A senior campaign adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris has deleted his X account after apparently taking a swipe at President Joe Biden.
David Plouffe, who previously led Barack Obama’s successful bid for the White House, thanked members of Harris’ campaign for their work and said in a message Wednesday evening that they “left everything on the field.”
He then concluded the message by saying, “We dug from a deep hole, but not enough,” calling it a “devastating loss.”
Many online took the message as an attack on the president, who some Democrats now blame for Harris’ loss, arguing that he should not have sought a second term and instead dropped out of the race.
An unidentified source, said to be close to the president, went so far as to label Plouffe a “sanctimonious bastard.” to Fox News and called his post “unproductive.”
David Plouffe, senior campaign adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, deleted his X account Thursday morning
It came amid a response to a post in which he apparently attacked President Joe Biden, writing: ‘We dug from a deep hole, but not enough’
The source added that “Joe Biden is the President of the United States and won without it [Plouffe]. He successfully defeated Donald Trump – something [Plouffe] never did.’
Amid the backlash, the senior advisor deleted his X account at 10 a.m. on Thursday. according to De Heuvel.
He was previously convinced that the presidential race was closer than the polls seemed, calling them “horses***.”
“I can’t speak to public opinion polls. I spend very little time looking at them… most of them are horses***,” Plouffe told Pod Save America last month.
“Some of them may be close, but overall I would say any poll that shows Kamala Harris four to five points ahead in any of these seven states is ignoring them,” he said, referring to the critical battleground states.
“Any point that Donald Trump makes like this, ignore it.”
But in the end, Trump won the election hands-down, with his margin of support even improving in most states that turned blue.
Donald Trump won an impressive victory in Tuesday’s election, improving his support from 2020 to now in every state but one.
As Democrats now try to understand how they could have lost, some media analysts have suggested that Biden should have pulled the plug on his candidacy well before his disastrous debate performance.
This would have either given Harris more time to establish himself or allowed for an open primary to select a stronger candidate, they argued.
Among those who endorsed that view was NBC Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker, who said during the network’s election night coverage that Biden’s timing would be “something that if she does, she will essentially lose, under a microscope will lie’.
“Because obviously there was so much discussion, even over the summer, about possibly having an open primary and allowing that fight to happen within the Democratic Party,” she said.
“So I think that’s one of the big questions for the future.”
Some media analysts have suggested that Biden should never have sought a second term and instead should have dropped out of the race
Yet those closest to Biden have instead pointed the finger at former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
They hold her responsible for pushing Biden out of the race, in which they believe he should have stayed.
“Bidenworld” sources have also argued that had he stayed in the race, he would have won over white working-class voters who largely voted for Trump.