Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is unraveling. No, I am not popping champagne yet, but the latest developments emanating from her camp aren’t the stories you want dropping as we approach the two-week mark of the election. Kamala doesn’t have an economic message that’s resonating; she has an appalling deficit among core Democratic voter groups and has a male voter problem, especially with black men. It’s too late to try and make up ground here—almost everything should be devoted to last-minute media blitzes and organizing all operatives on the ground to initiate their get-out-the-vote plans. In Pennsylvania, there could be trouble ahead.
Politico wrote a lengthy piece about how Kamala’s operation in the crucial state of Pennsylvania was a total shamble. Top operatives are unfamiliar with the areas where they’re supposed to maximize party outreach, and there are allegations that surrogates have been left out in the cold. Other activists are unable to access the tools required to reach target voters. The Kamala campaign addressed some of these allegations, but all is now well with Democrats in the Keystone State:
Top Democrats in Pennsylvania are worried Vice President Kamala Harris’ operation is being poorly run in the nation’s biggest battleground state.
[…]
Some are even pointing fingers at Harris’ Pennsylvania campaign manager, Nikki Lu, who they say lacks deep knowledge of Philadelphia, where the vice president must drive up voter turnout in order to win.
“I have concerns about Nikki Lu,” said Ryan Boyer, who, as the first Black head of the city’s influential building trades council, is one of the most powerful labor leaders in the state. “I don’t think she understands Philadelphia.”
[…]
Latino and Black Democratic leaders met with Harris officials behind closed doors in separate meetings in Philadelphia late last month and pressed the campaign on their concerns, said five people who attended or were briefed on them. In the conversations, which included Lu and Harris deputy chief of staff Sergio Gonzales, the leaders asked for a greater presence at local events, an improved surrogate operation and a more sophisticated understanding of how to engage with diverse voting blocs.
[…]
“I feel like we’re going to win here, but we’re going to win it in spite of the Harris state campaign,” said a Democratic elected official in the state, who, like others for this story, was granted anonymity to speak freely about a sensitive matter. “Pennsylvania is such a mess, and it’s incredibly frustrating.”
[…]
Some of Democrats’ frustrations could be exacerbated by Pennsylvania’s size and long-standing regional differences: Lu hails from Pittsburgh, which is located on the other side of the state from Philadelphia and the major Black and Latino communities in southeastern Pennsylvania.
And complaints about outreach to voters of color are common in Democratic politics in Pennsylvania.
But this level of frustration and finger-pointing is not.
A second Democratic elected official in the state described Lu as “AWOL.” A Pennsylvania Democratic strategist said that Lu “empowers a culture” in the campaign that has left elected officials feeling unengaged and disrespected.
[…]
Harris’ coordinated campaign’s former Latino coalition manager in Pennsylvania, Mariel Joy Kornblith Martin, left after two weeks on the job and wrote a blistering memo to state party leaders in August saying that she was provided with “no access to necessary data on Latino demographics” and “no infrastructure to plan events or engage the Latino community.”
“Please give us the tools to win,” wrote Martin in the memo, which was obtained by POLITICO, “for as we all know, you do not win PA without Latinos, and you do not win the presidency without PA.”
Martin later said she wrote the memo because she wanted to suggest changes to help the campaign rather than “passively observe the status quo.”
The Harris campaign said that Martin’s allegation of not having access to the campaign’s tools was inaccurate while also saying that they feel their ground game was better than the Trump operation in the state. Granted, these were words from national campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodriguez—what else will she say? For days, this campaign has denied that they have a male voter problem despite every poll showing that chasm, along with Barack Obama being dragooned to shame black men into voting for Democrats. You can’t have a robust campaign operation when the alleged deficiencies run this deep.
Again, let's not get comfortable, but a main criticism of Harris in 2020 was that her campaign was rudderless, disorganized, and had no plan. That seems to have reared its ugly head. These aren't stories you want to see this late in the cycle.
