Harris eyes changes at campaign headquarters while wary of drama

No previous American candidate has ever launched a presidential campaign with the race already this much in motion. It’s like changing the quarterback, team mascot and entire playbook halfway through the third quarter.

No previous American candidate has ever launched a presidential campaign with the race already this much in motion. It’s like changing the quarterback, team mascot and entire playbook halfway through the third quarter. Advisers to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have already agreed to start planning joint events for them into the summer and fall, people involved in the discussions told CNN, and now top aides are trying to get their campaign operations to mesh too, after Harris won endorsements from enough delegates Monday night to win the party’s nomination. “This campaign was built to elect Joe Biden. But now it has to retool to elect Kamala Harris, who’s a Black and South Asian woman in the year 2024,” said one aide at campaign headquarters. The vice president is inheriting a staff that she did not pick, working at a headquarters in a state she has no connection to other than spending a few days there with Biden over the last four years, where the signs are quickly being replaced and staff are either excited or bracing themselves to get their new email addresses @kamalaharris.com instead of @joebiden.com. And now, as Harris has to reconceive of herself as a candidate for president and start vetting her own running mates, she and the aides closest to her are trying to figure out how to take over the operation without upsetting the painstakingly worked out rhythms that had gotten Harris past most of the drama and difficulties that defined her first few years as vice president. In conversations with over a dozen aides on the campaign, in the White House and operatives working with both from the outside, many describe a campaign that had become a battered and dispirited mess — and that was true before Biden’s debate performance or the subsequent weeks of barely fighting back against the Democratic mutiny. Days were spent trying to grind down anyone who voiced even a hint of skepticism about Biden. Attempts by younger staff to move creatively were often slowed down by an impenetrable Biden inner circle only a few years younger than the 81-year-old president and with an insistently different sense of news cycles and campaigning.