Kamala senior advisor David Plouffe admits polling was all wrong, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon says media strategy failed

Kamala Senior Advisor David Plouffe said that "there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October showing us with leads that we never saw."

He added, "You know, I mean, it was just basically a race that in the battlegrounds was 46-47, 47-48, so that’s not where we started, we started behind."

He said that Harris was able to "climb out, I think even after the debate" that saw a gain of 0.51 percent, but "it wasn’t a race that moved a lot." He said that "you've got to have undecideds break your way more than your opponents and you’ve got to get a little benefit from turnout, which we weren’t able to do."

"We were dealing with ferocious headwinds and I think people's instinct was to give the Republicans and even Donald Trump another chance," Plouffe said.

Plouffe said that the campaign challenged Trump to a second debate immediately after the first one was because "We needed big moments. We were behind in the race with a candidate who was not fully defined."

Kamala Harris' Campaign Chair Jen O'Malley Dillon said that Harris did some podcasts that "hit key constituencies," going "everywhere we could," but that there was support from people like athletes "that were just not super interested in getting their brand caught up in the politics of this campaign, and I don’t think he had the same problem."

She said that Trump was able to "tap into some cultural elements in ways that we couldn’t, and I think that had an impact on us, that there were places that we knew we had support that we desperately wanted to go and have a conversation that we thought would be interesting and relevant and fun and we couldn’t get there."

She and others spoke on how Harris did more "traditional media" hits and how this was not reaching persuadable voters, like young men. "They're not watching the evening news. They're not watching cable. They definitely do not watch 60 Minutes," senior Kamala campaign advisor Stephanie Cutter said.

When asked whether "earned media" helped the campaign, Cutter replied, "If you’re a candidate with a limited amount of time to get your voice out there and define yourself, you kind of have to do everything. But did it screw with our narrative, not just in getting sh*t for not doing enough earned media, but getting questions that we knew voters weren’t going to care about, and you know, their myopic mindset on certain issues was not what the race was going to be about. So at a certain point, we had to decide, is this helping us or hurting us?"

"I think back and think we should have signaled more of our strategy early on about podcasts and who we were trying to reach, but we had a limited amount of time to reach he people who we’re trying to reach and we were trying to go to them," said O’Malley Dillon.