Harris adviser says VP ran 'flawless' campaign, GOP campaign managers candid on primary missteps

Sheila Nix, Vice President Kamala Harris’ chief of staff, said Thursday evening that Harris ran a “pretty flawless campaign” during a summit of campaign managers, reporters and Harvard University staff.

“I think the vice president was the best position of all the possible people on our side. She had been sitting vice president for 3 1/2 years and was also part of the campaign and was ready to jump in,” Nix said during a dinner reception for the Campaign Manager Conference at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“We obviously had a lot of things to do right away,” Nix continued. “We had to get the delegates so that she could be the nominee. We had to flip the convention to her instead of President Biden. We had to merge teams and we had a 107-day campaign in front of us and we had to move quickly.

“I would posit she ran a pretty flawless campaign, and she did all the steps that [were] required to be successful,” she added. “And I think -- obviously, we did not win, but I do think we hit all the marks.”

Senior staffers from several other campaigns, such as those of Asa Hutchinson, Dean Phillips, Jill Stein, Nikki Haley, Chris Christie and President-elect Donald Trump, also offered brief reflections during the dinner. The collective broadly addressed two main themes: reasoning to jump into the race and what may have been a strategic misstep.

Attack or not to attack?

Several of the campaigns mused on whether they made the right decision on holding back from going on offense against Trump during the primaries -- leaving Christie's campaign and, to a lesser extent, Hutchinson’s on an island of their own.

“Anybody here who ever wants to challenge the race at any level for any office, you don't ever beat an incumbent without attacking the incumbent,” said Mike DuHaime, senior adviser to Christie. “You have to say the incumbent has not been doing a good job or I would be better than the incumbent. You can't say that the incumbent is really, really, really, really, really great, but I'm also really, really, really, really great.”

The Christie campaign became frustrated when it realized the other primary candidates weren’t following Christie’s lead, DuHaime added.

“It becomes frustrating, obviously. And you start to talk privately about what were, what are other people's actual motivations,” DuHaime said.

While Christie took on Trump directly, aggressively and consistently, the same could not be said for Hutchinson.

“Unfortunately, it got to the point where in order for him just to continue to fight, to have his voice and his name and his face seen, he had to go on the offensive,” said Rob Burgess, campaign manager for Hutchinson. “Clearly, he didn't do it as aggressively as Gov. Christie, but he did it in his own Arkansas way.”

Even though Haley became the last candidate standing against Trump during the primary, the former South Carolina governor did not start going after Trump as aggressively as other competitors until she became the sole alternative.

Along with Haley, other candidates such as South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, North Dakota Sen. Doug Burgum and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also avoided heavily attacking Trump out of fear that it would turn off those who still liked the former president and supported his agenda but had doubts he could win.

“I think, like a lot of people in here, we determined that 40% of the electorate was always going to be for President Trump, 40% were Trump curious and then 20% of the possibly primary were not going to be for President Trump,” said Mike Zolnierowicz, campaign manager for Burgum.

Nix, Harris’ campaign manager, also attributed Trump’s decision not to participate in any debate following the ABC News presidential debate on Sept. 10 as detrimental to the Harris campaign’s strategy of presenting the choice between Trump and Harris clearly to voters several times.

“I think that was hard for us to then get the attention that we would have liked to,” Nix said.

One-state vs. multiple-state strategy

During the dinner, one common theme discussed among several of the campaign managers was the decision to have either a one-state strategy or a multistate strategy.

Betsy Ankney, Haley’s campaign manager, stressed that a Republican candidate couldn’t be successful if he or she only zeroed in on one state.

“One of the things that we saw earlier was that, you know, Iowa [and] New Hampshire were eight days apart,” Ankney said. “Every other candidate other than Donald Trump and Nikki Haley had a one-state strategy. Chris Christie was playing in New Hampshire. DeSantis, Iowa. There was no way that you could be successful in this campaign without having a strong showing in the world stage and being able to go to distance.”

Ankeny added that campaigns mismanaging their influxes of cash -- their “embarrassment of riches” -- was another major misstep of the election.

“I think that a potential theme of this entire election cycle is an embarrassment of riches,” she said. “You saw that with the DeSantis campaign in the primary. You saw that with the Harris campaign in general. A lot of times, when candidates have more money than they know what to do with, they make bad decisions, and we were mean and lean and scrappy.”

Campaign managers for Scott, Christie and Hutchinson discussed focusing and investing in one of the early primary states rather than all of them due to limited resources, lack of money and what many saw campaigns as their best chance to be successful.

Although the campaign manager for DeSantis was not in attendance, his presidential campaign also focused heavily on one state: Iowa.

Hutchinson’s campaign manager, Burgess, was blunt during Thursday night’s conversation that he and the former Arkansas governor disagreed on whether to focus on one state or multiple states, leading Burgess to leave the campaign.

“He wanted to run a five-state campaign, and I didn't know how I was going to pay for it,” Burgess said. “I wasn't comfortable with him taking a mortgage out of his house, and I didn't want to be responsible for the campaign having debt.”