For months, voters were told outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris was ahead of President-elect Donald Trump in the months leading up to the 2024 election. Yet, insiders working on her campaign were well informed that Harris was not in the lead throughout the entire election cycle.
A November 2 CNN poll showed Harris leading Trump by six points in Wisconsin and five in Michigan. An October New York Times/Siena College survey claimed Harris was ahead in every battleground state except Arizona, while another poll put the vice president ahead of Trump by three points in Iowa just two days before Election Day.
However, David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the Harris campaign, confessed on Wednesday that internal polls never actually showed the failed Democrat candidate ahead of Trump in swing states. Instead, he said her campaign was hoping for the best on November 5.
“We were behind,” Plouffe admitted. “I mean, I think it surprised people because there were these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.”
Harris’ campaign was one massive $1.5 billion scam.
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On October 31, Plouff wrote on X that President-elect Donald Trump was “not liking his internal briefings on the state of the race in Pennsylvania.” Trump ultimately won the state in a landslide. An Intelligencer article quoted Plouffe saying that the race would be “too close for comfort,” pushing repeated claims that Harris was ahead of Trump in the polls. In August, he told Axios that Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina were Harris’ to win— which she didn’t even come close to securing.
In addition, just weeks before Election Day, Plouffe dismissed public polls, calling them “harsh,” saying that he would have preferred Harris over Trump at the time of the race.
“I think it may be that our internal data is exactly right,” he said at the time.
Kamala Harris’ senior adviser David Plouffe admits internal polls never showed her ahead of Trump in battleground states, saying they hoped for the best on Election Day
— Martin Walsh (@martinwalsh__) November 27, 2024
The media lied and claimed Harris was leading by several points
Kamala lost all 7 battleground states to… pic.twitter.com/uqdDSGqNkR
During Plouffe’s first interview after the significant election loss for his team, he noted that the race between Harris and Trump did not move much. He acknowledged that after the first and only presidential debate between the pair, Harris’ polling only increased by a slight 0.5 points. He also let slip that the Harris campaign could not benefit from voter turnout.
Ultimately, Trump won all seven swing states in a momentous victory. Yet, Plouffe tried to save face and claimed that “it’s really hard for Democrats to win battleground states.”
