“But the reality is Donald Trump barely won in [20]16, but barely lost in 20[20]. He’s a little stronger this time than he was last time, so he’s going to get 48% of the vote.”
He stated previously that he believes the race is going to remain tied right up to election day; that is, in his view there is not going to be any dramatic late shift to Kamala as David Frum predicted.
He also said on the podcast embedded above,
“I think the freakout is because there were a bunch of polls, I’d say in the last month, that showed a lead for Kamala Harris that was not real. It’s not what we were seeing — we’ve seen this thing basically be tied let’s say since mid-September."
He says that in reality, i.e. in the campaign's internal polling, the race has been tied for a month. It's what they were seeing then, it is what they are seeing now. That has credibility. The campaign pollster said the identical thing. The pollster went public for one of the few, if any, times he ever has to set the record straight that Kamala with an outside-the-margin lead was not what his internal polling was showing. That has credibility but. How could every major and minor poll, except theirs, be wrong in showing a tightening of the race in the last 10 days-two weeks. Every other poll is wrong in showing that the race changed. Only theirs, which show no change for a month, is right? That strains credibility. Harris-Walz polls are right, Siena/NYT, Fox, ABC, CBS, WaPo, are all wrong. MAN, that's hard to believe.
Because what Plouffe said is consistent with what the campaign pollster said remotely I believe that Plouffe is sincere and is honest. And that freaks me out. I have been over the publicly available numbers here so many times, including just last night, I have done comparative research to 2016 and 2020 and...I wonder what the campaign's strategy is, how they think Kamala can win, what the tactics are to maximize every single vote necessary for victory, because, as I wrote last night, since trumpie is "going to get 48% of the vote", I give him a 90%+ chance of winning the Electoral College. I would love to know if the campaign has a plan, "If we do these three things we'll win." I'd love to know what a winning national margin is since trumpie's "going to get 48%". Is it 52%, not one percentage point going to minor candidates?; 51%, just 1% going to minors? Do they have a threshold margin for victory in the EC? Or, maybe they don't. Maybe they see this as a race where the rule of thumb that Kamala must win nationally by 3%-4% is wrong; that the minors' vote is going to be negligible, less than 1.5%, that Kamala will win the Electoral College even with a national popular vote of 50%-49%--or even lose the national vote 50%-49%!--by focusing like a laser just on Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, winning only those three of the seven swings, via a superior get out the vote drive.
Thinking it through, that has to be what it is. The race is going to be tied on Election Day and trumpie's going to get 48%. Nothing we can do about either of those fundamentals. We just have to get our voters out in marginally greater, teeny-tiny, numbers. Taking those two as givens, the Kamala campaign, in effect, is saying that they could do the same for trumpie if they ran his campaign. Like Alabama fans used to say about Bear Bryant: "He can take his'n and beat your'n and he can take you'rn and beat his'n." The candidate doesn't matter, the war chest doesn't matter, only we matter. Isn't that how it comes out in the wash? That's hubris. May be right, hope it is, but it's hubris.
