David Plouffe, a senior adviser to Kamala Harris’ campaign, on Monday night said their camp thinks Harris can win all seven swing states.
Plouffe, who previously served as Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign manager, said it’s important that Harris has “multiple pathways” to reaching the 270 electoral votes required to win the election.
“And just a couple hours ago reviewing all the early vote data, what we’re projecting for Election Day, how we think undecideds are breaking, we have a credible pathway to all seven states tomorrow night to go into Kamala Harris’ column,” Plouffe told Erin Burnett on CNN. “But we believe they’re all going to be close.”
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“Right, but you think you can win all seven?” Burnett replied, to which Plouffe answered: “Yes.”
Recent polling from the seven states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—paints a picture of an extremely close race. But there are some positive signs for Harris, with Burnett asking Plouffe about a prediction from Nevada election expert Jon Ralston that Harris would narrowly win the Silver State.
“We’ve liked what we’ve seen,” Plouffe said of Nevada specifically. “I mean, listen, what I think has largely been overstated in some of the analysis or coverage or cheerleading is, hey, ‘There’s a lot more Republicans voting early than there were in ’20.’ Yeah, of course: Trump told them not to vote in ’20 early, in a feat of, like, epic political malpractice.”
Plouffe said that many Democrats who voted early four years ago, particularly by mail, now want to vote on Election Day instead. “When we look at the folks who voted so far, Democrats, Republicans, but particularly that very important group of voters that are not affiliated, we think that that adds up—as long as we do our job tomorrow—to a state that we can win,” he said. “But narrowly.”
He added that “there could be a real upside surprise for women” if women comprise a slightly larger part of the national electorate than they have historically, but the Harris campaign is nevertheless being “very conservative” and assuming Donald Trump “will do a tremendous job with turnout.”
“But I think in my personal view,” Plouffe said, “There’s a better chance that we’re surprised tomorrow by Kamala Harris doing better, particularly with women voters than what we saw in ’16 and ’20 where Trump overperformed some of the data.”
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