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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign managers engaged in civil reflection on the 2024 presidential election at an Institute of Politics forum Friday evening.
The panelists included Trump’s Co-Campaign Manager Chris LaCivita and Chief Pollster Tony Fabrizio, as well as Harris’ Campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, Campaign Manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Principal Deputy Campaign Manager Quentin Fulks, Deputy Campaign Manager Rob Flaherty, and Campaign Strategist Molly Murphy. The panel was moderated by Wall Street Journal political reporter Molly Ball.
The IOP has hosted similar events after every presidential election since 1972, with only one interruption in 2020 when Trump’s campaign staff did not participate.
But unlike the event’s most recent iteration in 2016 — when the campaign managers’ discussion devolved into contentious accusations and interruptions by both parties — this year’s panel remained civil.
Ball opened the event by asking both sides to mark a success of the other team.
Fulks called Trump’s campaign “as disciplined of a team as you can get,” and Fabrizio noted that Harris’ team was able to “stay cohesive” throughout the tumultuous summer when Harris replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket.
The panelists also discussed the challenges each campaign faced.
LaCivita said Trump faced numerous obstacles, from the “assassination stuff” to “Iranians running around trying to shoot you down, to bullshit court cases, to the weaponization of the Justice Department.”
Dillon, meanwhile, said that quickly pivoting the campaign from Biden to Harris proved challenging, and that “when the call came and the president said he was getting out, we really did flip the whole thing without knowing exactly how to do it.”
When discussing the Harris campaign’s overall strategy, Murphy said, “We didn’t see a lot of value in trying to litigate people’s memories of Trump, as much as trying to define the next term as not a continuation of his first term, but instead worse.”
“What emerged in the research,” Murphy added, “was Project 2025.”
Flaherty added that even before Biden dropped out of the race, “we started popping off content about Project 2025 and we’re like, ‘This has actually got some heat to it.’”
However once Biden dropped out of the race, Fabrizio said that “it just fell away” as a voting issue “because the focus became Kamala Harris and then what we were trying to say about Kamala Harris, as opposed to what you guys were trying to say about Project 2025.”
LaCivita added that Trump never supported Project 2025 in the first place.
Fabrizio recalled Trump telling him, “‘I will not let any accusation, charge, attack go unanswered.’”
“If you let it go unanswered, it’s true,” Fabrizio added. “That’s just his mindset.”
So, the Trump campaign spent considerable time and effort trying to disassociate from Project 2025, Fabrizio said.
During their discussion of Trump’s relationship with Project 2025, LaCivita mentioned that he was “reading the New York Times” — at which point Fabrizio interrupted and said, “Shhhh don’t say he read the New York Times.”
Throughout the panel, both campaigns agreed that the economy was the biggest factor influencing voters’ decisions.
“This has always been a race about the economy, and these voters — whether you’re white, Black, whatever the case may be — you have a perception about the economy, if you think the economy sucks, it doesn’t get better if there’s a Black candidate,” Fulks said.
The sentiment was met with similar remarks from Trump’s team.
“It’s great to be concerned about climate change, but if you can't afford a place to live,” Fabrizio said. “At the end of the day, it comes down to self-interest.”
People voted for Trump, he added, “because they believed that he could put more money in their pockets, more money than Kamala Harris could put in their pockets.”
The event concluded with a question and answer period, during which an audience member asked Harris’ team — who he addressed as “the Democratic Party elites” — why “a party that calls itself the ‘Democratic’ Party” selected Harris without a primary. The question drew a combination of gasps and laughs from the rest of the audience.
Fulks said that though primaries are important, “this was such an anomaly of a campaign and in the time frame with which we did it, it would have been virtually impossible to have an open primary of any success.”
