


Trump 2016 is a notable (and complicated) exception.
You’d have to have a heart of stone to not laugh at Kamala Harris and her presidential campaign team as the excerpts of her forthcoming memoir continue to dribble out.
The Harris campaign, according to Maeve Reston and Sophia Nguyen of the Washington Post, “felt confident that they would win, in part because their internal analytics had found that they were ahead in all the battleground states as of the previous Friday.”
“We had plans for all kind of contingencies — that Trump might win Pennsylvania and claim premature victory, that we might win narrowly and Trump’s supporters would react with violent rejection of the result, that the count might drag on for days,” the former vice president writes in her book. “We’d planned for everything, it seemed, except the actual result.”
Like I said, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to giggle at that.
But “hold up,” Jim Geraghty responds, latching onto this very interesting tidbit. “On the Friday before Election Day, the Harris campaign team believed she was on track to win all seven swing states? (As you’ll recall, she went 0-for-7.)”
First, that directly contradicts what Harris staffers said after the election on the Pod Save America podcast. David Plouffe revealed, “Even post-debate, we had ourselves down in the battleground states. . . . 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.”
It certainly looks like someone here is not telling the truth. Or were the campaign staffers sharing a rosier outlook with the candidate than the actual numbers suggested?
Jim’s right to wonder about this, but I’m not so sure this is an example of Kamala Harris or her campaign walking around with blinkers. I think this just might be a feature of modern presidential campaigns. Since the turn of the millennium (I think Bob Dole and his people in ’96 understood pretty well that they were losing), almost every presidential campaign thinks it’s on a path to victory. I can think of only two exceptions.
In 2000, both W. Bush and Gore thought they were going to edge the other out. And it turned out to be so close that they could both reasonably think they were right from a data analytics perspective. In 2004, John Kerry’s campaign was so confident of victory that there have been stories ever since that Bob Shrum, Kerry’s campaign manager, started calling Kerry “Mr. President” before all the votes were even tallied. In 2012, the Romney campaign believed it was winning right up to the last moment. In 2020, Trump’s people thought they were going to win reelection and were outraged at Fox News’s early call in Arizona. Finally, in 2024, Trump and — apparently — Harris and at least parts of her campaign structure both thought they were going to win, too.
I can think of only two counterexamples: John McCain’s campaign probably knew that they were doomed in the aftermath of the financial crisis and amid Obamamania. And Donald Trump’s people — or at least a significant number of them; it’s always been reported that Steve Bannon was convinced that Trump was going to win the White House — thought Hillary Clinton would be sworn in as the next president going into Election Night 2016.
So I count two campaigns out of twelve that doubted they’d win. And, again, I’m not overly surprised by this. Campaigns — and the people who work on them — are competitive by nature. Belief in your side’s chances and the ability to see yourself on the path to victory are almost prerequisites to success. What’s more in line with human nature? Accepting the bright side of your nightly campaign rallies, filled with your fans and supporters cheering you to the rafters? Or listening to the egghead pollsters and data guys as they explain how they calculated the margin of error in Wisconsin’s crucial Waukesha County?