David Plouffe, senior adviser to Kamala Harris' presidential campaign, dismissed most of the public polls trying to predict the outcome of next month's election, calling them "horse----."
Plouffe, previously the campaign manager to former President Barack Obama in 2008, made the comments in an interview Sunday on the "Pod Save America" podcast.
"I really can't speak to the public polls. I spend very little time looking at them," Plouffe told podcast host and former fellow Obama staffer Dan Pfeiffer. "And most of them are horse----.
"Some of them may be close, but, generally, I'd say any poll that shows Kamala Harris up 4 to 5 points in one of these seven [swing] states, ignore it. Any point that shows Donald Trump up like that, ignore it," Plouffe said.
For example, Plouffe said, "There were a bunch of polls, I'd say within 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."
The election will be decided on the margins, Plouffe said, predicting that Republican nominee Donald Trump is going to get at least 48% of the vote.
"He's a little stronger this time than [he] was last time," Plouffe said. "It's going to come down to a very narrow margin."
However, Plouffe said he'd rather be in the Harris camp, confident they have an easier path to 49.5% to 50% of the popular vote.
"Trump is incredibly reliant on voters who never voted before, haven't voted in a long time, never voted Republican," Plouffe said.
"We like what we're seeing in early voting data so far. We particularly like what we're not seeing on the Trump data, which is there's not an army of kind of incels showing up," referring to members of the online community of young men who consider themselves unable to attract women.
The RealClearPolitics polling average shows Harris leading Trump by 1.7 percentage points.
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.