as you can see in a Washington Post piece just posted by Greg Sargent titledObama’s campaign guru: Don’t fret about polls. Clinton is winning, and she can finish the job tonight.
After an introductory section, the piece is in the form of a Q&A. Here’s the first exchange:
THE PLUM LINE: You have said that public polls are garbage — Jim Messina said the same in a recent Political Wire podcast — and that everything is about the composition of the electorate at this point. Can you expand on that?
DAVID PLOUFFE: Some polls closely capture where the race stands. But they’re very incomplete. The Clinton campaign is doing large samples for modeling surveys of everybody on the voter file. So you have a very good understanding of how you believe 100 percent of the electorate will be allocated on election day.
When you look at how 100 percent of the vote is likely to be allocated in Florida, I get very optimistic….I can get Donald Trump to within two or three in Pennsylvania, but I can’t get him to a win number. The same is true in Virginia and Colorado. I know everybody goes crazy about the latest Cheetos poll, but I feel very confident about both New Hampshire and Florida. So that puts her over 300 [in the electoral college]. Trump has to pull off a miracle in the electoral college.
That gives you a very good sense of what to expect in the rest of the piece.
Plouffe does think that Clinton’s support has been a bit softer — he puts it as Trump having more of his vote in the bank. I think we have seen this in the “movement” of the polls — it is not that Trump necessarily goes up, but some of Clinton’s weaker support temporarily goes back to undecided or 3rd party. That 3rd party vote is going to be dropping significantly.
Another, briefer, snip from Plouffe:
This race is being covered in a way that suggests it’s a dead heat. And it’s not. She’s got a small national poll lead. But more importantly, she’s got a decisive electoral college lead. The debates are a chance for voters to see her in a more unfiltered way.
He thinks she will win CO by more than Obama did. For the record, in 2012 the margin was Obama 51.49 Romney 46.13
Please note — Plouffe does not have an official role in this campaign, but most of the Clinton data people are people with whom he worked on behalf of Obama, he has regular contact with them, and on his own he remains one of the smartest people about election data around.