As CNN notes about the Pod Save America interview, “None of the campaign brass called out Biden by name, but they repeatedly referred to political ‘headwinds’ and touted how much Harris needed to claw back just to make the race competitive.”

Quentin Fulks told Pod Save America, “We were honestly in, in crisis management mode of keeping President Biden in the race.… Trump’s favorability numbers were creeping up as Plouffe said, and we had to do something about that as well. And so it was a lot of walking and chewing gum at the same time, but there really was no sort of contingency planning to turn the race over to her right after that debate or at any point until President Biden definitively said he wasn’t going to continue on.”

The fact that there was no contingency planning even after Joe Biden’s horrendous debate performance against Donald Trump in June is shocking. Yet it is confirmed by Time magazine, which reports: “Biden let his top hands know on July 21 that he’d be dropping out of the race. O’Malley Dillon said she and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez both cried that day, and insisted there had been zero planning for that moment. ‘Not one ounce,’ O’Malley Dillon said.”

These Biden loyalists took over Harris’s campaign and continued to show the same lack of judgement.

Stephanie Cutter told Pod Save America that “the convention demonstrated a lot of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris, a lot of freshness, future oriented, bringing a variety of coalitions together. We had independents, Republicans, Democrats, business leaders, sports figures, everybody coming together around a new way forward and finally turning the page.” It is incredibly revealing that Cutter thinks a winning Democratic coalition consists of “independents, Republicans, Democrats, business leaders, sports figures” rather than being a multiracial coalition of union members, the broader working class, young people, civil rights activists, feminists environmentalists, and anti-war activists. Hers is a profoundly depoliticized view of the Democratic Party as a vehicle of the bipartisan establishment rather than a coalition fighting to change America. This depoliticized ideology permeated the Harris campaign—and doomed it to failure.

Cutter gives an equally revelatory answer to “the Biden question” (why didn’t Harris distinguish herself from Joe Biden, since that was what voters told pollsters they wanted to see?). According to Cutter:

[O]n the Biden question, we of course got that, everywhere we went. And we knew what the data was. We knew we had to show her as her own person and point to the future and not try to rehash the past. But she also felt that she was part of the administration. And unless we said something like, “Well, I would have handled the border completely differently.” We were never going to satisfy anybody. So we did talk about things like: she’s a different generation, most of her career is from outside of Washington, not inside Washington. So she knows a lot of the best ideas are from across the country. Her career has been about reaching across the aisle, finding common sense ways to get things done. It’s not been based in ideological politics. All of these things we were trying to tell a story and give the impression that she was different without pointing to a specific issue.

That last sentence is telling: “we were trying to tell a story and give the impression that she was different without pointing to a specific issue.” In other words, the goal was a vacuous campaign that would involve no concrete commitment to real politics. Everything was about branding, not policy. But the story Cutter and her colleagues wanted to sell wasn’t one that the American people fell for. The public wanted genuine politics, which Harris failed to deliver.

The Democratic Party needs a fundamental shake-up if it is to recover from the failure of 2024. The party needs to come to terms with the fact the loss to Trump was not an accident that befell the party—but the result of bad decisions made by Joe Biden and his staff, which left Harris in an almost impossible position. But Harris preceded to make this bad situation even worse by hiring Biden’s staffers and following their advice to run a no-content campaign.

The Democrats will never improve unless the leaders responsible for this catastrophe are held accountable.