Gabe Kaminsky writes for the Washington Examiner about one way the recent presidential campaign could have a long-term impact on American politics.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s historic — and unsuccessful — $1.5 billion spending spree in the 2024 election is poised to influence how future candidates use their coffers, namely when it comes to avoiding her mistake of running a celebrity-centric campaign.

The Harris campaign burned through the money in just 15 weeks, operating on a highly compressed schedule on the heels of President Joe Biden dropping out of the race and passing the torch to the vice president. Following her loss to President-elect Donald Trump, Harris has come under significant scrutiny over her campaign’s payments to celebrities and various companies for events, particularly after a Washington Examiner report in November that cited a million-dollar disbursement to Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions.

“There certainly needs to be a huge conversation about how to connect with voters rather than throwing money at famous people,” said Jon Reinish, a Democratic strategist. “The spending and the strategy reflects stale, out-of-touch thinking by a Democratic elite class of Beltway consultants who haven’t mastered media, messaging, or actually reaching and turning out voters in a dozen years.”

Now, amid infighting within the Democratic Party, the consultant class is seeking to determine what went wrong with the Harris campaign and what can be learned from her loss despite her massive cash advantage. Top advisers to Harris are under fire from progressives for not taking accountability for her loss. Instead, her team has justified the defeat by pointing to the short time frame of Harris’s candidacy and suggesting that Harris was not in a position to distance herself from Biden’s unpopular presidency due to her role as his vice president.

The Harris campaign and aligned political action committees spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising — which has long been a key way for candidates to connect with voters across the country.