David Plouffe spent an hour on stage this past Friday in Seattle, talking about how Uber is changing the “future of work” with its technology-fueled ride-hailing platform.
But before his fireside chat ended, KCTS 9 reporter Enrique Cerna asked Plouffe — the campaign manager for Barack Obama in 2008 and longtime Democratic Party consultant — for his thoughts on the 2016 presidential election.
“It’s one of the more fascinating elections we’ve ever seen,” Plouffe said.
Plouffe, who joined Uber last year as a policy executive and has since transitioned to an advisory role as a company board member, said he thinks Hillary Clinton has really “stabilized and strengthened” as of late. Though Bernie Sanders has run a “very strong campaign,” he thinks Clinton will win a vast majority of the primary elections.
Plouffe also said that the “margin for error for Hillary Clinton is much higher than it is for the Republican [candidate].”
However, the 48-year-old noted that there are plenty of Americans who are “open to change” after having a Democrat run the country for the past eight years.
Supporters of Donald Trump can certainly be placed in this bucket.
“I think you have to understand that Trump’s rise is not about conservatism — it’s about populism,” Plouffe said. “You have a rising populist movement in the Republican Party that’s very anti-establishment.”
The 69-year-old Trump just today made another out-of-the-ordinary statement, calling for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
Here’s Trump’s statement:
“Without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life. If I win the election for President, we are going to Make America Great Again.”
And here’s more from Plouffe on Trump’s campaign strategy:
“Trump is definitely a character. People like what they perceive to be his strength, or bombast, even. But there’s something real behind it, right? There is about 30 percent of the Republican base that is becoming more populous. Don’t forget that Trump is calling for the end of carried interest rates with hedge funds on Wall Street. He’s not down the line with Republican orthodox. But they are very angry at their leaders and the fact that they don’t allow the government to shut down, don’t allow us to crash the debt ceiling, haven’t gotten rid of Obamacare, haven’t stopped the president from doing everything on climate change — they are very angry about this. That’s where the rise comes from.
I know it can be puzzling to say, well, how can he say these things? Yesterday, he just said, ‘I do better when there are bad tragedies.’ If anyone else said that, they’d be run out of politics. For him, it will just help him. They used to say, ‘Reagan has Teflon.’ I do think Trump has Teflon with his supporters. That’s probably not enough to win the nomination, but at this point, the notion that Donald Trump will drop into the 10 percent range anytime soon, I don’t see that happening.”
