A top adviser to the Harris-Walz camp has panned most public polling as unreliable — while claiming candidates’ campaigning barely affects voters.
“I really can’t speak to the public polls. I spend very little time looking at them,” said senior adviser David Plouffe on “Pod Save America,” a podcast comprised of former President Barack Obama alum, during an episode that dropped Sunday. “And most of them are horses–t.
“Some of them may be close, but, generally, I’d say any poll that shows Kamala Harris up 4 to 5 points in one of these seven [swing] states, ignore it. Any point that shows Donald Trump up like that, ignore it,” Plouffe said.
He also noted “how little the campaign matters,” contending that a well-run campaign on the ground only “can give you half a point or a point” in surveys.
Plouffe, 57, who served as Obama’s campaign manager in 2008 and later as one of his White House senior advisers, noted that many public polls underestimated former President Trump in 2016 and 2020.
But he also stressed that other Republicans were largely “overrated” by the polls and did more poorly than anticipated in 2022 and that 2018 was “probably a blend” for candidates from both parties.
Harris’ team has been very careful to temper expectations ahead of Nov. 5, with the vice president describing herself as the “underdog” in her Democratic presidential bid against GOPer Trump. Recently, her campaign has stopped touting its monster fundraising numbers over an apparent concern about complacency.
At the moment, Harris has a 1.5 percentage point edge over Trump in the latest RealClearPolitics aggregate of polling. Trump is up in the RCP map of battleground states.
“He’s a little stronger this time than [he] was last time,” Plouffee said, predicting Trump will get at least 48% of the popular vote. “It’s going to come down to a very narrow margin.”
Still, one silver lining for Dems has been the early voting data, the Harris adviser said.
“We like what we’re seeing in early voting data so far. We particularly like what we’re not seeing on the Trump data, which is there’s not an army of kind of incels showing up,” Plouffee said.
Trump has long been a skeptic of early voting but has recently sought to encourage his voters to show up before the official polling day to get as many of his supporters voting as he can.
Plouffe said that as for Harris’ camp, its internal data “may be undercounting her strength amongst Republican-leaning Independents.
“I think Kamala Harris may surprise at the end of the day with either straight-up Republicans or Independents who are essentially Republicans” voting for her, the adviser said. “We’re seeing a continued strength there, and that matters a great deal, given how big those cohorts are.”
One major hurdle he believes Trump faces is that his political foundation is built on something of a “rickety element” in that it relies on voters who haven’t cast ballots in a while or haven’t backed Republicans in the past.
“That’s the toughest thing to do in politics, is to get that cohort all the way through,” Plouffe said of the voting group, noting that Trump has had a pretty decentralized ground game to get those people to show up at the polls.
