Quickly flush with cash, flooded with volunteers and greeted by jubilant crowds, Vice President Kamala Harris’ newly minted campaign has now made a major move to help manage it all, bringing on some of the biggest names in Democratic politics.
A flurry of high-profile hires announced Friday — including David Plouffe, who managed President Barack Obama’s first White House run, and veteran Democratic operatives Stephanie Cutter and Jennifer Palmieri — comes as the Harris campaign rushes to transform away from Joe Biden’s operation and make a mad dash to November.
“This is, let’s take Trump down once and for all," said a person with close knowledge of the process around Harris. This person, like others in this story, requested anonymity to speak candidly.
With fewer than 100 days to the election, Harris aides must tackle a series of consequential moments and decisions that would typically be stretched across months. That level of intensity in a short period of time necessitated a crew of hardened professionals, several sources with knowledge of Harris' strategy said.
“Today, accept a nomination. This weekend, pick a vice president. Next week, a major campaign swing, then the convention and then it’s the debate,” one person with knowledge of Harris’ strategy said.
Some of the high-profile staffing additions are meant to focus on messaging, polling and paid media, which had been helmed by longtime Biden operatives Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti.
Obama had recommended to Harris that she bring on Plouffe, according to one of the sources, who will act as a senior adviser on strategy. Cutter will be a senior adviser on message and strategy. Mitch Stewart will act as a senior adviser on battleground states, and Palmieri will serve as senior adviser to the second gentleman.
The core of the operations around states’ work, communications and the advance team will mostly remain the same, while Harris’ communications personnel — like senior adviser Brian Fallon — will be elevated, and there will be extra help across the board. That extra assistance will include advance staff, given that the campaign is having far more robust events in larger venues and is hosting many more of them. Harris has also brought on a new speechwriter, overseeing message consistency.
“This is the A-team,” longtime Democratic strategist Pete Giangreco said. “It means the vice president is in it to win it. It speaks well of the kind of president she would be. She’s surrounding herself with top-level campaign talent … These are people who are winners and have played at the very highest levels of politics and government.”
With messaging, already Harris and her team have focused on projecting her own voice, shifting to talk about the future and spending less time attempting to tout Biden’s record.
She has already struck a different tone than Biden both on the stump and in ads. While Biden framed November as a fight for democracy, Harris is already talking about it in terms of freedom. Several Harris aides cast it as the same pillars of messaging, but with a different messenger.
She is focusing on issues Biden hadn’t, according to one person close to Harris, including that children should not live in poverty and that there should be economic opportunities to get ahead, not just get by. Two people close to Harris’ strategy said the vice president is also focusing more on “freedom” instead of “democracy.” Freedom is meant to encompass a spectrum of issues: security, reproductive rights, voting and living one’s life.
As far as talking about Trump, the message will in part focus not just on the idea that the country cannot go back, but that a second Trump term would be so much worse than the first, according to one of the people.
Harris will also focus on some of her initiatives, like affordable housing, but the person added that a potential first debate between Harris and Trump would be a natural time to make sharper distinctions on where she differs from Biden.
“The debate is the place that we might have to think through: Do they have some different visions of what they would do with the next four years?” the second person close to strategy said.
Cutter, someone who has gained Harris' trust, has been quietly working with the vice president for months on strategy. Moving forward, she will produce the convention, which kicks off on Aug. 19 in Chicago.
Jen O’Malley Dillon will still run the campaign. And campaign manager Julie Rodriguez will focus, in part, on Arizona and Nevada, specifically Latino voters.
There was no difficulty luring the veteran operatives onto the campaign. Instead, they looked at the moment and asked, "How can I help?" one source said.
Another noted that with so much enthusiasm immediately surrounding the campaign — and the knowledge that any commitment would mean three months and not a two-year slog — a bevy of operatives were turned away who wanted to come on board.
All of the staffing additions and major decision-making comes amid a backdrop of explosive enthusiasm on the ground, in fundraising and an overall uptick in polling. Some of the numbers are staggering, including that in one week, 360,000 people signed up to volunteer for Harris, according to the campaign.
In Wisconsin, 3,500 new volunteers signed up in a week and droves of people started visiting field offices — 10 times the usual number — asking for yard signs.
“In Wisconsin, we have had more online volunteer sign-ups since July 21st than between January 1st and July 20th,” a Harris campaign aide said.
Some signs are already up in places like Philadelphia that simply read “Harris for President.”
In Nevada, which Democrats had all but written off given Trump’s runaway lead there, the party saw some positive signs, including more than 1,200 new volunteers in the first week of Harris’ campaign and a sudden bump in polling.
“That’s a game-changer to a ground game in a small state like Nevada,” Molly Forgey, a Nevada Democratic strategist, said. Forgey said with Harris, there’s new hope Democrats can make inroads at the top of the ticket in the battleground state.
“As a diverse candidate, as a native of the West and no stranger to Nevada, she is uniquely suited to do well here," she said.
Harris also enters the race with a leg up on fundraising. The gush of money — a record $310 million reported Friday — is coming from large and small donors at a pace that likely means she won't have to spend as much time fundraising and more time on the campaign trail.
Chris Korge, a veteran Democratic fundraiser who remains on as a finance chair for the Harris campaign, said he's never seen the pace of fundraising that they are now experiencing.
“We are raising, in a small period of time," he said, "an amount of money that’s unprecedented in the history of American politics."
