WASHINGTON -- In early November, a few days after Sen. Kamala Harris' presidential campaign announced widespread layoffs and an intensified focus on Iowa, her senior aides gathered for a staff meeting at their Baltimore headquarters and pelted campaign manager Juan Rodriguez with questions.What exactly
WASHINGTON — In early November, a few days after Sen. Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign announced widespread layoffs and an intensified focus on Iowa, her senior aides gathered for a staff meeting at their Baltimore headquarters and pelted campaign manager Juan Rodriguez with questions.
The 2020 Democratic field has been defined by its turbulence, with some contenders rising, others dropping out and two more jumping in just this month. Yet there is only one candidate who rocketed to the top tier and then plummeted in early state polls to the low single digits: Harris. Story continuesWith just over two months until the Iowa caucuses, her staff is now riven between competing factions eager to belittle one another, and the candidate’s relationship with Rodriguez has turned frosty, according to multiple Democrats close to Harris. Several aides, including Jalisa Washington-Price, state director in crucial South Carolina, have already had conversations about post-campaign jobs.
But her troubles go beyond staffing and strategy: Her financial predicament is dire. The campaign has not taken a poll or been able to afford TV advertising since September, and it has all but quit buying Facebook ads in the last two months. Her advisers, after months of resistance, have only now signaled their desire for a group of former aides to begin a super PAC to finance an independent political effort on her behalf.
Yet it has come to this: After beginning her candidacy with a speech before 20,000 people in Oakland, some of Harris’ longtime supporters believe she should consider dropping out in late December — the deadline for taking her name off the California primary ballot — if she does not show political momentum. Some advisers are already bracing for a primary challenge, potentially from billionaire Tom Steyer, should she run for reelection to the Senate in 2022.
Then there was Harris’ campaign message. Extensive polling led her to believe that there was great value in the word “truth,” so she titled her 2019 memoir “The Truths We Hold” and made a similar phrase the centerpiece of her early stump speech: “Let’s speak truth.” But she dropped the saying out of a belief that voters wanted something less gauzy.
From the start, the campaign structure seemed ripe for conflict. Harris divided her campaign between two coasts, basing her operation in Baltimore but retaining some key advisers in the Bay Area. She bifurcated the leadership between two decidedly different loyalists: her sister, the chair, and Rodriguez, a trusted lieutenant who had managed her 2016 Senate campaign.
It was not only political tactics that divided the campaign: In the spring, Maya Harris and the consulting team were at war over whether the senator should embrace or downplay her record as a prosecutor, which some on the left have criticized, a dilemma the campaign has never resolved. Advisers close to Rodriguez said the cash flow problems were so intense he had to move swiftly and denied he ever disregarded financial warnings. They argued that the animus toward him, first reported by Politico, stems from the raw emotions of staffers seeing their colleagues pushed out.
“I’m cool with the T-shirts, but you also have to have a strategy,” said Bakari Sellers, a former lawmaker in South Carolina and one of Harris’ top surrogates there, referring to the merchandise Harris’ campaign had marketed after that first debate.
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