No previous American candidate has ever launched a presidential campaign with the race already this much in motion. It’s like changing the quarterback, team mascot and entire playbook halfway through the third quarter.
Advisers to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have already agreed to start planning joint events for them into the summer and fall, people involved in the discussions told CNN, and now top aides are trying to get their campaign operations to mesh too, after Harris won endorsements from enough delegates Monday night to win the party’s nomination.
“This campaign was built to elect Joe Biden. But now it has to retool to elect Kamala Harris, who’s a Black and South Asian woman in the year 2024,” said one aide at campaign headquarters.
The vice president is inheriting a staff that she did not pick, working at a headquarters in a state she has no connection to other than spending a few days there with Biden over the last four years, where the signs are quickly being replaced and staff are either excited or bracing themselves to get their new email addresses @kamalaharris.com instead of @joebiden.com.
And now, as Harris has to reconceive of herself as a candidate for president and start vetting her own running mates, she and the aides closest to her are trying to figure out how to take over the operation without upsetting the painstakingly worked out rhythms that had gotten Harris past most of the drama and difficulties that defined her first few years as vice president.
In conversations with over a dozen aides on the campaign, in the White House and operatives working with both from the outside, many describe a campaign that had become a battered and dispirited mess — and that was true before Biden’s debate performance or the subsequent weeks of barely fighting back against the Democratic mutiny. Days were spent trying to grind down anyone who voiced even a hint of skepticism about Biden. Attempts by younger staff to move creatively were often slowed down by an impenetrable Biden inner circle only a few years younger than the 81-year-old president and with an insistently different sense of news cycles and campaigning.
Never have the people on what was, until Sunday afternoon, the very small core team around Harris felt so popular. They have been flooded with emails and texts with offers to help for weeks. Now they’re drowning in even more.
The changes coming, several involved say, are about more than personnel or logos.
“How do you get rid of this siege mentality and go on offense more?” asked one Democratic operative in touch with multiple people on the campaign.
Some clear change is coming. A campaign spokesman didn’t have an answer on whether Mike Donilon, the longtime Biden guru who had left the West Wing to guide the campaign, will still be cutting ads for the vice president. But his expertise was in channeling Biden’s voice and spirit, and few see a significant role for him ahead. Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed, the senior advisers to the president who bridged the West Wing and the political operation, will now focus mostly on guiding the president through the end of his term. Anita Dunn, who had recruited most of the top staff and continued to shape the campaign while staying at the White House, did not answer when CNN asked whether she would retain a role in helping Harris.
“It’s just 24 hours out. They are working around the clock to support the vice president and will do everything possible to help her defeat Trump,” said one person close to the Biden inner circle, who also pointed out that Harris has already been having a weekly check-in with White House chief of staff Jeff Zients.
Part of the issue is that Harris has long lacked anyone quite like those advisers — to the point that last fall, her aides discussed trying to find what they referred to internally as a “Mike Donilon type” for Harris. They didn’t find one, and now there’s no time to build trust with anyone they did find.
“By definition, someone needs to tend to the store who is looking out for her,” a Harris ally told CNN.
Harris’ brother-in-law Tony West, a former Justice Department official and longtime informal adviser who has been at her side the last few days, is expected to play a role. Her sister Maya, with whom she is extremely close, is expected to play a smaller one.
Rahm Emanuel — the former Bill Clinton and House Democratic strategist who followed up his time as Chicago mayor by serving as Biden’s ambassador to Japan — has had his name tossed around.
Asked if he would want to comment on the speculation, Emanuel told CNN, “Nope.”
Others have suggested David Plouffe, the architect of Barack Obama’s historic presidential campaign, as one name being considered to lead the effort, two Democratic aides familiar with the conversations told CNN.
But neither Emanuel nor Plouffe, their doubters have pointed out, have run a campaign since Donald Trump entered politics.
And while Harris made a point of announcing during her visit to the campaign headquarters on Monday that she would be keeping in place Jen O’Malley Dillon as campaign chair and Julie Chavez Rodriguez as campaign manager — both of whom she has sparred with in the past — potential new senior adviser hires are also being discussed.
O’Malley Dillon staying on doesn’t just pour water on the Emanuel and Plouffe rumors, it also means that most of the senior staff is now expected to stay as well. And though she is still far from universally loved, she has won over some of the previous critics and kept the staff largely stabilized through the hellish last month.
Aides are also discussing a shift on the larger media strategy, with an eye especially on changing the advertising approach and decision makers in that department.
Some internally and externally are also looking to see a bigger operational and public role for Quentin Fulks, the deputy campaign manager who became a regular at Harris’ unofficial political sessions at the Naval Observatory while also becoming a favorite of Biden for the way he loyally defended the president on TV.
“The people in this office have been working so hard, and you have given so much of yourselves. … And you’re giving yourselves because you love your country, and you love Joe, and you love me,” Harris said during her visit to the headquarters. “I have full faith that this team is the reason we will win in November.”
Even as several campaign aides are staking out moves on each other behind the scenes, they all agree that with just over 100 days to go until the election, the top priority is to avoid the rampant infighting that helped sink Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign. That goes even for those who still hold grudges against her from the previous famous sputtering Biden debate performance, when she attacked him for being against school busing.
“Like the president would say himself, it’s not about him and it’s not about us, it’s about stopping Donald Trump and the harm he would do to the American people,” said a senior aide at headquarters.
The changes won’t just be on the campaign end. The vice president’s team is expected to be much more involved in front-end strategic decision making in the White House, down to what policies and announcements are being rolled out where and when. The West Wing staff has always gone through everything with the lens of what is best for Biden’s sensibilities and larger interests over all. That, they know, has to change immediately, but will happen as Harris’ staff is asked to step in.
Like Biden, Harris doesn’t have a history of running great or well-functioning campaigns, whether that was her Senate race in 2016 or her 2020 presidential run that didn’t even survive until December of 2019.
Harris’ past staff problems are the stuff of Washington legend, to the point that when she was sworn in as vice president, despite nearly two decades in three different previous offices, the number of even mid-level aides who had ever worked for her before could be counted on one hand. Sometimes, seemingly to cover for feeling unprepared for a meeting herself, she would slowly flay aides with cross-examination style questions. Sometimes, aides who have been through it told CNN, she would just do it for sport.
Her vice-presidential office became known for distrust, infighting and traumatized aides who would retreat with tears in their eyes to bars near the White House, counting down the days until they got other job offers.
Changes started to come a year and a half into the job. Harris got a new chief of staff, Lorraine Voles, who had both experience with a variety of campaigns, including Hillary Clinton’s, and the trust of key figures in Biden’s orbit. Everyone who had been on Harris’ press staff, including her first communications director and a press secretary who was already a personality in her own right, left in a matter of months. The issues didn’t disappear immediately — she went through more staff and another communications director along the way — but the office started to get into a new rhythm. Additions like adviser Megan Jones, recently elevated communications director Kirsten Allen, and Sheila Nix as her campaign chief of staff and Brian Fallon as her campaign communications director helped too.
Internal drama plunged. And amid a sudden atmosphere of mostly functionality, a smoother and more confident Harris emerged. Her events were planned differently. She was prepped differently. Her new core team figured out how to manage and push back on her better.
With just over 100 days to either get her elected or see Trump roll back into the White House, friends and aides who have watched the improvements and remember the dark days are terrified of regression. Any reassignments to Wilmington could upset the equilibrium they have achieved.
Several who were there for the collapse of Harris’ last campaign pointed to another reason to avoid making too many big changes: money running short in 2019 led to a round of layoffs, and vengeful staffers who were let go responded by feeding damaging stories about her, while those who stayed on formed into warring camps leaking on each other. One person on the campaign at the time ruefully joked that even the security guard at the front desk was phoning up reporters with gossip.
So at least for now, the campaign staff are trying to hold to a line that deputy campaign manager and digital outreach specialist Rob Flaherty used on a call Monday afternoon that senior staff held.
“We are,” Flaherty said, “just cookin’ and keeping it moving.”
Flaherty declined comment.
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