Aside from not being a great candidate, one of the biggest things that doomed then-Sen. Kamala Harris’ 2020 presidential run was the behind-the-scenes chaos and infighting among campaign staff at the state and national levels, where no one was on the same page, everyone was playing pass the buck, and there was no singular unifying message.
As the New York Times reported in November 2019 – just a few days before Harris dropped out of the race – “to some Harris allies, her decline is more predictable than surprising.”
“In one instance after another, Ms. Harris and her closest advisers made flawed decisions about which states to focus on, issues to emphasize and opponents to target, all the while refusing to make difficult personnel choices to impose order on an unwieldy campaign,” the Times also noted at the time after talking with “50 current and former campaign staff members and allies.”
Fast forward to just a few weeks before the 2024 presidential election, and it would appear some of those same mistakes are happening all over again in the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania, where there has been a lot of external and internal grumbling along with meetings called after repeated complaints that her HQ there did not have it together:
Top Democrats in Pennsylvania are worried Vice President Kamala Harris’ operation is being poorly run in the nation’s biggest battleground state.
They say some Harris aides lack relationships with key party figures, particularly in Philadelphia and its suburbs. They complain they have been left out of events and surrogates haven’t been deployed effectively. And they’ve urged Harris staff in private meetings to do more to turn out voters of color.
[…]
For some Pennsylvania Democratic elected officials, party leaders and allies, 20 of whom POLITICO spoke to for this article, they’re anxious the in-state operation has set them back.
[…]
And complaints about outreach to voters of color are common in Democratic politics in Pennsylvania.
But this level of frustration and finger-pointing is not.
Needless to say, with roughly two and a half weeks to go before Election Day, now is not the time for campaigns in the key states, especially one as close as Pennsylvania, to scramble to hit the “reset” button. Then again, these issues could be seen coming from miles away:
We’re at a point in the election cycle where these things should be running like well-oiled machines. The fact that Harris’ Pennsylvania HQ isn’t at this stage is a deeply troubling sign for her campaign. Not that I’m complaining, of course, but in an ideal world for Kamala HQ, lessons would have been learned from her last embarrassing presidential run.
But as we’ve said before, Kamala Harris was and always will be her own worst enemy. Would be something else if that inconvenient fact ultimately proved to be her campaign’s undoing.
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