David Plouffe says Kamala Harris Campaign’s Internal Polling Never Had Her Ahead of Trump

From [HERE] Senior advisers to Vice President Kamala Harris’ failed presidential campaign suggested this week that there just wasn’t much else Harris could have done to beat Donald Trump.

Harris couldn’t have distanced herself from President Joe Biden, they said, because she was loyal. She couldn’t have responded more forcefully to attacks over trans rights, because doing so would have been playing Trump’s game.

And she might not have had much chance of winning anyway, given the deficit she inherited from Biden when he dropped out of the race in July.

“We were hopeful. I don’t know how optimistic we were, but we thought, OK, this is tied, and if a couple things break our way [we could win],” David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the campaign, said Tuesday on the “Pod Save America” podcast in a joint interview with fellow Harris campaign alums Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks and Stephanie Cutter.

Plouffe said the campaign’s internal polling never had Harris ahead of Trump.

“We didn’t get the breaks we needed on Election Day,” he 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.”

There’s no doubt that voter anger over high prices hurt Harris, just as it has hurt incumbent politicians all over the world. Since Trump’s victory, however, Democrats have debated the relative impacts of other factors, such as the campaign’s muted response to Trump’s anti-trans TV ads and Harris’ decision not to say how she’d be different from Biden.

During an early October appearance on “The View,” Sunny Hostin, one of the hosts of the daytime talk show, asked Harris if there was anything she would have done differently than Biden, whose approval rating had been underwater since 2021.

“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris said, in an answer ready-made for a Trump TV ad. “And I’ve been part of most of the decisions that have had impact.”

Many Democratic pollsters and strategists have questioned why Harris didn’t give some example of how she’d be different, such as by saying she would have acted faster than Biden did to reduce migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Cutter said the campaign heard the second-guessing ― but, she said, Harris was merely being true to herself and loyal to Biden, and saying otherwise would have backfired. [MORE]