VP Kamala Harris’s campaign senior adviser, David Plouffe, admitted their internal polling never reflected the public polls.
“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.”
Of course, it seems it never occurred to these people that Harris was the problem.
It all goes back to President Joe Biden.
Cutter claimed Harris was loyal to Biden, putting her in a corner because she could not say anything negative about him.
Harris told The View she could not think of anything she’d do differently, which confused many of us. Why wouldn’t she differentiate herself from Biden? Well, that would mean distancing herself from the administration she belongs to:
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.“We knew we had to show her as her own person and point to the future and not try to rehash the past,” Cutter said. “But she also felt that she was part of the administration, and unless we said something like, ‘Well, I would have handled the border completely differently,’ we were never going to satisfy anybody.”“She had tremendous loyalty to President Biden,” Cutter continued. “Imagine if we said, ‘Well, we would have taken this approach on the border.’ Imagine the round of stories coming out after that, of people saying, ‘Well, she never said that in the meeting.’”
I honestly do not know what Harris ran on except abortion and “not Trump.”
Trump ran ads on Harris supporting taxpayers funding sex changes on prisoners. Why didn’t the campaign counter those ads?
Fulks insisted that countering Trump’s attacks on Harris meant having the campaign “playing on their field” instead of introducing Harris on their “own terms.”
OK, yeah, I could see that, but polls showed those ads against Harris did help some independents move to Trump.
Why? Probably because we cannot afford anything, and paying for body-altering surgeries is one of the last things we want to do!
But let’s go back to blaming Biden.
Harris inherited a deficit from Biden. Jon Favreau, a former speech writer for former President Barack Obama, said internal White House polls showed Trump winning 400 electoral votes over Biden.
Favreau also went down the blame Biden route:
“Joe Biden’s decision to run for president again was a catastrophic mistake,” Favreau added. “They refused to acknowledge until very late, that anyone could be upset about inflation. And they just kept telling us that his presidency was historic and it was the greatest economy ever.”Favreau accused Team Biden of “shivving” Vice President Harris and telling reporters quietly that she could not win.“I’m done being generous,” Favreau said, echoing a long line of Obama alum who have always disdained Biden and his inner circle.
An Economist/YouGov poll showed Harris supporters blaming Biden way more than Harris:
An Economist/YouGov poll asked Harris supporters straight-up whether they blamed Harris, Biden or a third option: “neither, it was just a bad year for Democrats.” That third option was the runaway winner, at 53 percent of Harris supporters.But notably, significantly more Harris voters were willing to blame Biden (24 percent) than Harris (just 6 percent). Again, this is despite the fact that Biden wasn’t actually on the ballot.
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