Trump, Harris teams reflect on tumultuous summer: The debate, Trump assassination attempt and Biden drops out

Senior staffers from the Trump and Harris campaigns met at Harvard University’s Campaign Managers Conference on Friday to discuss the summer of 2024, which gave way to an unprecedented political season that included a disastrous debate performance for President Joe Biden, a subsequent new Democratic nominee in Vice President Kamala Harris, and two assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump.

Much of the debate focused on the 107 days with Harris as the new Democratic nominee and how the campaigns had to tweak their strategies on a highly truncated timeline. The following are highlights from the sprawling, wide-ranging conversation.

Campaigns spar over candidate work ethic

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

“Why didn’t you trust your candidate more?” questioned Taylor Budowich, deputy campaign manager for the Trump campaign. “Why didn’t you put her out more? You said … you couldn’t ever compete with the amount of attention Donald Trump got. You never gave her a shot.”

The Harris campaign pushed back at Budowich, saying that its strategy was successful and not that the Trump campaign outworked them.

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

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

“I didn’t say she didn’t work hard. I said she got outworked,” Budowich clarified.

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

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

“Our people, once again, continue to shoot ourselves in the foot,” Fulks said.

“The discipline on the Right is better than the discipline on the Left,” he added. “And that is not about morals, values, any of that. It’s literally about discipline and seeing the big picture of how you win and what you can swallow in order to get to a win.”

Democratic fallout from the Biden-Trump debate

Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris campaign chairwoman, didn’t stray with the repeated messaging on Biden’s debate performance, reiterating he had a “bad night” and pointing to Obama as a precedent of incumbents having uneven debates, and argued the campaign saw a real path for Biden to win the election despite it all.

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

Without pointing to a particular moment, Fulks conceded that early in the debate, campaign staff could tell Biden wasn’t performing.

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

“I think that for us, and this was with all due respect to the president, we felt like there were challenges that were on full display at the debate,” said James Blair, the Trump campaign’s political director. “There’s also been days where those 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 has probably not been a more difficult period for a campaign team to navigate.”

Blair quickly interjected, noting that two assassination attempts and navigating the indictments were also challenging to navigate, and O’Malley Dillon later acknowledged the difficulty of the Trump team’s summer and mentioned she reached out to Susie Wiles, Trump campaign manager, in the aftermath.

When asked about the large number of Democrats calling for Biden to drop out of the race following his disastrous debate performance, Fulks referred to it as a “slow bleed.”

Fulks later agreed with a point LaCivita made earlier in the day: Visuals matter when running for office, and the Biden campaign wanted to put Biden out in public, doing a series of events to counter his debate performance.

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

The Trump campaign said it was preparing for what ended up becoming inevitable, adding that it began tracking and opposition research and polling alternative running mates as early as May on Harris but also ranged in other possible candidates, such as Michelle Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Trump assassination attempt

Clearly a pivotal political moment as much as it was a harrowing personal moment for both campaigns, the first assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, “severely limited where we could campaign because, after the first attempt, they basically told us, lock down, no more outdoor events,” said Tony Fabrizio, chief pollster for the Trump campaign. “And if we want to do an outdoor event, it needed, like, double the lead time.”

The Harris campaign, for its part, pulled its negative advertising in the days after the assassination attempt.

“We also were mindful about the way that we were campaigning. “There’s no place for political violence in democracy. And we wanted to make sure that our campaign was reflecting that in this moment,” added Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Harris campaign manager.

Biden drops out, Harris becomes nominee

The Harris campaign, pressed multiple times on whether it was made aware of Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 race prior to him making the announcement public or if there were any conversations beforehand about the possibility of Biden dropping out, asserted it found out shortly before he made his announcement and that there were no conversations beforehand.

Asked if there was any chance of another Democrat becoming the nominee besides Harris, Fulks said there’s 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 messy.

“From my perspective, Vice President Harris was the only commonsense choice to be made. But I think that President Biden made that — she’s his vice president and she was loyal to him, and he decided to support her,” Fulks said.