Kamala Harris advisers: Internal polling never showed VP ahead
A senior adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign said their own internal polling never showed her leading President-elect Donald Trump, and they were "surprised" when public polls put her ahead.
"We were behind, 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," senior campaign adviser David Plouffe said on the politics podcast "Pod Save America" that aired Tuesday.
Harris lost decisively to Trump, 78, earlier this month after he swept all seven battleground states, winning the Electoral College and the popular vote, the first time a Republican has done so since former President George W. Bush won in 2004.
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In an exclusive interview, Plouffe was joined by fellow Harris campaign high-level staffers Stefanie Cutter, Jen O'Malley Dillon, and Quentin Fulks in their first interviews since losing the election that was predicted to be razor thin.
"When Kamala Harris became the nominee, she was behind. We kinda, you know, climbed back. Even post-debate, we still had ourselves down in the battleground states, but very close," Plouffe said.
The former campaign manager for former President Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign said they were paying attention to polls asking voters whether the country was on the right track and President Joe Biden's approval ratings, which were consistently low.
These factors combined with an economy most Americans deemed as failing and a shortened campaign after Biden dropped out of the race in July are what Plouffe described as a "challenging political environment" for the campaign.
"The fact that we got the race to dead heat was positive," he said.
In an attempt to highlight the risks of a second Trump administration, Plouffe said the campaign worked to tie Trump to Project 2025, the controversial conservative presidential transition playbook that received massive backlash.
"Project 2025 ending up being about as popular as the Ebola virus, so we did a lot of good work there," Plouffe joked. "And now, of course, the son of a b**h lied about it and he's hiring everybody who authored it. Project 2025 is going to be the Trump administration agenda, as we pointed out."
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After Biden, 82, dropped out, the campaign struggled to distinguish Harris from the administration's record and poor view by the public.
"We knew what the data was, we knew we had to show her as her own person and point to the future and not try to rehash the past," Cutter, an Obama-era adviser and 2012 deputy campaign manager said. "But, she also felt that she was a part of the administration."
Harris was pressured throughout the campaign to differentiate herself from Biden by criticizing some aspect of his administration. This, Cutter said, was something she was not willing to do.
"Why should she look back and pick out, cherry pick some things she would have done differently when she was part of it?"
Cutter added: "She also had tremendous loyalty to President Biden."
"The most she felt comfortable with saying was 'Look, vice presidents never break with their presidents,'" Cutter said. "The only time in recent memory is when Pence broke with Trump after Trump stormed the Capitol."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Kamala Harris advisers: VP was never ahead in internal polling