David Plouffe, senior adviser to the Harris-Walz campaign, said most public polls are “hores‑‑‑” and discussed the campaign’s internal polling in a podcast interview released Sunday.
Plouffe, the manager of President Obama’s 2008 campaign, stressed how close the presidential race is and said polls showing either candidate winning by a significant margin should be dismissed.
“So I really can’t speak to the public polls. I spend very little time looking at them,” Plouffe said on “Pod Save America,” a podcast hosted by former Obama White House staffers. “I just don’t.”
“And most of them are horses‑‑‑,” he continued. “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 states, ignore it. Any point that shows Donald Trump up like that, ignore it.”
“This thing’s very close. It’s a margin-of-error race,” Plouffe added.
Plouffe said he would rather be Harris than Trump at this stage of the race, though it remains very close. He said he was hopeful for the Democrat’s chances, looking at Harris’s strength among some Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters.
“I think Kamala Harris may surprise at the end of the day with either straight-up Republicans or independents who are essentially Republicans. We’re seeing a continued strength there, and that matters a great deal, given how big those cohorts are,” he said.
“But listen: I think it may be that our internal data is exactly right. But if I were to hazard a guess, I think it may be undercounting her strength amongst Republican-leaning independents. So, we won’t put that in the bank, but let’s hope that’s right,” he later added.
Plouffe said he thinks Trump’s “big challenge” is that he is “incredibly reliant” on new voters, voters who have not voted in some time or voters who have never voted Republican before.
“As we look at the race, we give him credit for doing a good job there,” Plouffe said, “because my view on Trump basically, to break it down, is: If you think he’s going to get 100 votes in a precinct, you probably just assume he gets 110. So you can win a race where he overperforms.”
According to the Decision Desk HQ/The Hill’s national polling average, Harris is leading by 2.9 percentage points nationally, with 49.8 percent support to Trump’s 46.9 percent.