When Kamala Harris took over Joe Biden’s ailing campaign this summer, she went looking for help. Donald Trump had a commanding lead in the polls, threatening to make competitive Democratic strongholds like Virginia, and she had barely 100 days to turn the race around. The vice president needed a senior operative independent of the president and his loyalists that stocked the top ranks of her campaign. She quickly landed on David Plouffe, the strategist who’d run Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and advised his reelection effort.
If Plouffe is known for anything besides his work with Obama, with whom he’s still close, it’s for labeling Democratic anxiety as “bed-wetting.” Since 2008, when he first used the term, he has occasionally emerged in the final stretch of presidential races to try and redirect liberal worries, often to good effect — but not always. In 2016, he repeatedly and confidently predicted a Hillary Clinton victory over Trump.
Since he started advising Harris, Plouffe has shied away from commenting publicly on the 2024 election, but with nervousness rising after a battery of new polls this week showed Trump eliminating Harris’s lead nationally and in several must-win swing states, I figured he might want to weigh in once again. On Sunday, we spoke about how the Harris campaign sees the state of the race: Why it’s tied, what he makes of her sliding numbers among Black and Latino men, Trump’s lingering strengths and under-appreciated weaknesses, and why, in the end, he remains confident.
We’re talking a few hours after a bunch of new public polls were published showing a tighter race than just a few weeks ago. Let’s start there: What’s your analysis of why the race has narrowed to an effective tie since the convention this summer?
Well, inside the campaign we’ve had the race very close now for many weeks. So we’ve not seen much volatility. You know, the real change was between when she became the nominee through, let’s say, the second week of September. Obviously Trump had a big lead and that lead was erased. But we’ve seen a steady race since then. So my advice to people who are paying attention to this race is: Any poll out there that shows a lot of volatility is inconsistent with where this race stands.
Some of the polls after the debate had, say, Harris 48-Trump 44. Donald Trump’s not gonna get 44 percent of the vote — he was artificially low in those polls. Taking it back to 2012, there were periods in that race where Obama’s lead was larger in public polling than we saw it, because those polls had Romney down at like 42 or 43. But the difference between that and 47 percent was voters who were not going to vote for Barack Obama.
At the end of the day, this is a race in which we’ve seen enormous steadiness in our own data, and slow improvement through August, through September. Right now we’re sitting at a very close race in all seven battleground states, where you’d rather be Kamala Harris than Donald Trump, because she’s got a slightly higher ceiling. Ultimately, when the votes all get allocated and everybody turns out, we still think that she’s got a better chance of getting 49.5 or 50 percent of the vote in enough states compared to Trump.
If that’s the case, then to what do you attribute the gap between the public numbers and what you say you’re seeing internally? If you use this NBC one as an illustration, the margin has narrowed from 5 points to zero.
Well, listen, I don’t pay much attention to public polls, because we have multiple sources of data that we trust. But I saw an analysis. That NBC poll is of registered voters, number one, not likely voters. And I think it was, the last time they polled it, 49-44. Now it was 48-48. So the Harris number is about the same. Trump in that poll just got back stuff that he was eventually going to get back! So any poll that shows Kamala Harris at 44 or Donald Trump at 44 is not based in reality. Both of these candidates are receiving about 47, 48, with some people still deciding how to vote and whether to vote.
I think there’s way too much attention paid to the polls. And we’ve not seen numbers like this internally, with tremendous volatility. When there is volatility, it tends to be because one candidate is lower than the reality of what their vote share is going to be. We’re very focused on a race where there’s not a lot of volatility. Obviously people are starting to vote by mail, they’re going to start voting in person early, and we’ll learn a lot from that. We like what we’re seeing so far: In most states, we’re seeing a lot more first-time or irregular-voting Democrats than Republicans, and Trump is very reliant on first time and irregular voters.
But we’ll see. This is going to be close all the way, and I know for Democrats that’s uncomfortable. But that’s just the reality. ’16 was close, ’20 was close, ’12 was close. This is going to be close. And this one may be close in more states than we’ve seen in a long time. We could have six, seven states come down to a point, point-and-a-half. That’s probably where this is headed.
Let’s talk about those previous elections for a second. In each of those, you’ve had a moment where you address what you’ve called the “bed-wetters” and make the case for calm, or at least for more focused or productive anxiety. Are you saying that you read the concern this time as similar to the last few elections? How do you see this race as comparable to those? Presumably right now you’d rather be in a position like ’08 right now, but what about ’12 or ’16 or ’20?
’08 wasn’t close, but ’12, ’16, ’20 all were. First of all, the thing you can measure is activism: the daily number of calls made in battleground states, daily numbers of doors knocked. And we see the steady increase that you’d like to see so that you have the operation to win a close race. I think the people on the ground in Nevada, or on the ground in Philadelphia, are channeling whatever anxiety they have into activism.
But at the end of the day, the way to think about this race is: Donald Trump won narrowly in ’16, when he could win some states with 46.5 percent or 47. He lost in ’20 even though his vote share was slightly higher than that because there were fewer third-party voters. You know he’s going to get a healthy amount of the vote! I understand there’s some Democrats who say, “How could Donald Trump get 48, 48.5 percent of the vote?” That’s the country we’re living in. That’s the electorate that we have. So the only question that matters in terms of the presidential race is: Can Kamala Harris exceed Donald Trump’s vote share? And I think he’s got difficulty — this is the historical issue for him — climbing into the 49, 49.5, 50 percent range. And I still think that is a challenge for him. That’s why I’d still rather be Kamala Harris than Donald Trump, because I still think she’s got a better chance of reaching that win number that’s going to be required in these battleground states.
Okay, but let’s get a bit more specific. Public polling has fairly consistently shown Democratic slippage among both Latino and Black voters, particularly men, in recent years. That includes the VP running behind where President Biden was, and both Clinton and Obama before him with these voters. This is clearly where a lot of the recent anxiety comes in.
It’s always curious to me — and I went through this in the Obama years — how 100 percent of the attention from an electoral strengths and weaknesses standpoint is spent on Democrats struggling with certain parts of the electorate. The bigger issue here is Donald Trump’s huge struggle with women voters, college-educated voters, suburban voters. It’s almost like that’s just accepted. Well, that’s the reality! I’d love to see a little bit of attention paid to that. You can see that he’s worried about it — he’s out there saying, “I’m going to be the great protector of women,” which actually complicates his ability to improve, which may be a fatal weakness for him.
We only look at seven states and the congressional district in Nebraska. I personally don’t look at a national poll because it doesn’t matter to me as it relates to the presidential race. But in these battleground states, we believe we’re going to hit the number needed with both African American voters and Latino voters to win the election. That’s also partnered with doing exceedingly well with women of all ages and races, as well as college-educated voters, and doing quite well with older white voters in the Upper Midwest, without college degrees.
I think some of the public polls — again, I don’t spend much time on them — show Harris at something like 78 percent with Black voters, to 14 percent for Trump. That’s not 100 percent of the electorate, and we spend a lot of time trying to understand: When 100 percent of the electorate gets allocated, both in terms of vote share and in terms of turnout, what does that look like? It’s going to take a lot of hard work with every voter to make sure we hit our vote share target numbers, but we’re confident we’re on a trajectory to do that.
Of course, Trump is going to do a little bit better than he did in ’20 with some of these voters, just as we’re going to do better with some voters than Biden did. But I think that when you look at, ultimately, how the vote is going to be allocated — particularly the Latino vote — basically you’ve got numbers in Florida that really would affect any national poll. And what matters is Western Hispanic voters, in Nevada and Arizona, and the Puerto Rican community in Pennsylvania. How are those votes ultimately going to be allocated? And again, we’ve got a big program to reach them.
I am also interested in talking about Trump’s weaknesses, but let’s look at what he’s doing right now. There’s been plenty said about how he’s spending time in California and, soon, Manhattan. He, and Republicans, are also spending a ton of money on anti-trans ads. On that, it seems clear what he’s doing, but have you seen it move the needle purely as an electoral tactic?
You know, he’s 100 percent negative, which is interesting. Ultimately you’ve got to give people some reason to vote for you — people who are undecided, people who are concerned about his character, his instability. He’s giving them no reason to vote for him, so I think that’s a very curious, and ultimately, I think, flawed, strategy. I think he’s going to Madison Square Garden and California because he’s starting to have rally sites not filled with people, people streaming out of them. I think the act’s grown a little stale, so I think he wants to go out there, go to places where they haven’t seen him in a while. It doesn’t have any organizational value. He’s a New York guy, I’m sure he’s always wanted to play the Garden. At the end of the day I think there’s something going on in terms of his psychology.
He is deeply struggling with women voters of every age, and you can see he knows that. So, “I’m going to protect women,” “sending abortion back to the states is what everybody wanted,” trying to scare people that there’s people lurking on every block who will do damage — that’s not the America that people who live in suburban areas or even cities or rural areas understand. It’s a very ham-handed way of trying to correct something clearly his team has told him. Which is: You’ve got real electoral problems right now with women voters. Remember, he tried to do this in ’20, talking about MS-13.
But we don’t see any evidence that it’s working, and in our research, particularly qualitative research, when Trump’s talking about, “I want to be a protector of women,” a lot of the women who’ve not decided yet who to vote for see that, and it does the opposite of what Trump thinks it does. They laugh at him. And when he says, “Everybody wanted abortion to go back to the states,” a vast majority of people who are going to decide this election don’t think that. He’s kind of compounding his problems. So for me, the more he sticks to that in the last three weeks, the better off we’ll be.
And yet, again, it’s essentially tied. As far as your campaign’s headwinds go, how high do you rank the problem of incumbency? Or, to put it more bluntly, the unpopularity of the Biden administration, of which the VP is a part.
This question about why we are tied, I understand. I’m one of these people, I wish Donald Trump couldn’t get more than 44 percent of the vote because he’s Donald Trump. A Republican candidate for president, when you think about a two-way vote, is going to get 48 percent of the vote. Look at our “landslide” in ’08. John McCain still got into the 46 percent range, and in some states better than that. We don’t live in a country where someone’s going to win a presidential landslide anytime soon. So why is it close? Because we’re a closely divided country, Trump’s got an active base, and there’s no doubt that there are headwinds that both candidates are dealing with here.
So I think folks should focus less on, why is it close? It’s going to be close. The question is, how do we eke out a very narrow win in enough places? And I think we have the operation to do that, I think we have the candidate who’s going to close really strong here. I think Donald Trump is showing every day that he is unstable. He is attacking Americans, he just said his political enemies should be not just arrested but dealt with by the National Guard and by the military. Maybe his hardcore base supports that, but that’s not enough to win a presidential election. You’re fighting over a small number of voters in a small number of states, and you’re fighting to win the turnout battle.
Again: If this was an Aaron Sorkin screenplay, Donald Trump would be punished by the American people and by many, many Republicans, and he would get 42 percent of the vote. That is not reality.
Of course, your candidate is going after some Republican voters pretty explicitly, including just last week in Arizona. How do Nikki Haley voters factor into your thinking at this point in the race? Are there many left to be convinced to support Harris, or at least not to vote for Trump?
When you have states that are going to come down to a point, point and a half, 2 percent, every cohort that contributes to a winning margin is important. We see both registered Republicans and a bigger group of people, who are not affiliated with a party but largely consider themselves Republicans, who we’re showing great strength with. That’s not the only way we’re going to get to our win margin but that’s part of it. We’ve obviously got to make sure we’re getting the highest percentage of Democratic votes we can and we think we’re headed that way. Obviously if we can shave some points off him on the Republican side, that’s excellent.
There are independents. Most independents behave in most elections like Democrats or Republicans, but there are some in the middle that definitely fluctuate election to election. They tend to be overrepresented in the true swing voter universe but there are a bunch of these independents who generally consider themselves Republicans who are repelled by Trump. And so you ask: How do we go from basically 48 to 50? Well, it’s going to be some of those voters. It’s going to be making sure we do a very good job of turnout, it’s going to be very important that we maximize our vote share among Democrats, and we think we’re headed to an exceedingly high number there.
I will say: Turnout is very important to us. We’re spending a lot of time on it, a lot of money on it, a lot of energy on it. But I think Trump has more fragility because he really is reliant — and this is unusual, because usually this describes Democrats — on first-time voters or infrequent voters. And he’s got a lot riding on that. It doesn’t seem to be that he has built the kind of operation in the battleground states that would be consistent with executing on that.
But listen, this is not a race where you can say the way you get from 48 to 50 is really just one cohort. It’s a bunch of different areas where you want to slightly improve where you are today. And some of those Nikki Haley voters are certainly part of it. They fear the risk of a Trump second term. The thing to think about is his increasing instability, Project 2025, the notion of a Trump with no guardrails, with a desire for unchecked power. We’ve talked about that, we’ve run ads on that, we’re going to continue to emphasize that in the end, because that worries all the voters who are remaining out there who haven’t decided yet who to vote for. And really raising the risk profile of the Trump second term is a very important piece of business for us to execute well on.
I’d like to get back to Democratic anxieties for a second. You clearly wish people — call them bed-wetters or not — would understand that this race is a tossup and will be close no matter what happens here. But of course some people have been right to be concerned in the past, say in 2016 or more recently when Biden was running. How do you distinguish between justified concern and inevitable liberal nerves at this point in a race?
The stakes of this election are enormous, so I think we should all live with some anxiety. But I think the best way to deal with that is to channel it into activism, like Michelle Obama said, “do something.” The most important thing is: Don’t believe bad polls that suggest that, y’know, Kamala Harris was up by 6 points and now she isn’t. She was never up by 6 points! This is going to be a razor. Close. Election. And I think that sometimes that’s hard for people to embrace because they say, How can Donald Trump have that much support?! He’s going to get 48 percent of the vote in these states. And the third-party vote is not going to be 5 or 6 percent like it was in ’16, so he needs to get more than that. Our job is to make sure we hit our number. There is no alternative other than: This is going to be too close for comfort. That’s reality.
We like our internal data better this week than last week, but this is a really, really close race, and that is not. Going. To change. There’s no easy way here to avoid Donald Trump’s return. It’s going to be super close margins in seven states where the hard work over the next three weeks is going to make the difference.
So what do you see as Trump’s biggest strength in the home stretch?
He is guaranteed — as are we — a decent vote floor. What we’ve always seen with him on the ballot in ’16 and in ’20 is he’s done a decent job of turnout for himself. Our expectation is he’ll do that. What’s different this time than ’16 or even ’20 is he really is reliant on a lot of people who have never voted before, have never voted for a Republican before, or have maybe voted in one of the last four elections.
I’m not sure they’ve built the organization for that. The other thing is his performance has been, I think, a problem for them. It’s why he’s not debating again, it’s why, I think, he didn’t do 60 Minutes. I doubt he’s going to do the CNN town hall. They seem like they just want to keep him in rallies and in safe spaces. The problem with that is a lot of the voters who are going to decide this election aren’t going to see him. Now, his campaign sees that as a good thing because they don’t want him to necessarily set them back. But imagine that: To have a candidate for whom there’s a group of voters out there who are persuadable targets but we want to make sure our candidate does not have any exposure to them! At the end of the day, he’s not a great asset at the close of the campaign, because he’s unhinged, he’s increasingly unstable, he’s giving Soviet-style multi-hour speeches that make little sense. And so I think his campaign doesn’t want him anywhere near a debate stage, they may not even want him on things like the CNN or Univision town halls. We’ll see. I think he’s going to be pretty constrained here in the end, basically speaking to the converted.
At this stage in the race, yes, you want to make sure you turn out your supporters, but you also have to make sure you’re reaching the people who’ve not decided yet. We see this in our research: The more people see Donald Trump, he’s not doing himself any favors with voters who have not decided how to vote, or have questions about his character. He seems like he’s exacerbating those questions each and every time he opens his mouth.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
