Lessons from Hillary: Harris campaign faces a familiar playbook versus Trump

WASHINGTON - Francesca Hagadus, a self-described “ Hillary girl, ” woke up crying the morning after Election Day 2016.

She was exhausted and demoralized from what had happened just hours earlier while watching alongside some 300 other Hillary Clinton supporters assembled at Crabtree’s Kittle House in the New York hamlet of Chappaqua where the Democratic presidential nominee and her husband moved after leaving the White House.

The group of neighbors and friends had gathered for the election results over a meal of roast beef, chicken and salmon paired with wine and champagne, anticipating like so many in America that Donald Trump would be getting nowhere close to the Oval Office.

"By 11 p.m., it was just the waiters and a few of us from Chappaqua Friends of Hillary," Hagadus recalled in an interview with USA TODAY. "No one was saying anything. We were just staring at each other."

Fast forward to 2024, and Democrats are scouring their memories and dusting off the postmortems as they fight another campaign against Trump, albeit with a new candidate in the 59-year old Kamala Harris.

For many former Clinton supporters, Harris’ impending nomination as the Democratic candidate for president feels like déjà vu. They remember the morning after the election. But they also say that this time they're better prepared for the campaign ahead.

From an issues standpoint, they insist they've got a compelling argument to turn out voters by pointing to the Trump-fueled Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v Wade.

From a political standpoint, they say that Trump is no longer an unknown quantity. They know now what lies ahead, including the name-calling and sexist and misogynistic language that can spread even more than eight years ago thanks to a more sophisticated conservative media ecosystem.

“We would respond to outrageous lies about Hillary and the pizza parlor on social media without knowing they were paid trolls,” said Hagadus, referring to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that falsely tied the Democratic nominee to a purported pedophilia ring. “Now, we just block the trolls and volunteer to get out the vote instead."

If she wins in November, Harris would be the first female president in U.S. history. A child of immigrants, she'd also be the first woman of color as the child of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father.

That's red meat for Trump, who more than a decade ago helped lead the conspiracy theory movement that questioned Barack Obama's birthplace in America (it wasn't true) and then did the same with Harris (it's also not true) when she was campaigning as Joe Biden's vice presidential pick in 2000.

Halfway through 2024, Trump and his Republican allies are already going full throttle against Harris.

"I call her 'laughing Kamala,'" the former president said during an July 20 rally in Michigan, his first event following the Republican National Convention and a week after surviving an attempted assassination. "She's crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh."

Last week in North Carolina, with Biden fresh out of the White House campaign and Harris sliding in as his replacement, the Republican presidential nominee shed his post-shooting calls for unity by apologizing to his supporters because he didn't plan to "be nice" anymore.

He then called Harris "the most incompetent and far-left vice president in history."

This kind of rhetoric sounds familiar to anyone who remembers the Trump vs. Clinton battles of 2016, when the reality television star and then-rookie politician mocked his Republican primary challengers and then painted his Democratic general election rival as "Crooked Hillary."

Terry Szuplat a former Obama speechwriter and the author of Say It Well, a forthcoming book on public speaking, predicted the 2024 race is going to get even more ugly. “Expect attacks on Harris that are both explicitly and implicitly racist and misogynistic," he said.

Harris and her newly-mounted presidential campaign have tried to avoid getting sucked into the juvenile name-calling. At the same time, speaking to campaign staffers last Monday, Harris argued that the election was a choice for voters between “a country of freedom, compassion, and rule of law, or a country of chaos, fear and hate.”

Szuplat praised Harris for speaking about how she’ll defend American’s freedom, including the freedom of women to make decisions about their own body. After all, he noted how Trump appointed three conservative judges to the Supreme Court who overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling from 1973 that provided constitutional protections for women seeking abortions.

“She’s staying positive, hopeful, and optimistic,” he said. “Americans are exhausted by the divisiveness and the nastiness of politics.”

Mini Timmaraju, the CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, told USA TODAY that she is also happy to see Harris leaning into abortion and reproductive freedom as key campaign issues.

“She’s not afraid to talk about it, and that resonates with and inspires people - especially in this moment when the American people are fired up about this issue,” she said.

There are other lessons to draw from Clinton's loss in 2016 to Trump.

"Don't forget men," said Carol Evans, the founder of Executive Women 4 Hillary in 2016 and the co-founder of 100 Days 4 Harris in North Carolina. "Invite, welcome and get the men involved. And don't worry about likability. She's running for president."

Olivia Lapeyrolerie, who served as a press secretary for Clinton's presiential campaign in Columbus, Ohio, recalled one moment in particular from that 2016 White House race that Harris' team can learn from. That October, Trump’s “grab em by the p----” comments went public.

“Someone who is a nominee for a major political party said this about women. They must hate women,” she said she remembers thinking. Yet, she did not have the choice to put those comments out of her mind. She had to work through them – and that took a toll. Her advice to the Harris campaign staff: Take care of your mental health.

“I'm particularly concerned for the women of color that are working at the staff level on her campaign as a Black woman who has worked in those spaces,” Lapeyrolerie, who now works as progressive politcial consultants.

Another obvious example from 2016 is how much emphasis Harris needs to put on the all-important battlegrounds of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Clinton lost all three states when her Democratic campaign failed to recognize how many voters the Republican could turn out there that wouldn't normally show up to the ballot box. Inside the Clinton 2016 campaign, there was a feeling of inevitability that many staffers had assumed and which didn't go away until they'd lost on Election Day.

"Don't take anything," Lapeyrolerie said, "for granted."

Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is a White House correspondent for USA TODAY. You can follow her on X, formerly Twitter, @SwapnaVenugopal

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Lessons from Hillary: Harris campaign faces a familiar playbook versus Trump