United States | News & Politics

How did the Harris campaign fumble its messaging on cost-of-living issues, and why did they struggle to convince financially-stressed voters that the Democratic ticket was on its side? Many of the Harris campaign’s brain trust had spent years in corporate consulting, facilitating access for CEOs, and some brought deep corporate networks to their advisory roles atop the presidential bid. Looking at the Harris campaign’s senior strategists sheds some light on the campaign’s trouble connecting with working-class voters—for example, its unwillingness to more clearly identify the forces, like billionaires and large corporations, standing in the way of populist policies.

One leader of the Harris campaign was Democratic strategist Jen O’Malley Dillon, who stayed on as campaign chair from the Biden campaign, having previously served in that role in the president’s 2020 run. She moved from the White House to lead the Biden campaign in January 2024. Soon after Biden dropped out of the race in July, she was joined by Democratic consultant Stephanie Cutter, with her one of the founding partners of consulting firm Precision Strategies.Two other figures in campaign leadership were senior adviser David Plouffe, the former Obama campaign manager in 2008 who later worked as a policy and strategy executive at Uber, and Tony West, Harris’ brother-in-law and Uber’s chief legal counsel.

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David Plouffe officially came aboard the Harris campaign in early August as senior adviser, reassessing the operation handed over by the Biden team. After managing Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, and serving as a senior adviser to the president from 2011 to 2013, Plouffe joined Uber, where he worked as senior vice president of policy and strategy from August 2014 to January 2017. His responsibilities included harnessing his digital skills and political network to help the company gain access in cities where the company squared off against regulators. Plouffe was fined $90,000 in 2017 by the Chicago Board of Ethics for lobbying former Mayor Rahm Emanuel in favor of airport pickups by the ride-sharing company without registering as a lobbyist, and in 2022 he did not respond to questions from The Guardian about whether he had knowledge of a “kill switch” that could hide access to sensitive data after French regulators raided company offices.

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In a recent article in The Atlantic, Harris adviser Tony West was named by an anonymous Biden aide as steering the campaign away from sharp criticism of corporate power, angling toward the approval of big business. West has worked as senior vice president, chief legal officer, and corporate secretary for Uber since November 2017, according to his LinkedIn profile. In 2023, his compensation reached $10.4 million, composed of $7 million in stock and $3.3 million in cash, according to a Bloomberg Law review of company financials. West’s stock holdings in the company reportedly totaled about $14.7 million as of March. Before joining Uber, West was the general counsel, corporate secretary, and EVP of public policy and government affairs for PepsiCo for over three years, a role that had him travel to Saudi Arabia to discuss a potential sugar tax.

In 2019 and 2020, Uber and Lyft were at the forefront of a $200 million campaign supporting a ballot initiative, known as Prop 22, to protect their ability to classify rideshare drivers and other workers as independent contractors in California, as opposed to employees who would be eligible for benefits and other labor protections. According to the New York Times, West’s efforts on behalf of Uber encompassed negotiating with unions, legislators, and aides to Gov. Gavin Newsom on a compromise measure that was fiercely opposed by state labor groups. After massive influence spending by Uber, the measure was adopted by voters, and this year was upheld by California’s Supreme Court. At the federal level, Uber belongs to a coalition suing the Department of Labor over a rule on independent contractor status.

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Campaign memos from October, first reported by the Washington Post, show the largest pro-Harris super PAC, Future Forward, pointing out an opportunity for the Harris campaign to juice spending behind a “high-performing” ad with a script that leads with Harris saying, “I get it. The cost of rent, groceries, and utilities is too high. So here's what we're gonna do about it.” The ad saw little airtime, the New York Times wrote.

In the November contest, working-class voters went 63% for Trump, according to an NBC News exit poll, compared with their leaning Democratic in 2008. Trump’s gains among Hispanic and working class-voters, especially in seven battleground states where Harris slightly underperformed compared with Biden in 2020, were plenty to deliver him the Electoral College, and wider trends like lower turnout for Harris helped Trump win the popular vote. Harris’ campaign time spent with Liz Cheney ended up losing ground to Trump compared with the 2020 election—the share of self-described conservatives voting for Biden in 2020 was 14%, versus just 9% for Harris this year, according to NBC News exit polls.

Really weird coincidence that a bunch of consultants and campaign managers that are part of the revolving door between regulation, politics and business would want to move away from messaging about the 1% and corporate greed and towards obsessively targeting anti-Trump republicans with people no one cares about like Liz Cheney.