In these past few months, I spent a whole lot of time researching and writing about Kamala Harris. (Information that is now about as useful as the stats for the world’s top curling champions.)

Her presidential campaign was a repetition of her previous presidential campaign on a much larger scale. She blew through a ton of money, kept reinventing her campaign, failed to have a coherent message, blamed racism and sexism, and had her campaign devolve into infighting between family and professionals. That’s what happened in her failed 2019 campaign. And it happened again in 2024.

The difference was that this time she didn’t blow through a mere $36 million, but over $1 billion, with plenty of debt left over, including allegedly a whole lot of money shelled out to pay celebrities, and her campaign was dysfunctional with the usual infighting between various people inside it, and family, with Tony West, the husband of Maya Harris, standing in for his wife, who helped tank the 2020 campaign.

While the campaign spent money like water, it couldn’t manage to do the most basic things.

Before the election, I kept pointing out how I wasn’t seeing lawn signs. There was a good reason for that.

More than 1.5 million yard signs weren’t printed until late October. There weren’t basic reporting structures for organizers and volunteers in states until the end.

I’ll spare you the usual circular firing squad of campaign pros blaming each other and Biden. Campaigns are huge beasts and they’re often mismanaged. But this was a truly spectacular level of mismanagement. And much as they may try to blame the staff, not the candidate, as VP, Kamala had near total turnover in her staff, suggesting that she’s a horrendously bad boss. Now this may consist of actually being mean (and there’s at least one story that documents that) or just clueless and allows her various people to wrestle for power.

But at least we also know the campaign was racist.

The culture of the campaign was also a problem, said four Democrats. After melding the Biden loyalists with Harris’ longtime aides and new hires, the group wanted to move on from July’s drama. But campaign aides and outsiders complained to NOTUS for months that there was a lack of a defined leadership structure. Black aides felt routinely mistreated and demoralized, multiple people told NOTUS. Some had even wanted to make formal complaints and refrained for fear of retaliation.

Needed more equity.