Senior adviser admits internal polling never had Kamala Harris ahead of Trump

Vice President Kamala Harris’s epic election loss to Donald Trump may have stunned gushing celebrities and her stalwart supporters but within her campaign, the writing was on the wall way before November 5th.

David Plouffe, a senior adviser on the Harris campaign, revealed that internal polls never reflected the optimism of public polls showing the Democrat nominee leading or tied with Trump. Plouffe joined other campaign leaders including Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter in their first post-election interview on the Pod Save America podcast to discuss the realities and challenges in the 2024 presidential race.

(Video Credit: Pod Save America)

The group seemed to admit Harris never stood a chance of winning since jumping onto the top of the Democratic ticket once President Joe Biden was jettisoned as the presumptive nominee.

“We didn’t get the breaks we needed on Election Day,” Plouffe said. “I think it surprised people because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.”

Even after Harris replaced Biden in late July, the polls seemed to remain the same, according to Plouffe.

Dillon, chair of the Harris-Walz campaign, added, “The truth is that we really thought this was a very close race; we talked about the entire time we saw it as a margin-of-error race.”

The four seemed to circle around the real causes of the failed bid, blaming the short time Harris had to campaign and her ties to Biden and the administration.

“This political environment sucked, OK,” Plouffe said. “We were dealing with ferocious headwinds and I think people’s instinct was to give the Republicans and even Donald Trump another chance. So we had a complicated puzzle to put together here in terms of the voters and it was gonna take a little bit more independent Republicans than we saw in ‘20, maybe a percent more Republican voters for us.”

Looking ahead, Plouffe said Democrats “have to dominate the moderate vote.”

Democratic strategist James Carville offered a decidedly different take this week, scorching the young staffers on Harris’s campaign and the disastrous decisions that doomed the race, including not appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

“When you put a campaign together and you hire young people to do work, let me tell you exactly what you tell these people what I would tell them,” Carville said on the Politicon podcast. “Not only am I not interested in your f*cking opinion. I’m not even gonna call you by your name. You’re 23 years old. I don’t really give a sh*t what you think.”

Harris was “ready” and “willing” to do the show, according to Cutter who was in charge of the campaign’s messaging and communications.

“We wanted to do it … We had discussions with Joe Rogan’s team. They were great. They wanted us to come on. We wanted to come on. We tried to get a date to make it work, and ultimately we just weren’t able to find a date,” Cutter said.

Plouffe contended that one of the driving forces in the campaign’s approach was to emphasize the “threat level of a Trump second term.”

“I think if you look at our internal data…we did a lot of that. We just didn’t get it to the extent that we needed to win. But at the end of the day, I think people—you know—it was the price of eggs that drove a lot of the debate here,” he admitted.

“So, I think that that is an incredibly faulty reading that what we should have done is just lift up Kamala Harris. We clearly did—her favorability rating increased by, I believe, 15 points,” he said. “So we were very focused on lifting her up. But to win a race like this, given the political atmospherics, which were quite challenging, we had to raise the risk of a Trump second term.”

Social media users blasted the campaign team for essentially lying to voters.

Frieda Powers

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