Soon after Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidential election, Democratic officials began working on a postmortem on her campaign, seeking to find out what went wrong. Lawmakers offered numerous potential reasons for her loss, including that Harris put forward inadequate economic proposals and alienated key constituencies.

A year earlier, Obama had made his own cameo in an “S.N.L.” sketch, appearing with Amy Poehler as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama’s rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, and Darrell Hammond as former President Bill Clinton.