David Plouffe

Like she had to talk to Joe Biden to make sure even that was OK.

So that's kind of what we were dealing with.

I agree with that.

On the other hand, I just again, and this will frustrate people because everybody always wants to believe there was a decision that you could have made that would have changed, you know, a point and a half, which is a lot of votes, by the way.

It was close, but it's also it's a lot of votes.

Like at the end of the day, the incumbent president was deeply unpopular.

She was a vice president for that deeply unpopular president.

And they were running against someone in Donald Trump who voters said, you know, I have all these other concerns about him, but I think he's gonna be really good on the economy.

So super tough.

And I also think, you know, our party brand was much weaker than it was even in 20 or even in 16.

And that's sort of the point of my op ed, which is we need to get back to the point where there's more voters available to us in more places where you don't have to pull an inside straight to win every election.

Yeah, listen, in every state, you know, you have a sense of what's your pathway to victory from a voter standpoint.

And for us, it was a pretty narrow pathway.

It did include some Republicans, not many.

It included a lot of what you might consider center and slightly right of center independence.

And then obviously it was holding on to some of the parts of the

Democratic coalition that was cracking that Trump was making inroads into, particularly with young men.

And that was, you know, mostly centered around the economy.

You know, the truth is, I think oftentimes people think about the economy through people in their 30s or 40s.

You know, they might have kids.