Maybe no one could have beaten Trump this year

The Pod Save America squad spent nearly all of July urging President Joe Biden to step aside in this election in favor of someone, anyone — preferably Kamala Harris — taking his place as the Democratic nominee.

Now, a day after Donald Trump beat Harris to win re-election, some of the hosts are admitting: Maybe no Democrat could have beaten Trump this year.

Hosts Jon Favraeu, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeffier and Tommy Vietor weighed in on Harris’ loss on Wednesday’s Pod Save America episode, working through various potential contributors to her loss, including the economy, the war in Gaza and Biden’s unpopularity. Trump was declared the winner of the presidential election early Wednesday, with forecasts suggesting he will win the popular vote for the first time.

But Lovett noted that despite the momentum Harris built over her roughly 100-day campaign, neither she nor any other Democrat could have overcome the cemented unpopularity of the Biden administration.

“I’m sure there are ways the campaign could have done a little bit better, I don’t know,” host Jon Lovett said on a Pod Red America episode Wednesday. “But at the end of the day, I don’t know what you could have said to overcome that heavy power, right? Because some of what we’re talking about here is: It doesn’t matter what she said. People didn’t trust it. They wouldn’t trust the Democrats right now, and so what I think we were hoping to see, well, is, ‘Could Kamala Harris overcome Joe Biden’s commitments?’ The answer is, maybe she couldn’t.”

Favreau agreed, saying that Harris’ biggest problem may have been trying to separate herself from a man with whom she served as vice president. “Obviously there are a lot of reasons why it’s hard to do,” he said.

Pfeffier pushed back, conceding that Harris’ problems may have been insurmountable, but noted that her quest — to try to succeed a deeply unpopular sitting president while campaigning against a deeply unpopular former president who commands a broad swath of Americans – was “virtually impossible” to accomplish within 100 days.

“I’ll go to my grave believing that in the situation we were in with a hundred days left, nobody would have done a better job than Kamala Harris did in this race,” Pfeffier later added.

It was partly on the liberal foursome of Barack Obama veterans that Harris came out on top at all. Labeling Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump in June as “f**king awful” and a “f**king disaster,” the hosts were among the first prominent Democrats to publicly push for Biden to drop out.

Vietor even had a war of words with MSNBC host Joe Scarborough after he made the accusation Morning Joe star to try to support Biden. “I don’t mean anything against him,” Vietor later told the Daily Beast about the episode. “He has a relationship with Joe Biden. Politics is personal. I understand where he’s coming from. We didn’t try to make it personal, it’s just about the future of the country.”

Although what final reason Democrats will use to explain Harris’ defeat among the many they are floating, Lovett admitted Wednesday, may not be easy to pin down.

“It’s a ‘choose your own adventure,'” he said.

The group did not acknowledge their own role in bolstering another candidate to replace Biden, although they said they would use their pedestal to warn of the dangers of an incoming Trump administration.

“We’re all on the same team here, and if we’re going to figure this out, I think we’re going to have to be good to each other right now and in the coming months, because I think solidarity is important,” Favreau said.