‘This Was a Rescue Mission’: Top Harris Advisor Throws Biden Under the Bus — Says President’s Internal Polls Were ‘Catastrophic’ Before He Quit
A top advisor for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign described her 107 day White House bid as a “rescue mission” amid “catastrophic” polls for President Joe Biden.
As part of a lengthy post-election feature published by The Atlantic on Monday, Harris campaign senior advisor David Plouffe said the internal numbers for Biden were “pretty gruesome” at the time he pulled out of the race in mid-July.
“When I got in, it was the first time I saw the actual numbers under the hood,” Plouffe said. “They were pretty gruesome. The Sun Belt was worse than the Blue Wall, but the Blue Wall was bad. And, demographically, young voters across the board—Hispanic voters, Black voters, Asian voters—were in really terrible shape. When the [candidate] switch happened, some of that stuff got a little bit better, but nowhere near where we ended up or where we needed to be. This was a rescue mission. It was catastrophic in terms of where it was.”
Plouffe also cited the lack of a competitive primary as a reason why the Democrats lost.
“I’m not sure, given the headwinds, any Democrat could have won,” Plouffe said. “But if we had a primary in which a bunch of people ran and auditioned … through that process, whoever emerged … would have been a more fully formed person, would have had more time to mount a general election campaign. [Not having that process] is the cardinal sin.”
