Reader, we wrote you this newsletter in a tense room in Cambridge.
The walls were covered in dark-wood paneling. A U-shaped conference table was elegantly draped with maroon tablecloths and decorated with little jars of roses and calla lilies.
On one side of the table sat several senior staff members for the Biden-Harris campaign who looked a little bit as if they were undergoing a collective root canal without anesthesia. On the other side sat five leading Trump campaign staff members and allies who looked a little bit as if they were holding the dentist’s drill.
After every presidential election, the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School invites campaign strategists for both general-election candidates — as well as key staff members from losing primary campaigns — to unload about what happened. The discussions, which take place on panels moderated by journalists, can get heated, as they did in 2016. Maybe some years the event feels cathartic. This year, though, the big word was flawless.
Sheila Nix, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign chief of staff, used it on Thursday as each campaign outlined over dinner what had been its main strategy, saying Ms. Harris “ran a pretty flawless campaign.” And then Chris LaCivita, one of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign managers, lobbed the word back at Team Biden/Harris during one of the panels today.
“Flawless execution,” he sarcastically interjected, after Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the chair of the Biden and then the Harris campaign, labored to answer a question about the fateful debate that ended President Biden’s campaign.
LaCivita’s interruption got at a central tension in the aftermath of the election, one that has grated on Democrats outside the room and became a target of mockery from the Trump staff members inside it. For a campaign that lost, the Biden-Harris team has been reluctant to admit to specific mistakes — and that pattern continued today. They admitted they had lost, but their diagnosis was more about the mood of the country than tactical errors on their part. The ultimate answer may be a combination of both factors.
