The walls were covered in dark-wood paneling. A U-shaped conference table was elegantly draped with maroon tablecloths and decorated with little jars of roses and calla lilies.

On one side of the table sat several senior staff members for the Biden-Harris campaign who looked a little bit as if they were undergoing a collective root canal without anesthesia. On the other side sat five leading Trump campaign staff members and allies who looked a little bit as if they were holding the dentist’s drill.

After every presidential election, the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School invites campaign strategists for both general-election candidates — as well as key staff members from losing primary campaigns — to unload about what happened. The discussions, which take place on panels moderated by journalists, can get heated, as they did in 2016. Maybe some years the event feels cathartic. This year, though, the big word was flawless.

Sheila Nix, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign chief of staff, used it on Thursday as each campaign outlined over dinner what had been its main strategy, saying Ms. Harris “ran a pretty flawless campaign.” And then Chris LaCivita, one of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign managers, lobbed the word back at Team Biden/Harris during one of the panels today.

“Flawless execution,” he sarcastically interjected, after Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the chair of the Biden and then the Harris campaign, labored to answer a question about the fateful debate that ended President Biden’s campaign.

LaCivita’s interruption got at a central tension in the aftermath of the election, one that has grated on Democrats outside the room and became a target of mockery from the Trump staff members inside it. For a campaign that lost, the Biden-Harris team has been reluctant to admit to specific mistakes — and that pattern continued today. They admitted they had lost, but their diagnosis was more about the mood of the country than tactical errors on their part. The ultimate answer may be a combination of both factors.

“We lost — clearly, we didn’t achieve what we had hoped to,” O’Malley Dillon said, as she answered a question about the challenges of Harris’s running as a change candidate while also being part of the current administration.

But she insisted that Harris had “created differentiation” from Biden.

“So much more of this is about how people felt, regardless of what the numbers said, about the economy,” O’Malley Dillon said. “And there’s just a general negative, clearly, feeling of where the direction of the country was.”

The Trump side sees the flaws — and the flawlessness — differently.

“Flawless campaigns don’t lose,” LaCivita told us during a break in the proceedings. “You can run a great campaign — you can run a good campaign — and still lose. But you can’t run a flawless campaign and lose.”

A discussion of ‘headwinds’

It is never fun to figure out what went wrong, be it in life, sports or politics, though it’s often the first step to figuring out how to succeed next time. Some candidates never do it at all — including Trump, whose false claims that he had won the 2020 election meant he never had to reckon publicly with the reasons for his loss.

We have found it striking how, in recent weeks, Democrats who four years ago defeated Trump have begun to talk about his most recent victory as if it were inevitable, whether because of voter unhappiness with Biden or the country’s direction. By this thinking, nothing went wrong. Instead, everything went according to some cosmic plan.

“These headwinds could be overrunning all the things, but we still, even within that, made major movement in the places where we campaigned, and we made our case,” O’Malley Dillon said.

The Trump campaign staff members seemed to be having a lot more fun than the Democrats in the room. Earlier in the day, they pilloried Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida because none of his allies had showed up for the discussion on the Republican primary, unlike former staff members for also-rans like Nikki Haley, Chris Christie and others.

Trump and his allies spent much of the past two years trying to telegraph the idea that his ascent as the Republican nominee was inevitable, despite his loss in the 2020 election, and that they would cruise to victory in November. But here, they seemed to be saying that victory had not been assured, and that it was their strategy and ability to overcome what LaCivita called “the switcheroo” that had made the difference.

Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s chief pollster, at one point made clear that, after Biden dropped out, the Harris campaign had brightened her image and moved voter perceptions significantly on key issues, including inflation. “It wasn’t enough to get where you needed to be in those seven states,” he said.

The election, Fabrizio said, proved that nobody ever knows what’s around the corner.

“It became incumbent upon us to not let the candidate change overpower the fact that the political environment did not change,” he said.

One issue that was debated on Friday was whether Harris should have distanced herself more clearly from Biden. At one point, O’Malley Dillon acknowledged that Biden had personally told Harris that she was free to do so. But Harris’s team said she preferred not to criticize the administration she serves in.

“There were lots of ways she did separate herself from Biden,” said Molly Murphy, a Harris pollster. “There certainly could have been more moments to be more pointed.” She added, “Hindsight’s 20/20.”

‘You won this race’

One of the more fiery exchanges came late in the afternoon when the Trump team tried to push the Harris campaign to acknowledge one mistake: that they had kept her too cloistered.

Taylor Budowich, a Trump ally and an incoming White House deputy chief of staff, questioned why Harris had been less available in interviews, specifically questioning why her episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast was shorter than normal.

Rob Flaherty, a deputy campaign manager for Harris, said that was because Harris had been in the Situation Room that day.

Budowich asked about the other 106 days of their campaign. “Why didn’t you trust your candidate more?” he said. He also made a larger claim that the Trump side had “outworked” the Harris team.

Quentin Fulks, the principal deputy campaign manager for the Harris campaign, vigorously objected to any questioning of their — and the vice president’s — work ethic. “You all had a better strategy and a strategy that worked, and you won this race,” Fulks said.

And while Fulks acknowledged that “anything that you say sounds like a defense” after a loss, he pointed out that they were there to discuss the race. “Look, we’re eating it,” he said. “We lost the race.”

That is when Budowich jumped back in.

“I honestly respect that,” he responded. “Because Ron DeSantis’s team didn’t show up.”