As long as Donald Trump has been in the presidential polling mix, it seems, pollsters have gotten the numbers wrong.
They, of course, had Hillary Clinton leading by significant numbers in 2016. She lost to Trump.
The 2020 election was skewed by a number of outside influences that likely now will be investigated by a Republican Congress, but the polls still weren’t that close to accurate.
And this year, poll after poll counted on Kamala Harris in the lead, sometimes by significant numbers. Or some of them said it was close. But Trump won by millions of popular votes and a landslide in the Electoral College.
The one segment of the polling process that appeared to get it right, actually, was the internal polling Kamala Harris’ own campaign did.
According to a report from the Washington Examiner those results had her losing.
“The leadership of outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign said that internal polling never had her ahead of President-elect Donald Trump,” the report explained. “After President Joe Biden began lagging heavily behind Trump in the polls in June and July, the entrance of Harris appeared to solve Democrats’ problems. From August until right before the election, a great many accredited public polls had Harris leading Trump.”
But senior Harris campaign adviser David Plouffe said the internal polling always was telling Harris she wasn’t winning.
“We didn’t get the breaks we needed on Election Day,” he said in an interview with a podcaster. “I think it surprised people because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.”
He explained that, unlike legacy media portrayals of a campaign energized and reinvigorated when Democrat party elites tossed Joe Biden under the bus and installed Harris, “internal polling didn’t change much throughout the election, remaining mostly static since Harris joined the race in July.
Joining Pflouffe in the autopsy of the 2024 Democrat campaign were Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter, all Democrat campaign officials.
“The truth is that we really thought this was a very close race; we talked about the entire time we saw it as a margin-of-error race,” Dillon said.
“Overall, the Harris campaign leadership portrayed the race as doomed from the start, saying there wasn’t much Harris could’ve done to change the outcome,” the report said.
Trump, in fact, swept all seven swing states and collected millions of more votes than Harris.
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