A senior adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris during her presidential campaign has admitted that internal polling consistently showed she was unlikely to defeat President-elect Donald Trump, contrary to the optimistic picture presented to donors.

“We were told she had a real shot at winning—it wasn’t even a question,” Harris campaign fundraiser Lindy Li said. “I was told Pennsylvania was looking good, and we would win 3-4 swing states. On election night, they told us we were going to win Iowa.”

However, Harris senior adviser David Plouffe painted a very different picture during an episode of Pod Save America. He revealed the campaign never saw the same leads reflected in public polls, which showed Harris performing well in battleground states. “We didn’t get the breaks we needed on Election Day,” Plouffe said. “There were public polls in late September, early October showing us with leads that we never saw internally.”

The podcast episode featured Plouffe and other top aides, including Jen O’Malley Dillon, Stephanie Cutter, and Quentin Fulks, dissecting the reasons behind Harris’s decisive defeat. They acknowledged that internal data consistently showed the vice president trailing Trump in key battleground states, contradicting the narrative pushed to fundraisers and donors.

Li slammed the campaign’s lack of transparency, calling it “absolutely not normal” for such information to be obscured. “I’ve been doing this since I graduated from college more than a decade ago. Absolutely not,” she said, adding that the campaign now faces a trust deficit with donors.

Li said many donors felt blindsided by the election outcome. “For some casual donors, they’re going to be like, no [expletive] way,” she remarked. “It’s not that he beat her that’s a shock. It’s the extent to which he beat her. It wasn’t even close. It was a decisive defeat.”

Despite public polls that showed Harris closing the gap or even surpassing Trump in battleground states, Plouffe acknowledged on the podcast that the campaign never saw those numbers internally. “When Kamala Harris became the nominee, she was behind. We kind of climbed back, and even post-debate, we still had ourselves down in the battleground states, but very close,” he said. “By the end, it was a jump-ball race.”

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)