Top Harris campaign aide admits not having a Democratic primary was 'the cardinal sin'

David Plouffe, a top aide to the Harris campaign, told The Atlantic that the Democratic Party's lack of a primary for the presidential candidate was "the cardinal sin" during a discussion about the campaign's loss to President-elect Donald Trump.

"I’m not sure, given the headwinds, any Democrat could have won. But if we had a primary in which a bunch of people ran and auditioned… through that process, whoever emerged… would have been a more fully formed person, would have had more time to mount a general election campaign. [Not having that process] is the cardinal sin," Plouffe told The Atlantic.

A group of Harris campaign aides have largely blamed the loss due to a tight time crunch after President Biden dropped out of the race, as well as the media treatment of the vice president.

Plouffe also spoke about where the Democratic presidential campaign was when President Biden withdrew from the race and said they were in a "gruesome" spot.

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"When I got in, it was the first time I saw the actual numbers under the hood," Plouffe told the outlet. "They were pretty gruesome. The Sun Belt was worse than the Blue Wall, but the Blue Wall was bad. And, demographically, young voters across the board—Hispanic voters, Black voters, Asian voters—were in really terrible shape. When the [candidate] switch happened, some of that stuff got a little bit better, but nowhere near where we ended up or where we needed to be. This was a rescue mission. It was catastrophic in terms of where it was."

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said multiple times ahead of the election that the process was open to Democrats and that Harris "won" the primary. However, after Harris' loss, Pelosi said that the president should have dropped out sooner so that Democrats could have held a primary.

After the Harris campaign spoke to "Pod Save America" in the weeks following the election, they were criticized for not taking any accountability for the loss.

Harris campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon previously complained about the "narrative" that Harris was afraid to do interviews during their conversation on "Pod Save America."

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"I do think a narrative, 107 days… two weeks talking about how she didn't do interviews, which you know she was doing plenty, but we were doing in our own way, we had to be the nominee, we had to find a running mate, and do a roll-out, I mean there was all these things that you kind of want to factor in. But real people heard, in some way, that we were not going to have interviews, which was both not true and also so counter to any kind of standard that was put on Trump, that I think that was a problem," Dillon told "Pod Save America" host Dan Pfeiffer.

After Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, he quickly endorsed Harris as his replacement on the ticket. Harris did not sit for her first interview until 39 days after the president's announcement.

During the interview with The Atlantic, Quentin Fulks, the principal deputy campaign manager, addressed why they decided to minimize media engagement in the first month of her campaign.

"I don’t say this to be defensive at all, but our priority was How do we get her into the battleground states? She [had been] traveling, but she was focused on the periphery states when she was the vice president and not the core battleground states, as President Biden was traveling to those places pretty frequently," Fulks said.