Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign team was caught off guard by reports suggesting she held a lead over Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential race.
Harris’ senior campaign adviser David Plouffe revealed that the campaign’s internal polling never indicated Harris was ahead of the former president.
The admission came after Harris’s defeat in the November election, where Trump secured a second term in the White House. Plouffe, appearing on “Pod Save America” on Tuesday, expressed surprise at media narratives that had portrayed Harris as a frontrunner.
“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,” he said, per the New York Post.
Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign manager; Quentin Fulks, the deputy campaign manager; and Stephanie Cutter, who led messaging and communications, also appeared on the podcast.
During the interview, the Harris campaign discussed what contributed to her not winning a single battleground state. One of the issues they touched on was the challenge of distancing Harris from her boss, President Joe Biden.
“She felt like she was part of the administration,” said Harris adviser Stefanie Cutter. “So why should she look back and pick out — cherry-pick some things that she would have done differently when she was part of it? And she also had tremendous loyalty to President Biden.”
“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 a meeting,’ or ‘What meeting when she said this,’ or ‘I remember when she did that.’ And it was just, it wasn’t going to give us what we needed because it wouldn’t be a clean break.”
One opportunity for Harris to distinguish herself from Biden came when the co-hosts of “The View” asked if there were any policies or decisions she would approach differently. Her response was, “Nothing comes to mind.”
Harris’ refusal to distinguish herself from Biden was also seen by voters and her critics, who argued that she failed to articulate a clear vision for her presidency, often relying on attacks against Trump rather than promoting her own agenda.
Post-election analysis indicates that economic concerns and immigration issues played a significant role in voters’ decisions. AP VoteCast data showed that 30 percent of voters felt their financial situation was worsening, up from 20 percent four years ago. Additionally, 40 percent of voters believed that illegal immigrants should be deported, an increase from 30 percent in 2020, per the BBC.
The Harris campaign acknowledged that the Trump campaign effectively leveraged social media, appeared on popular podcasts, conducted sit-down interviews with influencers, reached millions of viewers and promoted its policies.
Despite their best efforts, members of the Harris campaign said the campaign was doomed from the start, especially with having little time to rebrand the vice president after becoming the Democratic nominee.
