Senior advisers who worked on the Kamala Harris campaign have admitted that the vice president had no pathway to victory.
Speaking on the Pod Save America podcast, several campaign advisers to the Harris campaign shared some hard truths they could not admit during the presidential election.
“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.
Plouffe also admitted that internal polling also showed that Kamala Harris never took the lead over Trump, even admitting that public polls showing Harris in the lead left him surprised.
“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.”
Plouffe was also joined by campaign staffers Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter.
Some Democrats have criticized Harris for not properly differentiating herself from President Joe Biden during the campaign, such as her interview on The View in which she said she would have done “nothing” different from her boss in her administration, but Stephanie Cutter felt that Harris was simply being loyal.
“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.’”
Quentin Fulks said that the Trump ads blasting Kamala Harris for her stance on transgender issues, such as paying for the gender transitions of incarcerated inmates with taxpayer dollars, were effective.
“I ultimately don’t believe that it was about the issue of ‘trans.’ I think that it made her seem out of touch, and it was sort of a pseudo-economic ad underneath it, because he was saying you’re going to pay for it with taxpayer money,” Fulks said.
“We tested a ton of responses to this, direct responses, and none of them ever tested as well as basically her talking about what she would do… the future, the type of president that she would be,” Fulks said.
Fulks said the campaign chose to avoid Trump’s attack ads in the hopes of introducing Harris in a positive way.
“If we spent this entire race pushing back on immigration attacks or crime attacks and pushing back against trans attacks, at what point are we bringing Trump down and/or introducing the vice president on our own terms?” Fulks said. “We’re playing on their field.”
Paul Roland Bois directed the award-winning Christian tech thriller, EXEMPLUM, which has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes critic rating and can be viewed for FREE on YouTube,Tubi, or Fawesome TV. “Better than Killers of the Flower Moon,” wrote Mark Judge. “You haven’t seen a story like this before,” wrote Christian Toto. A high-quality, ad-free rental can also be streamed on Google Play, Vimeo on Demand, or YouTube Movies. Follow him on X @prolandfilms or Instagram @prolandfilms.
