The Kamala Harris campaign is navigating internal tensions as a new team of senior strategists takes over an operation largely made up of people hired when Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee, according to six people familiar with the matter, including aides.
Longtime Harris supporters also have been frustrated by the continued presence of some Biden aides who are known to despise the vice president, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The friction comes as the Democratic Party’s unprecedented reshuffle of its candidate slate with less than three months to go is posing the daunting task of integrating the two political camps while also selecting a running mate to take on former President Donald Trump.
And new structures must be negotiated at the highest levels of the organization.
Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s White House staffer and campaign chair, told Harris in the call that she wanted specific assurances that some of the campaign’s new top players, including David Plouffe, former campaign chairman for Barack Obama, would not dilute her decision-making power, two people familiar with the matter told Politico. Like others briefed on the inner workings of the campaign, the people were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.
The call last week came after aides to the vice president pushed hard to hire Plouffe, who Harris wanted to bring on as an adviser to her campaign.
Politico first reported the Harris campaign’s interest in Plouffe and first reported her hiring more than a week later. The Harris campaign added Plouffe to its list of staff expansions after O’Malley Dillon spoke with the vice president, but one aide and another said the title doesn’t necessarily convey importance or familiarity with Harris.
They said Plouffe’s title, “Senior Advisor for Path to 270 and Strategy,” was a gross disregard for the role that is normally the responsibility of a campaign manager.
They also questioned why Harris’ former 2020 staffer, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, who went on to hold senior positions in the White House and Biden’s campaign, was given the specific new task of focusing on Sunbelt states and Latino voters, given the increased competitiveness and experience of Harris in those states, which they saw as a demotion that would further decentralize Harris’ overall power.
A senior Harris campaign official disputed that description, stressing that Chavez Rodriguez’s new role is in addition to her current role, and that all of the new senior advisers, including Plouffe, have clearly defined duties, which in addition to advising Harris, include working closely with O’Malley Dillon and others to execute state-by-state campaign strategy.
Other hires include veteran strategist Stephanie Cutter as senior adviser for messaging and strategy, Mitch Stewart as senior adviser for battleground states and Jen Palmieri, senior adviser to second-choice candidate Doug Emhoff.
“When you have 2,000 candidates and you’re changing the top candidate, it certainly takes a minute to make sure everyone is seated, and there’s still work to be done on that front,” O’Malley Dillon said in an interview. “But at the end of the day, when you look at what this campaign has accomplished in such a short space of time, when you look at how people who were top candidates and working with the president have quickly switched over to being the top candidate, the vice president, you see at the heart of it all is very strong support and strong cooperation for the vice president.”
O’Malley Dillon maintained her influence over the organizational chart. All of Biden’s department heads maintained their leadership roles, as did other former Biden staffers. But some Biden staffers who previously worked in Harris’ portfolio have had their jobs changed and their positions reduced, just as early signs of discord began to emerge from the headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware.
All of this happened as a campaign built to represent Biden’s ideas and voices had to rapidly adjust to take its cues from a new standard-bearer, Harris, creating a faction of Biden supporters at the staff level, including some who have privately criticized Harris’ political skills and instincts for years, as well as members of her own team, which she has worked to unify.
At the same time, Harris’ top advisers have made clear that any changes would be “additive” and that those leaving the campaign were voluntary — in other words, Biden’s longtime aides would keep their titles and, in some cases, their workloads.
Sheila Nix, Harris’ senior adviser and chief of staff, released a statement contrasting the campaign’s progress with what’s happening with Trump.
“In just a few weeks, this team changed candidates, added a running mate, received an influx of hundreds of millions of dollars in historic support from millions of voters, and traveled the country to speak to voters while the other candidate grew increasingly insane and dangerous from the heights of Mar-a-Lago,” Nix said. “The story here is what we managed to do to build a winning campaign in an astonishingly short amount of time. And that’s it.”
While the unrest within the campaign may subside in the three-month rush to November, aides also worry that the scope and importance of the unrest could expand and lead to troubles lower down the chain of command. Harris built a chaotic operation during the 2020 presidential primary and allowed it to fester, creating bottlenecks and dysfunction throughout the organization. In her first two years as vice president, a series of staff departures and internal rifts have reinforced the notion that she cannot properly assemble and lead a harmonious team. But Harris and her staff have been working hard to overcome all the drama of the past, and the scaled-down 2024 campaign is the latest test of whether she can keep it going.
Several Harris aides told Politico they worried rising tensions among campaign staff would spill over onto the vice president, which they say is unfortunate and unfair given the strides Harris has made in recent years to build a cohesive and loyal campaign.
But some of Harris’ supporters have noticed some former Biden aides quietly grumbling about now having to work for her, and there’s been considerable anger directed at Rob Flaherty, a top digital strategist who holds the title of deputy campaign manager.
Flaherty and his collaborators stumbled during early stages of creating Ms. Harris’s “freedom”-themed announcement video, according to one person involved in the production, who said the early version featured mostly black women in the background, which risked stereotyping Ms. Harris as a narrow constituency rather than showcasing her ability to unite voters across communities.
The original video had to be outsourced through the Democratic National Committee, which turned to an outside creative team to remake it.
A second person involved in the video’s production said Flaherty was one of the spot’s editors, and that the spot was completed in a short period of time and was ultimately hailed as a great success. The campaign has reached out to Flaherty for comment.
Harris campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz disputed the notion that the DNC had to intervene.
“Our team produced the first cut of our launch video, but when we acquired the rights to Beyoncé’s ‘Freedom’ we had to update that video. The claim that we ‘had to outsource’ the work because it wasn’t up to standard is completely unrealistic and fails to acknowledge that the same creative team that produced the first video produced our incredibly powerful final launch video.”
Shelby Cole, the Democratic National Committee’s mobilization chief and Harris’ former digital director, said in a statement that staff at all levels “were fully committed to this campaign,” adding that the resulting public support for the new candidate “is a reflection of the team I’m proud to be a part of.”
O’Malley Dillon also credited Flaherty with playing a key role in the campaign’s transition after Harris took over, including overhauling the website and releasing a ton of new content. She acknowledged that the campaign includes some former 2020 rivals, but said many of the same people have been working side by side for at least a year now.
But raw emotions from the rapid turnover remain. Another aide to Ms. Harris pointed to the role played by the Biden campaign’s digital arm in the aftermath of the disastrous June 27 debate. That effort included threatening to “scare” Democrats away from another candidate, including Ms. Harris.Less likely to win.”
A Harris aide also said he witnessed TJ Ducklo, a longtime Biden spokesman who is now Harris’ spokesman, speak badly about Harris.
Harris communications director Michael Tyler, who is Ducklo’s campaign manager, said no one has a bad word to say about Harris’ candidacy. “Not at all,” he said.
