A senior aide to Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has revealed that internal polls consistently indicated Harris was unlikely to defeat President-elect Donald Trump. However, this information was apparently not shared with those soliciting high-dollar donations for her campaign.

“And on the night of election night… we were told that we were going to win Iowa,” one insider recalled.

Harris’s senior adviser, David Plouffe, offered a contrasting perspective during an episode of Pod Save America, a podcast hosted by former Obama staffers. “We didn’t get the breaks we needed on Election Day,” Plouffe stated in an episode released Tuesday.

“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,” he added.

Plouffe was joined on the podcast by other top campaign advisers, including Jen O’Malley Dillon, Stephanie Cutter, and Quentin Fulks, to analyze why Harris’s campaign failed. While senior campaign staff were reportedly aware of Harris’s consistent polling deficit, this information was not clearly communicated to others, including those fundraising on behalf of the campaign, reports Fox News Digital

Li, a fundraiser for the campaign, expressed dismay, calling this lack of transparency highly unusual. “I’ve been doing this since I graduated from college more than a decade [ago]. Absolutely not,” Li said.

Li also suggested that the campaign’s lack of honesty could damage donor trust moving forward. “For some casual donors, they’re going to be like, no f—ing way,” she said, highlighting the gap between the campaign’s public optimism and the reality of their polling situation.

She continued, “It’s not that he’d beat her that’s a shock. It’s the extent to which he beat her. It wasn’t even close. It was a decisive defeat.”

Public Polls vs. Internal Reality

Despite Harris outperforming Trump in multiple respected public polls during the campaign, Plouffe acknowledged on the podcast that these optimistic forecasts did not align with the campaign’s internal numbers. Ultimately, Harris’s loss was described as “decisive,” leaving her team to reflect on what went wrong and the impact of their decisions on donor relationships moving forward.