Top Dem shocked to discover Joe Biden’s team ‘pretty cruelly’ failed to release poll

The poll was worse than some Democrats said at the time.

After Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the debate against Donald Trump, Biden aides tried to allay his fellow Democrats’ concerns about the incumbent’s electability. Internal notes circulating at the time reportedly showed a close race against the former president, but Biden was within striking distance of Trump, who was in the lead.

David Plouffe, who was a senior adviser to Kamala Harris’ campaign after Biden withdrew and endorsed his vice president, tells a different story.

Barack Obama’s former campaign manager told The Atlantic the numbers were “catastrophic.”

“When I got in, I saw the actual numbers under the hood for the first time. They were pretty scary,” he said in a new interview. “The Sunbelt was worse than the Blue Wall, but the Blue Wall was bad. And demographically, young voters across the board – Hispanic voters, black voters, Asian voters – were in really terrible shape. When the (candidate) change happened, some of those things got a little better, but nowhere near where we ended up or should be. This was a rescue mission. “In terms of the situation, it was catastrophic.”

Biden dropped out of the race in July.

Never before has a party’s presumptive presidential candidate dropped out of the race so close to the election. President Lyndon Johnson, beleaguered by the Vietnam War, announced in March 1968 that he would not seek another term after a single-state primary. Biden’s decision in July came after more than 14 million Democrats voted for him in the primary.

His decision came after pressure mounted from his Democratic allies to resign following the June 27 debate, in which the 81-year-old president paused, often gave nonsensical answers and failed to address the former president’s many falsehoods .

Nearly 30 minutes after breaking the news that he was abandoning his campaign, Biden endorsed Harris.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.