Kamala Harris’ campaign is navigating internal tensions as a team of new senior strategists take hold of an operation largely staffed by people hired when Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee, according to six people, including aides familiar with the dynamics.
Longtime Harris loyalists are also chafing at the continuing presence of some Biden aides known for disparaging the vice president, three of the people said.
The unfolding friction is the result of an unprecedented overhaul of the Democratic ticket less than three months before the election, a daunting task that requires integrating two political worlds while at the same time selecting a vice presidential nominee and battling former President Donald Trump.
And it requires negotiating a new structure at the highest levels of the organization.
Jen O’Malley Dillon, the former Biden White House official and campaign chair, told Harris in a phone call that she needed specific assurances that some of the campaign’s new power players — including David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s former campaign manager — would not dilute her decision-making authority, two of the people told POLITICO. Those people, like the others who detailed the campaign’s internal dynamics, were granted anonymity to convey private conversations.
The call last week came after advisers in the vice president’s inner circle pushed hard to hire Plouffe, whom Harris wanted on the campaign to provide counsel.
POLITICO was first to report the Harris team’s interest in Plouffe, and first to report his hiring more than a week later. After O’Malley Dillon’s call with the vice president, the Harris campaign marked Plouffe’s arrival in a long list of staff additions with titles that one aide and a close ally said don’t convey their significance or necessarily their proximity to Harris.
They described Plouffe’s title — senior adviser for path to 270 and strategy — as severely downplayed given that those duties are typically the purview of a campaign manager.
And they noted with suspicion that Campaign Manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, a Harris alum from 2020 who went on to hold key positions in the White House and Biden sphere, was assigned the new specific task of focusing on Sun Belt states of the American West as well as Latino voters, considering Harris’ increased competitiveness in those states and her depth of experience. They viewed it as a demotion that further diffuses her overall power.
A senior Harris official pushed back on those characterizations. The official stressed that Chavez Rodriguez’s new duties were being added to her current job and that the incoming senior advisers, including Plouffe, all have a defined portfolio. In his case, it’s to closely collaborate with O’Malley Dillon and others to execute the campaign’s state-by-state strategy — in addition to advising Harris.
Others brought in include the veteran strategist Stephanie Cutter, as senior adviser on message and strategy; Mitch Stewart, senior adviser for battleground states and Jen Palmieri, senior adviser for the second gentleman Doug Emhoff.
“There is no doubt when you have 2,000 people and you are changing who is at the top of the ticket that it’s going to take a minute to make sure that everyone is seated well, and we still have some work to do on that,” O’Malley Dillon said in an interview. “But I think, ultimately, when you look at what this campaign has accomplished in such a short amount of time, and how people went from working with the president on the top of the ticket to flipping immediately to the vice president on the top of the ticket, it does show at its core really strong support for the vice president and strong collaboration.”
O’Malley Dillon maintained her influence over the organizational chart. As did other Biden originals, with all of the department heads keeping their leadership roles. But some Biden staffers who had worked on Harris’ portfolio before have seen their jobs change and standing diminish just as the early warning signs of disunity began to emanate from the Wilmington, Delaware headquarters.
All of this comes as a campaign built to think and speak in the voice of Biden had to sharply adjust to taking its cues from Harris, its new standard-bearer. That’s created staff-level factions of Biden loyalists, including some who spent years privately criticizing Harris’ political skills and instincts, and her own team, whom she’s worked to integrate.
At the same time, Harris’ top advisers have made clear any changes would be “additive,” and those leaving the campaign would be doing so voluntarily. In other words, aides who spent years working for Biden would retain their titles, and, in some cases, their workloads.
Sheila Nix, the senior adviser and chief of staff to Harris, issued a statement in which she contrasted the campaign’s progress with what’s happening with Trump.
“This is a team that within a few short weeks has changed candidates, added a running mate, seen hundreds of millions of dollars pour in fueled by a historic outpouring of support from millions of voters, and crisscrossed the country talking to voters — all while the other guy has grown increasingly unhinged and dangerous from his perch on Mar-a-Lago,” Nix said. “The story here is what we’ve been able to do in a remarkably short amount of time to build a winning campaign — full stop.”
Anxiety inside the campaign could still dissipate over the three-month sprint to November, but aides also fear they could grow in scope and significance and lead to trouble down the chain of command. Harris built a chaotic operation in her 2020 presidential primary campaign that she allowed to fester, causing bottlenecks and radiating dysfunction across her organization. In the first two years of her vice presidency, she also saw several staff departures and internal fissures that reinforced the idea she couldn’t properly assemble and lead a harmonious team. But Harris and her staff have worked hard to overcome all the old dramas and the curtailed 2024 campaign is the latest test of whether she could keep it up.
A handful of people in Harris’ circle told POLITICO they worry that the unfolding tension among campaign staffers will splash back on the vice president, and argue that it’s unfortunate and unfair given the strides she’s made in recent years to build a cohesive and loyal unit.
But some Harris loyalists have picked up on former Biden aides grumbling under their breath about now having to work for her. And there’s considerable ire directed at top digital strategist Rob Flaherty, whose title includes deputy campaign manager.
Flaherty and collaborators stumbled when making an early take of a launch video for Harris based around the theme of “Freedom,” according to one person involved in the process. The person said the earlier version featured shots with primarily Black women in the background, which threatened to typecast Harris as having a narrower appeal rather than demonstrating her ability to unite voters from across communities.
The original video had to be outsourced via the Democratic National Committee, which leaned on an outside creative team to remake it.
A second person who worked on the video explained Flaherty was one of several editors for the spot that was completed on a compressed timeline and ultimately heralded as a major success. The campaign fielded the request for comment about Flaherty.
Kevin Munoz, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, disputed the notion that the DNC had to intervene.
“Our team did an initial cut of a launch video, that needed to be updated when we got the rights to use ‘Freedom’ by Beyonce. Any assertion that work ‘had to be outsourced’ because the work wasn’t up to snuff is completely divorced from reality, and fails to acknowledge that the same creative team driving the first video is the one that created our very powerful, final launch video.”
In a statement, Shelby Cole, the DNC’s mobilization officer and a former digital director for Harris, said staffers at every level “have put everything they can into this campaign,” adding that the resulting public support for the new ticket is “a reflection of the team I’m so proud to be a part of.”
And O’Malley Dillon credited Flaherty with having a crucial role in transitioning the campaign when Harris took control, including overhauling the website and putting out a torrent of new content. She acknowledged the campaign includes former 2020 rivals, but said many of the same people have been working shoulder to shoulder for at least a year now.
Yet the raw emotions from the swift change-over still linger. Another Harris aide pointed to the digital operation’s role in the Biden campaign — in the aftermath of his disastrous debate on June 27 — that included a fundraising pitch that argued switching to another candidate, including Harris, would make Democrats “less likely to win.”
The Harris aide said they had also observed longtime Biden-turned-Harris spokesperson TJ Ducklo bad-mouthing Harris.
Harris Communications Director Michael Tyler, Ducklo’s boss on the campaign, said nobody is speaking ill of their nominee. “Nope,” he said, “not happening.”