'Unfathomably Painful': Kamala Harris's Campaign Faces Meltdown as Reality Sets In

In a moment of reflection tinged with a jab at President-elect Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign chief expressed the profound disappointment of Tuesday’s significant electoral loss.

“I’ll leave you with this: losing is unfathomably painful. It is hard,” campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in a memo addressed to campaign staff. “This will take a long time to process,” she noted, as reported by Newsweek.

Dillon promised that Harris and her supporters would be at the forefront of an anti-Trump movement. “The work of protecting America from the impacts of a Trump Presidency starts now,” she wrote.

“I know the Vice President isn’t finished in this fight, and I know the very people on this email are also going to be leaders in this collective mission,” Dillon emphasized.

The memo also promised a smooth transition of power, adding, “unlike what we saw in 2020,” referencing accusations made against Trump for allegedly inciting the January 6, 2021, Capitol breach. This charge has been a point of contention, with Trump facing legal battles from the Biden administration’s Justice Department over claims of election interference.

Elsewhere in the memo, Dillon praised the campaign's accomplishments despite the outcome. “You built a first-rate, historic Presidential campaign in basically 90 days. You navigated things that no one has ever had to navigate, and likely no one will ever have to again,” she acknowledged.

Dillon defended the campaign’s efforts, attributing Harris’s loss to “unprecedented headwinds and obstacles that were largely out of our control,” rather than the campaign itself.

She also highlighted areas where the campaign had made an impact, saying, “We knew this would be a margin of error race, and it was. And, your work mattered: the whole country moved to the right, but compared to the rest of the country, the battleground states saw the least amount of movement in his direction. It was closest in the places we competed. That speaks to both the work you did, and the scale of the challenge we ultimately couldn’t surmount.”

A tweet shared reflects public discourse surrounding these developments.

In a Foreign Policy article, Michael Hirsh analyzed the campaign's shortcomings. “Harris failed to close the deal rhetorically. In an unfortunate echo of Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, Harris spent far too much time trying to argue that Trump was unfit for the presidency and too little time delivering a coherent message about why she would be better,” he observed.

Hirsh further explained, “The political landscape had shifted in ways the Harris campaign didn’t really understand, with cultural issues playing a much bigger role than they had in a long time — even possibly trumping economic issues.”

“Put another way, the takeover of the Democratic Party by progressive, so-called woke issues was devastating to Harris’s campaign, especially as Trump and the Republicans successfully painted her as an unreconstructed left-winger,” he concluded.