SIDE NOTE: Interestingly, here is Flaherty’s take on why the report wasn’t released: “News coverage has focused on why the DNC shelved it. My understanding—based on Dem-world hearsay—is that the truth is stupider than the fiction: No autopsy was released because there is no actual autopsy. The members of the “autopsy team” were in over their heads and struggled to put the thing together. What they produced was a loose summary of a bunch of interviews that were largely done without talking to the campaign or big spenders.”

My biggest lesson from the 2024 election is that tactics don’t add up to a brand, and a brand is the most important thing in politics today. Without a brand that people genuinely feel is connected to your candidate’s deeply held beliefs, your tactics will add up to nothing. You’ll reach people but won’t close the deal…

We underestimated then—and are underestimating now—just how disillusioned people are. There was and is a pervasive sense that nothing works and the institutions holding us up have failed. Media, government, business—no one trusts anyone anymore. For reasons both of Democrats’ own making and from simply being incumbents, the Democratic brand sucked.

In the face of that massive cultural shift toward skepticism and distrust, and some holes Democrats dug for ourselves, we hit the limit of what campaign tactics can do. We cut the margin everywhere we played, but the national deficit was too much to overcome. We could not break the perception that we were the status quo.

We traditionally think of “swings” as right-left or left-right—the kind of person who, say, votes for Romney one cycle and Obama the next. In reality, today’s swing voter is choosing between “change” and “burn it all down.” People just didn’t trust our ability to make a difference in their lives.

…

Democrats will likely win the House this year, even with all the congressional redistricting going on. We may win the Senate. But those wins will paper over the structural problem: Our party still speaks the language of, and to the priorities of, people who care about our institutions and believe they basically work.

There isn’t a left-right solution here; this is an up-down problem. The voters we need to win back are the ones we already had and lost: the multiracial working-class coalition we thought we were assembling in 2020, which has frayed badly, especially among men. They are waiting for a party that sounds like it’s on their side against a system that isn’t working for them.

That requires economic populism with teeth, candidates with genuine charisma, and—hardest of all for a party staffed by institutionalists—a posture of real contempt for a status quo we are arguably part of. And we need to do it without losing the new members of our coalition who joined us over the last decade.

The trans ad worked because of what it implied, not what it said. It was devastating because it seemed to confirm what the Trump folks had been saying all along.

The ad put us in a bind. Responding to it directly meant fighting on their turf, on an issue we were losing, using paid media, without even responding to the core thing it was triggering in people: She’s focused on crazy liberal stuff, not you. We made five or six ads in response and tested them against ads about the economy. Focus groups and ad tests showed that centering on the economy was the better move; it made Harris seem like she was focused on the right stuff. So, not wanting to make the fight about an issue we were losing, we talked about the economy more.

A literal rebuttal would have been a loser.

The Candidate Has to Be in the Room

Digital presence is a direct reflection of a candidate’s brand. It’s how voters come to understand who a candidate is. For this to work, the candidate needs to be actively engaged in the planning and execution of their social media presence. Period. If they’re not, it won’t work. This isn’t a specific criticism of Harris or Biden—delegating social media is still standard practice in campaigns. This has to change.

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Biden in 2024, she did a whole day on the trail for us. I spoke with her about her content strategy—and she led the discussion for forty-five minutes. AOC had very specific thoughts about the story she wanted to tell, the kinds of clips she wanted, the framing of the whole thing. It was a remarkable conversation. Likewise, Beto O’Rourke, whom I worked for in 2019, had deep and strong opinions about what went on his social media. You get very different results when the candidate is completely hands-off.

Candidates need to own their campaigns. Yes, quality experts and aides and staff are obviously necessary. But in the end, on election night, the candidate better feel like they ran the campaign they wanted to run or it was a waste of time and effort.

After deciding to run again in the next cycle, it was time to assemble a new team and get to work.

And so, on a cold winter day in January, my new team assembled in my hometown to begin the process of mapping out a campaign strategy.

I began by telling them who I was and why I was running. I wanted to be very clear with them that I didn’t believe I was the standard-issue congressional candidate. I had not spent my life in politics and hadn’t worked my way up the party ladder. Frankly, politics as usual was everything that I felt was wrong with our system, and I wanted them to know I wasn’t afraid to be honest and speak my mind.

We then moved on to a recap of the last campaign. Themes, strategy, message, media. They asked what I thought I had done that had gotten me so close in an overwhelmingly “Red” House district. To me, the answer was very clear. I had given the people of my district an honest and authentic alternative option. I spoke from the heart, did my best to listen and learn while letting voters know how I felt about issues, and perhaps most of all, refused to go negative. After all, I told them, if I was viewed as just another run-of-the-mill politician willing to do and say anything to get elected, why would the voters  go against their natural instincts (to vote Republican) and vote for me? They could easily get politics-as-usual from their sitting Congressperson.

Being the honest alternative hadn’t quite gotten me over the top (or maybe it had?), but I felt strongly that it was the right way to go because it was WHO I AM. And I wasn’t willing to sacrifice that for a seat at the table.

They all nodded their heads, in what I thought was silent understanding.

As the meeting progressed, however, I noticed something strange happening. The consultants were comparing notes – on other races they had been involved in, on issues they felt were important, on tactics and strategies they had used in the past. My presence at the meeting seemed to become less and less important. I actually started having to forcefully inject myself into the conversation if I had something I wanted to say.

At one point, I stood up and walked to the other end of the room with my back to the three DC consultants. As I stood there, facing the window, I had a bit of a revelation. They didn’t trust me or even respect me.

I was a product they needed to sell, and they were going to use their tried-and-true methods to sell me, no matter what I wanted to do, or say. I’d been in DC and met other candidates and members of Congress. Frankly, I was less than impressed with the vast majority of them. Most of them are not qualified to be running the largest organization in the world.

Nonetheless, the realization that, at least initially, these people saw me as no different from the others –again, as a flawed product they needed to clean up and market – hurt. And it pissed me off.

I turned and told them what I was thinking. “Guys. I’m still here in the room. it’s day one and I already feel like you don’t trust me as a candidate – that somehow you think I don’t know what I’m doing or that I came so close last time by sheer luck. I don’t know what the other candidates you work with are like, but you need to know this is MY campaign. It’ll be run on the issues I care about and on MY views. At the end of the day, on election night, it’s my ass that’s on the line - not yours. I get that I didn’t quite make it last time, but we had a solid strategy that was based on who I am. It worked pretty darn well. We need to build on that, not rebuild from scratch to do it the way you’ve done it in other places. That’s not gonna fly with me.”

Stunned looks all around. Then quick protests that – no, they weren’t excluding me and yes, I’m the candidate and they all understood that.

They said all the right things. But to me, the curtain had been pulled back, and frankly, from there on out I felt like I had to be eternally vigilant to make sure they understood who worked for who. I needed them to understand that “advising” wasn't just a one-way street. To understand that my input wasn't an ego thing; it was my authenticity and it mattered. To understand that I would not settle for outside consultants imposing their cookie-cutter DC bubble-centric view. I had to be ever attentive to make sure they understood my campaign was more than a product to be sold by any means necessary. It was me pouring my soul into trying to make a difference.

On top of all the roles involved in being the candidate: day-to-day campaigning, writing and giving speeches, speaking at gatherings, door-knocking and fundraising, having to now add “eternal vigilance over political consultants” to the list was not exactly something I relished – or needed.

And unfortunately, the problem of Biden’s age also pre-loaded the “she’s not in it for you” perception that would dog Vice President Harris…

Could Harris have rehabilitated the brand by distancing herself more from Biden? Perhaps there were ways she could have, but I doubt it would have changed the outcome. It was a quandary: If she had said ‘Joe Biden was wrong about [X] and I disagreed vehemently,’ the obvious journalistic followup would be: ‘Okay, so what did you do about it?’ Once we missed an early window on that distancing, anything late-breaking would have seemed political and phony…

Throughout the campaign, there was a disconnect between what people were hearing from us and about us in earned and organic media, and what we were saying in paid media….

But in the long run, I don’t know if I was right. Either way, my side lost the internal debate. After David Axelrod panned the spot as “base mobilization” on an episode of Hacks on Tap, we moved on from using it in paid media.

It’s hard not to look at the success of an affordability message in the time since the campaign and wonder what would have been if we had focused just on that.

Then again, would it have been convincing in 2024? Harris was the sitting vice president.

Contra conventional wisdom, when we messaged people—through paid media, mainly—on middle-class economics, it worked. Harris started to close the gap on whom voters most trusted to handle the economy. People even started to associate her with “middle-class economics.” Looking back, though, “middle-class economics” is a political buzzword that means nothing to anyone. Trump’s message was much clearer: The economy feels bad and Harris says it’s good. Those vibes were tough to argue witn.