Vice President Kamala Harris' advisers claimed they were "surprised" to see public polls showing her leading former President Donald Trump prior to his decisive 2024 presidential election victory as internal campaign surveys showed the opposite during an appearance on the Pod Save America podcast.

“We were behind. I mean, I think it surprised people because there were these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw,” said David Plouffe, Harris’ senior campaign adviser.

Harris' team said there were several reasons for the vice president's loss to Trump, admitting that the campaign struggled to come up with cohesive messaging, while also acknowledging the difficulty of Harris entering the race only 107 days prior to election day.

“It is easy to say with the kind of resources that we raised, we should have been able to do everything, but that’s not the case,” deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said defensively. “You have to make decisions in the time frame that we were in in this race.”

Trump became the first Republican candidate to win the popular vote in 20 years during the 2024 presidential election. The former president won 312 electoral college votes, as well as all seven projected swing states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all of which he'd previously lost to President Joe Biden during the 2020 election.