Her revamped presidential campaign has quickly added loyalists from her 2019 primary bid. Her former aides have returned to write a convention speech and see her through a debate against Donald J. Trump. Her sister flew to Washington, joining her as she made a pork roast and marinated over her choices for a running mate.....CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE>>>
As Vice President Kamala Harris races through the final weeks of her campaign — the only weeks, really — she is relying on a network of confidants to guide her through the hurdles ahead.
This group looks nothing like President Biden’s tightly held brain trust, a group that was dominated by older white men and family members and grew smaller as he approached the decision to end his campaign. Ms. Harris, by contrast, relies on a multiracial, intergenerational web of about two dozen advisers, friends and relatives, firing up her phone every day to call in favors or ask for advice.
“None of us knew that this moment would come,” said Senator Laphonza Butler, a Democrat from California and one of several Golden State allies of Ms. Harris. But, she added, “when the opportunity presented itself, of course, we were ready to do whatever was asked of us.”
While Ms. Harris has her own inner circle, she was also thrust into a campaign with only a few weeks to make her case to the American people. So she has accepted the help and support of much of Mr. Biden’s team, added a few Obama-era operatives and elevated some loyalists of her own to positions of power.
The message from the top to many of the Biden faithful has been: This is not a hostile takeover, it’s a friendly merger.
But the reality of a newly crowded campaign speeding toward November on a crunched timeline has led to tensions among staff members who feel there are now even more channels to go through to get an answer. And other longtime Biden campaign hands are now supervised by operatives seen as more faithful to Ms. Harris.
Interviews with about two dozen people in Ms. Harris’s orbit suggest that she is a politician more skilled at the long game than observers in Washington might have appreciated when she became vice president.
Cedric Richmond, a former adviser to Mr. Biden and now a co-chair of the Harris campaign, said that the vice president “came out of the gate making decisions about who she wanted.” He added that Ms. Harris had chosen people who “know how she thinks, they know how she processes information, and they know how resolute she is in her decision making.”
Still, the contrast with Mr. Biden’s longstanding team is striking. Where a relative newcomer to his orbit could have worked with him for a decade, few of Ms. Harris’s current top campaign advisers even date to her years based in California.
The Stabilizers
When Lorraine Voles joined Ms. Harris’s staff on a temporary basis in the fall of 2021, the office was in tumult, and high-profile departures were on the horizon.
At the time, Ms. Harris’s allies worried that Mr. Biden’s West Wing was sidelining her, and some Democrats openly questioned how well she was adjusting to the job.
Ms. Voles, who had served as a deputy press secretary for former President Bill Clinton, is a friend of Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s chief of staff at the time. Current and former aides to Ms. Harris said Ms. Voles helped streamline the communications operation and improved the working relationship with the West Wing.
If Ms. Harris wins the presidency, her allies see Ms. Voles, now her chief of staff, as a natural person to oversee the transition.
Others have been with Ms. Harris as she found her footing in the vice presidency, including Phil Gordon, her national security adviser. In 2021, Adam Frankel, a former speechwriter for Mr. Obama, joined the vice president’s office along with Ms. Voles. Now with the campaign, he is the lead writer on Ms. Harris’s convention speech.
“Lorraine has been an incredible force in the vice president’s office and done a fantastic job of leading a team,” Representative Robert Garcia, Democrat of California, said in an interview, also praising the aides she had hired. “But her team has also worked incredibly hard to make sure she was able to connect with people across the country.”
In practice, Harris allies say, this means that the vice president places or fields as many as dozens of phone calls per day, to take the temperature of her party or to hear how issues are playing outside the Beltway.
Or just to wish people a happy birthday: It is not uncommon for her friends to listen to voice mail messages from a “No Caller ID” phone number and hear the vice president singing “Happy Birthday.” A staff member keeps a birthday calendar and informs Ms. Harris each day of people who need to be called, according to two people briefed on the arrangement. She has asked her staff to build dedicated time for phone calls into her schedule.
Sometimes, Ms. Harris calls in a favor.
Recently, she asked Martin J. Walsh, a former mayor of Boston who served as Mr. Biden’s labor secretary, if he would help her vet possible running mates. Mr. Walsh, who had been friends with her since her days in the Senate, obliged and interviewed candidates over Zoom, according to a person briefed on the discussions.
The Confidants and Relatives
The vice president wakes up many mornings to an informal media briefing from her husband, Doug Emhoff. The second gentleman rises before she does and scans major news websites.
“If I hear him making noises — a sigh, a groan, a gasp — I know what kind of day it’s going to be,” Ms. Harris wrote in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold.”
Mr. Emhoff, whom she married in 2014, has been an eagle-eyed protector of his wife. (They will celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary next Thursday, the day Ms. Harris delivers her convention speech.) He monitors coverage of her closely — so closely that he has flagged negative news articles when her aides tried to hide unflattering headlines from her or buy time before briefing her on them, according to several people aware of his actions.
Other family members, including Ms. Harris’s younger sister, Maya Harris, and her husband, Tony West, have been more involved in political strategy. They are among the very few people who have been politically involved with Ms. Harris dating to her days as the district attorney of San Francisco and when she first ran for statewide office in California.
Mr. West, who recently took a leave of absence from serving as Uber’s chief legal officer, was with his sister-in-law when she received the news from Mr. Biden that he was ending his campaign. As she reached out to dozens of Democrats, Mr. West made calls to his network of donors and business contacts.
Maya Harris, a confidant and sounding board for her sister, arrived in Washington that night. She has tried to avoid the scrutiny that comes with being deeply involved in Ms. Harris’s campaign, as she was during the 2019 primary race. Maya Harris served as Ms. Harris’s campaign chair then, and, when the operation unraveled, she fielded some of the blame from staff members, who accused her of laying off people without notice and contributing to a disorganized campaign.
Still, the vice president’s sister fields calls from senior advisers and passes along suggestions sent to her by Harris allies. Top aides to the vice president can call Maya Harris — and she can call them — when there are broad questions about what might be best for the candidate.
Maya Harris was also at the vice president’s residence over the weekend when Ms. Harris was interviewing candidates to be her running mate, watching (but not participating) as the her sister cooked a pork roast and mulled over her choices. Maya Harris is expected to join her sister at the convention in Chicago next week, according to a person briefed on her plans.
Outside her family, Kamala Harris turns to a small group of people for personal and political gut checks. She places regular calls to a group of close friends, including Chrisette Hudlin, who set Ms. Harris up on a blind date with Mr. Emhoff in 2013.
Other contacts in Ms. Harris’s Rolodex include Minyon Moore, who served as the deputy director of political affairs to Mr. Clinton and who is part of a group of Black women who have risen in the Democratic Party. She has spoken at length about the importance of diversifying politics.
“When I go into a room, if I don’t see Asian Americans, if I don’t see anyone in the L.G.B.T.Q. community, if I don’t see Black women — and sometimes if I don’t see white men — I’m like, ‘OK, well, what’s wrong with this table?’” Ms. Moore recently told the news site The 19th. “That’s how I was trained.”
Ms. Moore, who has been close with the vice president since Ms. Harris was the attorney general of California, used her longstanding relationships to help Ms. Harris transition to her political roles in Washington. Ms. Moore was one of the outside advisers to Mr. Biden who helped him select Ms. Harris as his running mate in 2020.
She is one of Ms. Harris’s most trusted confidants, according to several current and former staff members. Few big decisions are made without Ms. Harris calling Ms. Moore to ask, “What do you think?”
People close to Ms. Harris insisted that she and her senior aides had not been preparing for Mr. Biden to drop out. But when he made his decision, several Harris aides were prepared with lists of delegates and Democratic officials to call.
The vice president called upward of 100 people that day, assuring them she would work for the nomination.
The Loyalists and New Advisers
When Ms. Harris traveled to Wilmington, Del., immediately after declaring her candidacy, she announced that the existing campaign leadership, led by Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair, would remain in place. Questions remained, however, about how central her role would be.
Since then, Ms. O’Malley Dillon has not just remained in command, but she has sat in on Ms. Harris’s interviews with the finalists to be her running mate. Ms. O’Malley Dillon fields regular calls from Ms. Harris and has now joined a daily call with Ms. Voles and Sheila Nix, Ms. Harris’s campaign chief of staff.
Brian Fallon, a veteran of Democratic politics, has also taken on a bigger role, primarily advising Ms. Harris on communications strategy. He works on strategy with Kirsten Allen, who had been a deputy press secretary on Ms. Harris’s 2019 campaign. Ms. Allen, who joined the vice president’s office in 2022 and was elevated to communications director in February, focuses, in part, on Ms. Harris’s political image.
There have also been new hires, including David Plouffe, who managed Mr. Obama’s first presidential bid, and whom Ms. Harris did not know before he joined. Stephanie Cutter, Mr. Obama’s deputy campaign manager in 2012, advised Ms. Harris on communication strategy for about a year before joining the campaign. She is now playing a major role in the convention’s programming.
Several staff members who have worked with Ms. Harris in her past roles are advising her on key policy issues. They include Brian Nelson, the campaign’s senior adviser for policy, who served under her when she was the attorney general of California.
Others, including Karen Dunn, a lawyer who helped prepare Ms. Harris for her vice-presidential debate in 2020, and Rohini Kosoglu, a former policy director, have returned to her orbit to help her strike an onstage contrast with Mr. Trump in a debate.
“They’re building all of this as they go,” said Jamal Simmons, a longtime Democratic consultant and former communications director to Ms. Harris. “The most important thing for her is to have people she can call when she has a question.”
“They can give her the ‘Kamala Harris’ answer,” he said, meaning one that is straightforward, specific and rooted in reality. “That usually takes three months. They’ve done it in three weeks…CONTINUE READING>>
