Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared.
As the old saying goes, old habits die hard, and that certainly rings true for the presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, which reportedly is experiencing some of the same types of internal divisions and chaos that helped derail her failed 2020 run for president.
As Legal Insurrection readers will recall, Harris dropped out in December 2019, well before the first primary vote was cast. This came after a dramatic freefall in polling numbers that started in mid-summer, something that accelerated after then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) demolished her during the second Democratic presidential primary debate.
Along the way, she blamed her floundering campaign on racism and sexism, basically accusing voters in her party of not being woke enough to pick her as the nominee. Left out of her rant on the subject, though, was the fact that her loss in support was most remarkable among… black voters and female voters.
Fueling her downward spiral were behind-the-scenes campaign woes, as reported by Politico at the time:
….aides said a lack of clarity among staff surrounding the roles of Campaign Manager Juan Rodriguez and Campaign Chair Maya Harris, the candidate’s sister, and inexperience across the organization are feeding a growing sense of indecision and aimlessness inside the campaign.[…]The campaign did not start holding regular senior staff meetings until September — nine months after launching — leading to a lack of coordination across departments.
Here we are now some five years later, and it’s like déjà vu :
The good vibes of Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign mask tensions among competing factions, as Harris loyalists and Obama alumni are grafted onto what had been President Biden’s campaign.Why it matters: New people are remaking the campaign on the fly. The result is a large and at times unwieldy team, with internal worries about cohesiveness when inevitable stumbles arise, six people involved in the campaign tell Axios.
- Biden’s campaign was insular, with a few long-serving aides making big decisions. The Harris campaign has become a diffuse “Frankenstein” team with multiple power centers.
[…]Between the lines: Harris’ team has been wary of making the Biden people feel set aside. But that has led to some internal confusion about who’s in charge.
- “The entanglement of these different entities has led to many people feeling a real lack of role clarity,” one person involved in the campaign told Axios.
[…]The intrigue: Some on Biden’s team thought many top Obama aides had been second-guessing their decisions for months — and were part of the effort to push the president to end his run for re-election.
One of the many things we’ve learned about Kamala Harris over the last three and a half years she’s been in office has been how heavily she relies on her team to try and make her look like she knows what she’s talking about (obviously, they’ve failed big time on that one).
Exhibit A, from a Washington Post piece in December 2021 amid reports of heavy staff turnover in Harris’ office:
Critics scattered over two decades point to an inconsistent and at times degrading principal who burns through seasoned staff members who have succeeded in other demanding, high-profile positions. People used to putting aside missteps, sacrificing sleep and enduring the occasional tirade from an irate boss say doing so under Harris can be particularly difficult, as she has struggled to make progress on her vice-presidential portfolio or measure up to the potential that has many pegging her as the future of the Democratic Party.[…]
Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared.
“It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,” one former staffer said. “With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully and it’s not really clear why.”
Further, there was this:
Harris’ turnover in the Senate was on the high end during her four years in the US Capitol’s upper chamber. She ranked No. 9 of 114 senators for highest turnover from 2017 to 2020, the congressional database LegiStorm showed.
Needless to say, for a woman who is infamously known in part for her word salads and policy failures as Biden’s second in command, having a campaign team that lacks cohesion and a unifying vision for how the next two months should go could spell doom for Kamala Harris come November.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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