Kamala Harris raised over $1 billion—much of which was spent on advertising—but internal polling showed that she still struggled to convince swing-state voters that Donald Trump had been a bad president.

The Democratic Party now finds itself grappling with how it lost so definitively, and how it so thoroughly misunderstood the American electorate.

In the final sprint to the election, Kamala Harris’ campaign — at her insistence, aides and allies said — started playing Donald Trump’s most incendiary comments on the jumbotrons at her rallies, displaying in technicolor his meandering, racist and, sometimes, violent rhetoric.