Harris camp’s own polling never showed VP leading Trump, team ‘surprised’ by reports showing her ahead: top adviser

Vice President Kamala Harris’ advisers dished that they were “surprised” to see public polling showing her ahead of Donald Trump in September and October of the election — because internal polling was showing her way behind.

“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,” David Plouffe, Harris’ senior campaign adviser said on Pod Save America.

Harris’ team sat down for an interview with the podcast that came out Tuesday and spoke about what went wrong to have her lose every single swing state.

The campaign spoke about the difficulties they faced figuring out how to distance Harris away from President Biden, since they were a part of the same administration, despite voter concerns.

“She felt like she was part of the administration. 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,” Harris adviser Stefanie Cutter said.

“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.”