OAN Staff Blake Wolf
11:03 AM – Wednesday, November 27, 2024
Following Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat, top Harris advisors are reflecting on the campaign, revealing that they were “surprised” to see Harris leading in mainstream media public polling between September and October, since their own internal polls revealed she was far behind Trump.
Senior Harris campaign advisor David Plouffe recently spoke on some of the internal campaign calculations and specifically where things “went wrong.”
“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,” Plouffe stated.
Former campaign staffers Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter similarly reflected on the Harris campaign.
“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,” Cutter stated.
Cutter’s comments referenced criticism Harris faced after stating that “there is not a thing that comes to mind” that she would’ve done differently from how Biden handled his presidential term, while simultaneously labeling herself as the candidate of “change,” copying former Democrat President Barack Obama.
“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,” Cutter continued.
The campaign team went on to blame Biden’s unpopular administration, as well as the media for portraying Harris as “too scared to do interviews,” which Dillon thought was an unfair characterization.
“This portrayal created an impossible uphill battle for us,” Dillon said. “Kamala Harris is a leader who has consistently shown her ability to tackle tough questions and advocate for policies that matter to Americans.”
Although Dillon noted that the Harris campaign was unfairly characterized as “too scared to do interviews,” from the time she became the Democrat nominee, it took her over 100 days to do a formal press conference and nearly a month to appear in a sit down interview.
Additionally, the Harris campaign decided that it wouldn’t hurt to keep their nominee from appearing on the most popular podcast in the world, the Joe Rogan Experience (JRE), blaming the blunder on bad “timing.”
Podcaster Joe Rogan previously revealed that the Harris team demanded that he go out of his way to travel to Harris, and keep the episode to only an hour, which is significantly less time than the average JRE episode.
However, when Trump’s turn came to appear on the podcast, he had a three hour conversation with Rogan, which garnered 51 million views on YouTube alone, showing the American public that Trump wasn’t afraid to face any questions.
“There’s a lot of intrigue around this, a lot of theories,” Cutter stated, regarding the Rogan mishap.
“It’s pretty simple. We wanted to do it… I hate to repeat this over and over, but it was a very short race with a very limited number of days and for a candidate to go to Houston, which is a day off the playing field in a battleground, getting that timing right is really important,” Cutter continued.
“She was ready, willing to go on Joe Rogan… would it have changed anything, it would have broken through, not because of the conversation but the fact that she was doing it, and that was the benefit of it,” Cutter stated. “But it didn’t ultimately impact the outcome one way or another.”
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