The Monday Morning quarterbacking regarding the failures of the Kamala Harris campaign will be taking place for some time, given that the list of problems is legion. She had the entire media complex backing and promoting her, unanimous celebrity endorsements, and she dropped double the spending of that seen from the Trump campaign. It led to a Trump landslide where he took all the swing states, and he saw GOP gains in 49 states over 2020, as well as the party taking control in the Senate and (likely) retaining the House.
So yes, after dropping over $1 billion and failing so miserably there will be questions, and a slew of answers, on how this went so poorly – or rather, make that “so disastrously” instead. (“Poorly” is bad form after that lavish spending.) At the Washington Examiner, Gabe Kaminsky looked over some of the financials from the campaign and there are revelations that abound. One issue is with the expanse of payroll, where she managed to outspend Trump at a clip of over $55 million, while his total came in under $10 million; he won while using hundreds fewer employees.
Kaminsky spotted one telling example that is smaller in scale, but it explains both the way they lit cash on fire like The Joker in “The Dark Knight” and the impacted decision-making from the campaign. One of the critical miscues cited by Harris was her refusal to go on the most popular podcast in the nation, “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Both Trump and JD Vance managed to make their way to Austin to sit in for hours at a stretch.
But we heard that Harris could not find time in her schedule, even when she had staged a rally in the state with Beyoncé in Houston. There was word from the host that they requested Rogan fly out to meet her at a location for a truncated interview, but he declined, as he always speaks with people at his studio. Then Rogan incurred criticism for not bowing to her demands, like that seen in New York Magazine:
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Why is he requiring the sitting vice-president to come to his house? Rogan records his show inside his multimillion-dollar lakefront mansion in Austin. He does only three or four episodes per week, and there are no major MMA events for him to announce this week. Perhaps he just does not want to leave his house.
Yet while Rogan was told he needed to cater to Kamala’s inflexible schedule, there was suddenly time found for Harris to make a special trip to New York to appear on “Saturday Night Live.” But the popular podcast was something she could not manage.
When this development emerged, one of the other criticisms hurled at Rogan was that he should go where Kamala needed him to be because that was what Alex Cooper had done when Harris sat in for the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. There had been politics in play when it was said Harris went on the podcast rather than help with Hurricane relief in Georgia and North Carolina. But now we learn that the Harris people accommodated things for the broadcast. The campaign dropped $100,000 to build the rather tepid set of the show in a hotel room.
This figure pales when you see other expenses, such as the $15 million dropped on the celebrity-choked election eve rally, but it displays so much of the horrid decision-making. Why did an interview like this need a set built when a couple of cameras would suffice for a podcast format? And given the reach of the Rogan show and the lack of effort and lower expense, how is it that a trip to Austin was just not workable?
We know it was due to Harris’ inability to conduct herself in a genuine fashion without prep work. She cannot speak freely and in a realistic manner. Look at how she came away looking bad even in coddling environments, such as with Oprah, the town hall with Maria Shriver, and her appearance on “The View.” Sitting with an unflinching host like Rogan simply was not an option.
So the campaign was left with dropping a princely sum on an unneeded set build for a podcast appearance that really did not generate any lasting sound bites. We mostly heard she had been on the show; the takeaways were not to be found. Like the rest of her campaign, it was an expensive move that delivered no results.
