After Kamala Harris entered the presidential race last year, he communicated with the student of Barack Obama, Jim Messina, to help lead his White House offer.
But when Messina shared news from the vice president’s offer with a friend, she received a severe warning.
“I said ‘Jim, if you get involved in this, will be a political suicide,” recalled Democratic Megadon John Morgan, a Harris critic for a long time, recalled his conversation with Messina, who had served in the White House of Obama and handled his successful re -election campaign of 2012. “You will be a loser. And all your brightness is that you are undefeated.”
Messina rejected the job. And after Harris’s loss against Donald Trump, it may not have been a bad movement.
David Plouffe, acclaimed for a long time as The brilliant architect of Obama’s victory in 2008, served in a key role in the Harris campaign and is now among those labeled with a devastating defeat.
“The Shine is out of Plouffe now. He was the golden boy,” Morgan said. “Now it’s just an old breakdown boy, who lost. Big.”
Messina did not comment on the exchange. Plouffe did not respond to a request for comments.
While many Democrats still admire the successes of Plouffe, the hard words scored a growing feeling through a match that seeks a path to follow: the flowering of the Obama team can be falling from the rose.
More Democrats openly criticize Obama’s strategists and consultants, who were treated for a long time as the priests of their party’s policy. Officials of the National Democratic Committee at a news event last month blamed Obama’s lack of investment in state parties for their two terms to delay the local organization, and the party still felt the effects. The so -called Obama voters, less politically committed voters, younger voters and color voters, no longer exists. In 2024, each of those groups changed to Trump in large quantities.
In the future, I could mark a clean slate for a party whose course for almost two decades in cascade of the decisions Obama had made. It was Obama who chose Biden as his vice president, offering him the elevated hanger that established his 2020 election and his aborted re -election of 2024. Obama selected Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state, then anointed her for the Democratic nomination in the 2016 race against Trump. Obama operational and its main empowered assistants have forged leading decision -making roles at the top of the Democratic Party since then.
But after 2024, more Democrats want to see that change.
Obama himself is still a force at the party, filling stadiums and calling the attention of the main donors. In fact, the DNC is in conversations with New Jersey governor, Phil Murphy, to receive Obama for a collection of funds at home, according to two people with knowledge of the planning, which is still in his early stages.
But even the brightness of the former president was showing signs of fading the past fall, a phenomenon that threatens to persist as the next harvest of young voters ages in adulthood. When the 2028 presidential elections arrive, 20 years will spend from Obama’s first victory. At that time, more voters will have reached the age of majority in the era of Donald Trump than in the Obama era.
“One of the challenges that the Democratic Party has is that there is nostalgia for Obama’s era, both in terms that Barack Obama is in the White House and what that meant for the country and the leadership style we have, but also as the style of our policy,” said Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist. “There has been a desire for our policy in the last 10 years, and it is a very different era.”
Criticism flying inside the party
Democrats point out countless factors that lead to Harris’s defeat in 2024, and many focus on a compressed timeline because Biden refused to depart as a party candidate up to 107 days before the elections. Plouffe promptly blamed Biden, saying “He made us totally” in a recently released book.
Plouffe’s verbal affront opened other students from Obama to his own criticism. The president of DNC Finance, Chris Korge, lashed out at Plouffe in an interview with NBC News last week, saying that he and other students of Obama shared guilt, rebuking them as the “called Gurus”.
“It’s time to reasseval the use of consultants and bring new people with a vision of the future,” Korge also said in the interview. “Obama’s old play book no longer works.”
Jane Kleeb, the president of the Democratic Party of Nebraska, a vice president of DNC and president of a national group of presidents of the state party, said that Democrats must return to the basic concepts of investing and listening to local interested parties and organizers. She said that this crystallized realization during the recent elections of Mayoral of Omaha, when the Republicans attacked the Democratic candidate in transgender matters. She said the party “fell” in 2024 by not delaying those attacks against candidates that up and down the ticket.
This time, he said, he knew who to enter a room to address the problem.
“I did not contact the children of the United States or a New York press firm to say: ‘How do this?'” Kleeb said. “Our team literally entered the conference room in our state party office and said: ‘Let’s launch ideas about how we can delay this, because we are not going to let them demolish John Ewing in these bulls, again'”.
They were basic, turning the script in a new announcement: Mayor Jean Stothert “focused on the Spanish”; The Democratic candidate Ewing “focused on fixing the potholes.” Ewing ended up expelling the headline for almost 13 points, after Stothert had defeated his past opponents.
“And that resonated with the voters,” Kleeb said, adding: “The reality for state parties on the ground is that we do not give each other a s — on which camp a political consultant was cut.”
As regards her, she said, welcomes each and every one of the Democrats, those who worked for any Democratic president and beyond, to be in the room.
“Our party is analyzing these philosophical questions and losing the point that we need to trust people in the states that are in the field, which are constantly in contact with voters, and simply let this introduction fight and whose camp is better, let it go,” said Kleeb. “I love everyone on the table.”
Other Democrats echoed the feeling. A Biden ally for a long time, Steve Schale, who also worked in Obama’s presidential campaigns, specifically defended Plouffe’s contributions to the party.
“David is one of the most clear types. He was grateful that he took a step forward and joined the campaign, and anyone who thinks that his voice is not necessary, frankly, is an idiot,” said Schale. “David has also been clear about what we must do in the future … He has done enough in his life that has earned the right to take his ball and go home, but for example, I’m glad he is committed.”
Chuck Rocha, who worked in the presidential offer of Bernie Sanders in 2020 and consultation on camera and Senate campaigns, said a small group of companies dominates the market of political agents.
“Most of these same consultants have locked these candidates before announcing, so there is never any opportunity for any new blood to be part of these campaigns,” said Rocha, who helped the first year senator Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., He wins his seat in 2024.
He said that companies rise and fall, but the players who direct them are the same, a kind of regeneration cycle that keeps the same people in their place. “Everyone is connected,” he said.
In 2024, Biden-Harris campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon took advantage of the former Obama student for important roles. For example, Stephanie Cutter, manager of the former O’Malley Dillon company, Precision Strategies, was chosen to help administer the Democratic Convention Program and prepare Harris for media interviews. The founding partner of 270 strategies, Mitch Stewart, who administered battlefield states for Obama, was introduced to supervise a similar program for Biden. Rufus Gifford, Big Donor Wrangler for Obama, acted as fund collection director for the Biden campaign. The list continues.
Chris Kofinis, a democratic strategist with experience in previous presidential campaigns, said it is time for the party to take a look at the same set of agents, including the students of the Obama campaign, who have been executing national Democratic campaigns.
“I’m sorry, I don’t want a surgeon who keeps killing patients,” he said.
Some victories, he said, are a reflection of the candidate’s skills, instead of the surrounding agents.
“It is quite easy to win with a guy like Obama,” Kofinis said, adding that Democrats tend to put too much emphasis on experience when they hire operational, instead of “if they are good” in their work.
The activist and vice president of DNC, David Hogg, said that just when some chosen democrats cling to power for too long, so does the operational class of the party.
He sees an anti-establishment fervor that began with Obama and continues to this day, where the candidates who are perceived that they go against the system will be more successful than those who commit to defend or defend it.
“It is difficult to imagine this now, because Obama is such an important figure, obviously he is seen as part of the system, but when he ran, he would say, as an anti-establishment candidate,” said Hogg, who has faced himself to withdraw a position of DNC while he also advocated the primary challenges against some incumbent of the party. In addition to a unique choice and fed with Covid in 2020, he continued: “The challenge is that we are still at a time when antiestrometric candidates will be favored.”
What follows for the Democrats?
But with the political agents who cut their teeth in the Obama years that still handle power in the party, there is a disconnection between the leadership and the youngest electorates that the party needs to win in the future, Hogg added. Part of the problem is that these young voters have a memory of the first black president of the nation.
“I don’t think they have one to be honest with you. That is part of the challenge,” said Hogg, 25, adding: “For many of these younger people who are under 20 years old, at this time … they don’t remember much of what Obama spoke. They grew up in the political context of Donald Trump and he being normalized, that was what politics was growing.”
Ammar Moussa, a campaign assistant for Biden and Harris, said that probably a natural change of the guard is already underway. To begin with, many of the governors who fill the short list of the main contestants for the nomination of the 2028 party have their own political hands for a long time, some of them were incubated away from the headquarters of the Democratic Party in Washington.
“We must always think about how we are raising the operations and promoting their personnel who understand the landscape and what is needed to gain campaigns in 2025, 2026, 2027 and 2028, because each cycle is different,” said Moussa. “It is incumbent for high -level candidates and employees and the senior consulting class to know what they do not know.”
