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A senior adviser to the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz presidential campaign has admitted that the perceived lead Harris held over former President Donald Trump in recent polls was not as significant as it appeared. David Plouffe, a veteran political strategist and adviser to Harris, made this revelation during an interview on the popular podcast Pod Save America over the weekend, sparking concerns about the direction of the campaign.
Plouffe’s comments revealed that the comfortable lead over Trump that had been reported in recent months was, in fact, misleading. “This is the race we have; it’s the race we expected,” Plouffe said, explaining that the race between Harris and Trump is much closer than earlier polls suggested. He added, “I don’t think it’s going to open up for either candidate. I think it’s going to be close all the way in.”
Plouffe discussed how a string of polls over the past month had shown Harris with a comfortable lead over Trump, but this lead quickly evaporated as more recent data became available. He explained that the earlier polling numbers did not reflect the true state of the race, leading to what he described as a “freakout” within Democratic circles.
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“I think the freakout is because there were a bunch of polls, I’d say in the last month, that showed a lead for Kamala Harris that was not real,” Plouffe said during the interview. “It’s not what we were seeing. We’ve seen this thing basically be tied, let’s say, since mid-September.”
According to Plouffe, Harris never had a commanding lead over Trump, and the race has been neck and neck for some time. The perceived lead, which some media outlets and polls suggested was in Harris’s favor, was not backed by internal campaign data. Instead, both candidates have been running in a tight race that will likely stay competitive until the election day.
Plouffe emphasized that the Harris campaign anticipated a tight contest from the beginning and was not counting on an easy victory. He reminded listeners that, in key battleground states, the race will likely be decided by a very slim margin. “This thing’s going to be decided on the margins in these few number of states,” he said.
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