Top Trump, Biden, and Harris Advisers Spill the Tea on 2024

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Donald Trump had a very clear message for his team: don’t spike the football after Joe Biden had a disastrous debate showing in June. Things were going well for Trump’s attempted return to political office, Biden was wounded and seen as off his game, and the electorate was just starting to tune in. “Don’t go too hard on him. We want him around,” Trump told his staff, who shelved an ad for fear it would force Biden off the ballot, according to Trump’s co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita.

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Meanwhile, once Biden bowed to the pressure from fellow Democrats to step aside and clear the way for Kamala Harris to take the nomination in August, he had a blunt conversation with his Vice President. The chair of both Biden’s and Harris’ campaigns, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said Biden gave Harris permission to do what she needed to do to build distance with the White House. The risk of Trump’s return to power was greater than Biden’s badly bruised ego.

Those were just two of the many behind-the-scenes stories shared Friday at a conference at Harvard’s Institute of Politics featuring the top hands of the major 2024 presidential campaigns. Typically, the two-day conference is coda to the election cycle. But this was a precedent-breaking campaign for a ton of reasons: two failed assassination attempts, a nominee swap, China and Iran hacking campaign emails, and a type of political comeback last seen in 1885.

The day was the first pass at a comprehensive oral history of the campaign. The election’s architects are still struggling to understand the outcome and extraordinary circumstances. And the Harvard conversation revealed just how personally many of these top minds in politics made the contest.

“We run shit like we ought to run it,” O’Malley Dillon said under persistent second-guessing of how Biden’s and then Harris’ campaigns were led.

Here are 11 revelations that help tell the real story of the 2024 campaign.

Republicans still don’t understand Trump…

Over and over again, Trump’s aides and adversaries alike kept returning to the fact that a huge chunk of the GOP universe started with an immovable and immutable affinity for Trump. Efforts to tear him down never really found footing, and it was nearly impossible for other candidates to gain traction during the primaries. Those who tried, like former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, ended up failing.

Christie’s argument was pretty straightforward: Trump was a criminal unworthy of returning to power. Haley’s message was more nuanced, arguing Trump logged a net positive record but it was time to move past his era.

Neither really prevailed. LaCivita further discounted any importance of Christie in the mix. “Chris Christie didn’t even enter into the discussion,” LaCivita said. “Chris Christie was never anything. Spare me the bullsh-t. … He took up space, which he is very good at doing.” 

At another point, Trump political director James Blair said the efforts to take down Trump in the primary failed because they were not listening to real voters. “I’m sorry. No offense to Mike. But understand where the Republican electorate is,” Blair told Christie’s longtime strategist Mike DuHaime.

… or the party he leads

For his part, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott thought his strict anti-abortion position could help him differentiate himself from Trump, especially with Evangelicals in Iowa. “He speaks their language. He’s one of them,” adviser Matt Gorman said. The campaign leadership all knew that Scott’s positions were pretty far afield from where most Americans were thinking about abortion rights, but they set their sights on performing well in Iowa first. “If we get to the general, we’ll figure it out then,” Gorman said.

It was similarly ill-fated for former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s bid. “We had a candidate who was very much in the mold of 2012, 2008, 2004,” Hutchinson campaign manager Rob Burgess said. In other words, someone who was totally mismatched to the moment.

And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to run as “Trump Lite” or a more-electable version of Trumpism never seemed to find a glidepath. His efforts to reposition were even less credible. “Running to the right of Trump is not possible,” Blair said.

The Republican field hated DeSantis

An initial begrudging respect for DeSantis quickly faded once the campaign got underway.

“We never saw anyone else as a serious threat,” Blair said. “We didn’t want a one-on-one with DeSantis.”

Chief Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio echoed that in his own summary of the race: “DeSantis was a real threat. No offense to anybody else, but DeSantis was a real threat.” To fix that, the Trump team worked to “delegitimize” DeSantis, as Fabrizio described it, as a weirdo “who ate pudding with his fingers.”

 “The attacks that we levied against Ron worked because they were believable,” deputy campaign manager Taylor Budowich said. LaCivita even laughed at how his team trolled DeSantis, including handing out chocolates shaped like boots to suggest their rival was wearing lifts in his shoes.

By the time they were coasting toward Iowa, it was clear that DeSantis was playing way too hard for an impossible victory there. 

“He was never going to win Iowa. He raised expectations for him and lowered them for Trump,” Haley campaign manager Betsy Ankney said. “DeSantis ran a terrible campaign. He started with every advantage and he sort of imploded.”

Others, too, initially saw DeSantis as the one to knock down a peg. “We viewed those two as the monsters in the race. They were inevitably going to clash,” said Mike Zolnierowicz, an adviser to North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, said of DeSantis and Trump.

Budowich, who earlier in his career worked to help DeSantis’ policy team come together, was unapologetic in his pluck against his former boss. “A lot of us woke up every morning thinking about how we would destroy Ron DeSantis. They were thinking about where they were going to happy hour in Tallahassee,” Budowich said.

The pile-on met little pushback. DeSantis’ campaign did not send a representative to the Harvard event.

“It’s too bad we don’t have our other Florida friends here,” Budowich said dryly.

Trump stuck with his gut

It’s almost gospel at this point, but it remains a sacred reality that Trump doesn’t listen to anyone but himself.

LaCivita said there were about 10 days when it was possible that Trump would have joined the primary debates. Network execs and star anchors were burning up Trump’s cell phone, making a self-interested play to get him onstage to boost their ratings. “Everyone in the world is calling him,” LaCivita said. But refusing to participate became a way for Trump to pick a fight with the Republican National Committee. “There was no way he was going to do it.”

That was generally how most things in that campaign worked. “We didn’t over-analyze anything. In politics, people tend to over-analyze, over-think everything. Sometimes you have to accept the situation you’re in and you have to find the easiest, or most painless, way out of a problem,” LaCivita said. “You’re looking at Donald Trump. He’s Teflon.”

While the quants had plenty of data about what was working and what wasn’t, there really was no meaningful substitute for the boss’ judgments. “You don’t sit down and say, ‘We have to do things this way.’ That’s a non-starter,” LaCivita said. But what they did in a very nimble way was to turn weekly jam sessions on policy—sometimes six hours at a time on camera for direct-to-viewer messages about a second-term agenda—into workshops on the hows and whys of governing and campaigning. 

At other junctures, they sent Trump into press conferences and interviews to get the juices flowing and get him practicing for the debates, even if they didn’t tell him what the goals were. “Donald Trump doesn’t prepare for debates like the way I’ve done it for 35 years… It’s an entirely different process. He doesn’t really do prep,” LaCivita said.

The Trump campaign understood they could win if the race was based on policy and performance, but could not prevail if voters were deciding on personalities, Fabrizio said. But “you cannot control it,” Fabrizio said of Trump. LaCivita was equally resigned: “Worry about what you can control. On the campaign, I worried about what I could control. He was not one of them.”

Trump kept his rivals afloat

Trump’s team intentionally kept second-tier rivals in the mix as long as possible because, to their mind, a jumbled and crowded field split Trump skeptics and denied a serious one-on-one race. An errant social media post from Trump was sufficient to move the conversation of the entire primary field, and most of the Trump-free debates still started with questions about his campaign.

“Every time you did something like that, it gave us another four days,” Hutchinson campaign manager Burgess said of Trump’s team mentioning the Governor in a social media post or statement. “Every time you put us in a press release, it was good.”

That kept the GOP field unsettled until it was almost too late for anyone to rise.

“The game was always going to be who was going to be the alternative… You have to get to the one-on-one spot,” Ankney of Haley’s team said. But with Trump’s onslaught of headline-grabbing antics, there never were real ways for that to winnow. “It blocked out everything else,” Ankney said.

In hindsight, the campaigns all divided the vote in ways that only benefited Trump. “While running against Trump, they were helping Trump,” DuHaime said.

Trump didn’t go for broad appeal

Fabrizio and his allies were openly contemptuous of efforts—in the primary and then the general—to reach more voters. Instead of chasing 10 people and hoping to win one new person, they opted to go narrow and hard at their base, hoping to get two out of three contacts. By the end, they stopped looking at the broad universe of voters and instead went hard for low-propensity voters.

“It was hyper-targeted on people who are not reachable by any other way,” Blair said.

By contrast, Fabrizio said, the rivals adopted what amounted to a “spray and pray” approach.

The Democrats, meanwhile, described a contest that consistently had their nominees trailing but within the margin of error—giving them flashes of hope until the end.

“A floor and a ceiling can be the same thing,” Harris principal deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said.

About that Biden debate disaster…

No one disputes thatBiden had an unmitigated disaster of a debate on June 27. He stammered through a sloppy night facing off in what would be this cycle’s lone debate against Trump. Calls for his exit came quickly and loudly. It was an evening that reinforced the quiet rumblings whether octogenarian Biden was up for another four-year term.

“The President prepped. I was at debate prep. He was strong. He was ready,” O’Malley Dillon said. But, she added, “We all saw what happened at the debate. He also is old and he knew that and we knew that. He’s also Joe Biden. … We were not Pollyannish about any of that.”

Fulks was equally as blunt: “We’re not blind, of course.” Another Biden deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty, did nothing to hide the disappointment: “Obviously, it was not a good night.”

… and its fallout

At Trump headquarters, the strategists went to work right away to build out research packets on potential replacements for Biden. They had one on Harris, but they wanted to look more widely, including what a potential campaign against someone like former First Lady Michelle Obama or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would look like. But they pushed pause on an ad hitting Biden for a poor showing, worried that it would have hastened Biden’s exit. They tweaked the programming for the debate in July to make sure the scripts were about the Biden-Harris administration, not just Biden. “We included her, but we didn’t lead with her,” Fabrizio said.

At Biden HQ,  the campaign thought they could weather the bad headlines. “In order to get out of the hole, we had to fight through it,” O’Malley Dillon said.

At least until they couldn’t.

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. She called Flaherty, who oversaw the digital aspects of the campaign including its email and social media platforms, at 1:06 p.m and told him he needed to ready the news to go live at 1:45 p.m. 

They then realized they had to plug Harris’ nomination into a long-standing convention plan. “We had a convention that was built for Joe Biden,” said O’Malley Dillon. (By the way, those persistent rumors of a celebrity appearance at the convention? “F-king bullsh-t,” she said.)

The shuffle was a shock to Trump’s team. “July 21st comes and it’s—bam!—you hit a brick wall,” Fabrizio said.

Trump and his allies sped up the advertising spending plan to start to define Harris before she and her allies had a chance to do it for her. “It was like immediately going into overdrive,” Fabrizio said. Because it was a Sunday, some had to postpone personal plans, like going to the beach.

O’Malley Dillon had little sympathy for her rivals: “A lot of things got f–ked.”

The assassination plots’ practical effects

Then there were the attempts on Trump’s life, including a July 13 shooting at a rally in Butler, Pa., and a thwarted sequel near a Florida golf course on Sept. 15. They brought a huge shift in how the campaign was able to move.

“From that point on, two-thirds of the time was spent on things that had nothing to do with a campaign,” LaCivita said. They had to deploy decoy motorcades for fear of more assassination attempts. The same was true for decoy airplanes. Events couldn’t be outside without more precautions, the thick bullet-proof glass framing for Trump’s podiums didn’t move easily. 

“It severely limited us where we could campaign,” Fabrizio said. 

LaCivita spoke sharply about the Secret Service’s leadership for hampering their nimbleness: top officials “dragged ass” in keeping Trump under glass, he said. 

Harris really wanted more debates

With limited time, Harris wanted to bait Trump into more debates after their first and only match-up on Sept. 10. Trump’s team told him not to fall for it, despite a push from Fox News and party insiders. O’Malley Dillon said they wanted to debate so badly they’d have allowed one hosted by a Fox News anchor.

Meanwhile, Trump’s team was nervous about a second debate against Harris given she landed plenty of blows in the first one. But O’Malley Dillon said she does not list a lack of a second debate as a deciding factor in the election. It could have even hurt Harris: pollster Molly Murphy said Harris could have lost ground if she had a bad night.

The final push was messy on both sides

“We were up against a caricature of being dangerously liberal,” O’Malley Dillon said. A devastating anti-transgender ad from the Trump campaign helped feed that image, coupled with Harris’ ties to the unpopular Biden record. Efforts to draft Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney made some difference in suburban areas in Blue Wall states. But Harris’ flub on The View was instantly seen as a problem that was not going to be a one-day story. Given a softball opportunity to explain what she might have done differently than Biden, she said “not a thing that comes to mind.”  

“It was a big looming negative hanging over us the whole time,” Fulks said. 

“We didn’t lose this f—king race because of The View,” O’Malley Dillon said.

Trump’s camp had its own flubs in the final stretch. But his team didn’t think a racially insensitive comedian at a Madison Square Garden rally would matter in the end. “We knew it would blow over,” Fabrizio said.

By the time Election Day arrived, O’Malley Dillon felt the Harris campaign was facing a different standard than the one enjoyed by Trump. O’Malley Dillon also said that Harris’ race and gender did not decide the race on their own, but cannot be ignored. “There is no way to look at this race without factoring that in,” she said.

That doesn’t mean the Harris defeat is any less painful for her advisers. “We lost,” O’Malley Dillon said. “So everything requires us to relook at everything.”

But asked directly if Biden would have won if he stayed in the race, O’Malley Dillon was summarily dismissive: “We don’t engage in hypotheticals.”

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