madison Square Garden rally. Both broke through — in memes, in jokes, on cable and in conversations I had with people who don’t follow politics like we do. But the perceptions they reinforced about Trump were already well-baked into the electorate.

Otterbein: One question I have is, did the “garbage” comments actually persuade/motivate some Latino voters to support Harris — clearly they didn’t do it enough! — but did they actually move things a little bit in her way? Or was seizing on that just a Hail Mary?

I thought it was really striking that on the last day before the election, Harris campaigned in two majority-Latino cities and campaigned alongside AOC. We knew the whole campaign that Latino men were a soft spot for Harris. But her last 24 hours on the campaign show us how badly they knew they were in a hole.

And jumping off what Adam and Myah said about ground game, I think it’s worth asking whether Harris really did have the better ground game. That was certainly the assumption among political pros — and perhaps it was all Trump himself and the conservative social media/podcast machine that energized Republicans to turn out. But I’m not sure we know that yet.

We saw that Republicans were very effective in getting more of their voters to vote early this cycle. Doesn’t that suggest a good ground game?