Failed Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s senior campaign advisor has admitted that public election polling didn’t match up with internal poll data.
David Plouffe suggested the campaign’s internal data did not match corporate media polls that showed Harris ahead of President Donald Trump.
Plouffe also managed Barack Obama’s successful 2008 White House bid and later became a senior advisor to the president.
He admitted that the campaign’s internal polling “never” showed Harris leading Trump.
The observation was made in a post-mortem discussion with several leading Harris campaign staffers.
During the latest episode of the “Pod Save America” podcast, Harris campaign staffers discussed “what went wrong” for them in the presidential race.
“I think it surprised people,” Plouffe said.
“There was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw …
“It was just basically a race that in the battlegrounds was 46-47, 47-48.”
Harris entered the race in July, shortly after President Joe Biden dropped out.
Biden was forced to end his re-election campaign due to pressure from Democrat elites concerned about his mental capacity, age, and electability.
The concerns emerged following Biden’s fumbling debate performance against Trump.
Plouffe said that the “Biden-Trump 1.0” match-up was “obviously pretty catastrophic in terms of where the race stood.”
However, he contended Harris was “able to climb out” from behind and make it a “margin-of-error race.”
As shown in the RealClearPolitics national poll average chart, Harris boasted a 2-point advantage from late September until early October.
During the same period, Harris built a small betting odds lead.
Nevertheless, Trump soon caught up in the betting odds and ran away with it.
The betting market average was the only polling data that showed Tryump’s landslide victory.
The Harris team’s “internal analytics” showed “47-47” in Wisconsin and “48-47 Trump” in Pennsylvania, recalled Plouffe.
Plouffe noted they hoped to win over undecided voters and “get a little benefit from turnout, which we weren’t able to do.”
He summarized the Harris team’s stance come Election Day as: “We were hopeful.
“I don’t know how optimistic we were.”
Trump ended up winning all the battleground states, including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
He also made gains among working-class voters, minority groups, and young people.
Trump also appears to have prevailed in the popular vote.
“I think the political atmosphere, the desire for change, all those fundamentals that you’ve spent a lot of time talking about really presented huge challenges for us,” Plouffe said.
“So … we got there, but we didn’t get the breaks we needed.”
