The leadership of outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign stated that internal polling never showed her ahead of President-elect Donald Trump, despite the fact that several so-called ‘legacy’ media outlets repeatedly put her in front of the incoming 47th president. After President Joe Biden began trailing Trump significantly in the polls in June and July, Harris’s entry into the race seemed to address Democrats’ concerns. From August until just before the election, many accredited public polls showed Harris leading Trump.
David Plouffe, a senior adviser on the Harris campaign, stated that internal polling consistently showed Harris behind or tied with Trump. “We didn’t get the breaks we needed on Election Day,” he said in an appearance on the left-wing Pod Save America podcast. “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.” Plouffe noted that internal polling remained mostly unchanged during the election, staying relatively static since Harris entered the race in July.
He appeared on the podcast alongside other leaders of the Harris campaign: Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign’s head; Quentin Fulks, the deputy campaign manager; and Stephanie Cutter, who managed messaging and communications. All of them agreed with the assessment. “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,” Dillon said. They shared other early signs of trouble, including predicting that Florida would shift even further toward Republicans and that Virginia would come dangerously close to falling into Republican hands.
Overall, the Harris campaign leadership characterized the race as doomed from the outset, suggesting that there was little Harris could have done to alter the outcome. The comments on the video of the podcast on YouTube were heavily against the guests. “This interview was absolutely bananas. They admit zero fault. What a disaster,” one commenter wrote. “The long and the short of it is that none of these people should ever run a national campaign ever again. The Obama era is over,” another said. The Harris campaign was experiencing internal panic, but this remained unknown to the public, leading to a widespread perception that the race was highly competitive. The results were the best for Republicans since 2004, with Trump winning the popular vote and sweeping every swing state.
