Teams Trump and Harris reflect on a tumultuous summer: the debate, the Trump assassination attempt and Biden drops out

Top officials from the Trump and Harris campaigns gathered Friday at the Harvard University Campaign Managers’ Conference to discuss the summer of 2024, which set the stage for an unprecedented political season that included a disastrous debate for the President Joe Biden, a new Democratic nominee for Vice. President Kamala Harris and two assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump.

Much of the debate focused on the 107 days that Harris was the new Democratic nominee and how campaigns had to tweak their strategies on a very truncated timeline. Here are highlights from this sprawling, wide-ranging conversation.

Campaigns clash over candidates’ work ethic

Sparks flew toward the end of their discussion when a member of the Trump campaign said the former president had “outperformed” Harris.

“Why didn’t you trust your candidate more?” asked Taylor Budowich, deputy campaign manager for the Trump campaign. “Why didn’t you take him out more?” You said…you could never compete with the attention that Donald Trump was getting. You never gave him a chance. »

The Harris campaign pushed back on Budowich, saying their strategy was successful, not that the Trump campaign had outdone them.

“Your strategy was a good strategy, but you have no idea how hard the people on the other side worked,” said Quentin Fulks, senior deputy campaign manager for the Harris campaign. “I have no idea how hard you work.”

Budowich interjected, saying he was referring to Harris and not the entire campaign, but Fulks claimed Harris had worked hard.

“I didn’t say she didn’t work hard. I said she was overworked,” Budowich said.

Fulks defended the vice president, explaining that it wasn’t a fair comparison because the Harris campaign had a different strategy, which he said was not successful. He reiterated that it had nothing to do with his work ethic.

Asked by ABC News’ Brittany Shepherd about President Joe Biden’s remarks calling Trump supporters trash, Fulks said Democrats need to do a better job of not creating self-inflicted wounds.

“Once again our people continue to shoot themselves in the foot,” Fulks said.

“Right-wing discipline is better than left-wing discipline,” he added. “And it’s not about morals, values, none of that. It’s literally about discipline and having the big picture of how you win and what you can stomach. to achieve victory.”

The democratic fallout from the Biden-Trump debate

Harris campaign chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon did not shy away from repeated messages about Biden’s debate performance, reiterating that he had a “bad night” and pointing to Obama as a precedent for uneven debates by incumbent candidates, and argued that the campaign saw a real path for Biden to win the election regardless.

“So we really felt like we had a path to 270. We felt like we had the right candidate, the person that we believed in, and that person was leading our country very well,” O’Malley Dillon said . “We still believe that.”

Without citing a specific moment, Fulks admitted that early in the debate, campaign staff could tell Biden was underperforming.

Trump’s team was much more pointed, saying it was clear Biden was “not going to survive” the election cycle “about a minute” into the debate, according to Chris LaCivita, co-campaign manager of Trump.

“I think for us, and with all due respect to the president, we felt like the challenges were on full display in the debate,” said James Blair, political director of the Trump campaign. “There have also been days when these challenges seem less apparent. That night was not one of them.

Referring to Biden’s debate performance and what followed, O’Malley Dillon said, “There probably hasn’t been a more difficult time for a campaign team to go through.” »

Blair quickly interjected, pointing out that two assassination attempts and navigating indictments were also difficult to navigate, and O’Malley Dillon later acknowledged the difficulty of Team Trump’s summer and mentioned that she contacted Susie Wiles, Trump’s campaign manager, afterward.

Asked about the large number of Democrats calling for Biden to abandon after his disastrous debate performance, Fulks called it a “slow bleed.”

Fulks then agreed with a point made by LaCivita earlier in the day: visuals are important when running for office, and the Biden campaign wanted to take Biden public, holding a series of events to counter his performance in the debate.

“I think Chris is right,” Fulks said. “Something visual happened before people’s eyes. The only way to combat this is to give them something visual. And the only visual game you have at this point is to put Joe Biden in front of as many people as possible, which is what we’ve tried to do. And so when he got COVID, it’s almost like a dagger.

The Trump campaign said it was preparing for what would eventually become inevitable, adding that it began tracking and researching the opposition and interviewing other vice presidential candidates as early as May on Harris, but that she had also studied other possible candidates, such as Michelle Obama and the former secretary of state. Hillary Clinton.

Attempted assassination of Trump

This is clearly a pivotal political moment as much as a heartbreaking personal moment for both campaigns, with Trump’s first assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, “very limited to where we could campaign because, after the first attempt, they basically told us to lock up.” , more outdoor events,” said Tony Fabrizio, the Trump campaign’s chief pollster. “And if we want to organize an outdoor event, we need, for example, to double the preparation time. »

The Harris campaign, for its part, withdrew its negative advertising in the days following the assassination attempt.

“We were also careful about how we campaigned. “There is no place for political violence in a democracy. And we wanted to make sure that our campaign reflected that at that time,” added Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Harris’ campaign manager.

Biden drops out, Harris becomes candidate

The Harris campaign, repeatedly pressed on whether it knew of Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 race before he made the announcement public or whether there had been conversations beforehand about the possibility that Biden would drop out, claimed to have discovered it quickly. before making his announcement and there was no prior conversation.

When asked if there was a chance another Democrat would become the nominee besides Harris, Fulks said there was always a possibility, but noted that Biden wanted to throw his support behind Harris. He added that a Democratic primary this late in the cycle would have been complicated.

“From my perspective, Vice President Harris was the only logical choice to make. But I think it was President Biden who did this: she is his vice president and she was loyal to him, and he decided to support her,” Fulks said.