David Plouffe, who served in a top advisory role to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, made the admission during a recent interview with the Atlantic.

“I’m not sure, given the headwinds, any Democrat could have won,” he said, reflecting on Harris’s loss to President-elect Donald Trump on Election Day. 

“But if we had a primary in which a bunch of people ran and auditioned … through that process, whoever emerged … would have been a more fully formed person, would have had more time to mount a general election campaign. [Not having that process] is the cardinal sin,” Plouffe said. 

His words follow a barrage of criticism leveled at Democratic Party elders after President Joe Biden, the party’s all-but-certain presidential nominee, dropped his bid for reelection on July 21. 

At the time, Democrats had several options over how to select a new nominee to replace Biden. Some favored a whirlwind “mini primary” that would have had voters pick a new presidential candidate before the Democratic Party’s August convention. Other Democrats initially backed an open nominating process at the convention, with all of Biden’s delegates he had earned in primary victories throughout the year being released to candidates competing to win their favor. 

However, Biden almost immediately endorsed Harris to replace him at the top of the ticket. Party chiefs ultimately decided to follow his lead and coalesced around her, making her the uncontested candidate at the convention in August, and she easily clinched enough delegate support to win the nomination. 

Harris’s ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket without winning any primaries as the presidential candidate had critics stewing. Trump led Republicans in calling it a “coup.” ​​Some Democratic affiliates, including Black Lives Matter, slammed the process as an “anointing.” 

The criticisms echoed a letter Biden himself wrote to Democrats who were pressuring him to drop out of the race in early July. He rebuffed their calls at the time, saying, “We had a Democratic nomination process and the voters have spoken clearly and decisively.”

“I received over 14 million votes, 87% of the votes cast across the entire nominating process. I have nearly 3,000 delegates, making me the presumptive nominee of our party by a wide margin. … Do we now just say this process didn’t matter? That the voters don’t have a say?” he continued.

Plouffe’s latest comments indicate that the concerns about the primary process made an imprint at the deepest levels of Harris’s own campaign effort. 

While presidential candidates traditionally have a year or more to barnstorm the country during the primary season, the lack of such a process stunted the Harris campaign, Plouffe and others argued.