Vice-President Kamala Harris at a campaign event in Atlanta on Tuesday.
Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Forced into an extraordinarily compressed campaign timeline, Kamala Harris has been buried in calls and meetings at the White House, at her residence at the Naval Observatory, and on Air Force Two as she whips around the country in her first whirlwind weeks as the Democratic presidential nominee. She has been working with her top advisers to craft an extended stump speech, approve new ads, and consider which senior strategists should join her team for the 90-something-day sprint to Election Day. Most pressing of all, she is deciding who should be her running mate.
Harris has reviewed a wide range of options, but multiple Democrats close to the process say special focus has been on Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and Arizona senator Mark Kelly, with Minnesota governor Tim Walz also in contention as well as two slightly longer shots: Kentucky governor Andy Beshear and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Eric Holder’s team of lawyers is busy vetting the contenders, while Harris has been reviewing documents about the candidates, watching clips of them, and looking over the limited polling that has come back on their images and electoral profiles.
The tea-leaf reading on Twitter and cable seems to have concluded that Harris has made a decision, but she has yet to formally interview the serious contenders. That will probably happen later this week, maybe over the weekend, so she can decide by Tuesday — in time for the new ticket to make a weeklong swing-state blitz next week. That tour will start in Philadelphia, which Harris’s team knew would ignite speculation that she had chosen Shapiro. But they have vehemently denied that she has decided and instead point out the city’s centrality to the electoral map.
Owing to her schedule, Harris’s process has been unlike any in memory, and it’s starting to reveal how she and her little-known inner circle operate after four years out of the spotlight. Harris will likely come to a decision only after a deliberate process that includes weighing the pros and cons with these close advisers, said a handful of top Democrats who have previously worked with her. (In 2020, Joe Biden hemmed and hawed over his veep decision for months with a formal committee, rounds of interviews, and extensive polling. Harris and her team have barely had enough time to order serious polling on the wannabes before the candidate must be nominated next week, ahead of the convention.) “She is the type of person that likes to have a meeting; she’s a verbal person. She likes to talk through and hash stuff out,” said one longtime friend and adviser. That process will also include reviewing the available polling data: Two of the top contenders are from important swing states, but it’s not yet obvious if their presence on the ticket would have more sway than running mates usually have.
Although the process is playing out behind tightly locked doors, a handful of major factors appears certain to affect Harris’s decision-making, according to Democrats close to her. One is Holder’s vet, which scans for red flags in the candidates’ backgrounds. Another is Harris’s personal chemistry with them. She knows Kelly in part through his wife, Gabby Giffords; has gotten to know Shapiro as the governor of an important state and a fellow former attorney general; and has become friendly with Buttigieg in the Cabinet. But she does not know any of the candidates especially well. The one she knew best, North Carolina governor Roy Cooper, asked early in the process not to be considered.
Harris has repeated to people close to her that she wants someone she is confident could do the job of president. That qualification may come down to her instincts. “It’ll be: What’s her confidence that this person could take the reins? Can she look the American people in the eye and say that?” said the adviser.
But it’s also likely to be a matter of résumés. Harris and her close aides have heard opinions from longtime associates, many of whom have encouraged her to choose a governor, such as Shapiro, Walz, or Beshear, because of their executive experience — the kind she, a former senator, did not have before becoming vice-president. Some of her allies have been impressed with Walz’s midwestern charm and extensive time in government, as well as his rapid emergence and sudden popularity, but wonder if he might be a better surrogate than running mate. Others have fixated on Kelly’s biography — he’s a former fighter pilot and astronaut with a reputation for being tough on the border — but have been trying to work out whether his initial refusal to sign on to the PRO Act would make him unpopular with Harris’s labor allies. (He has since said he would vote for it.) Still others have wondered whether Shapiro’s stances on school vouchers or Israel’s war in Gaza would alienate especially loud parts of the left.
The campaign warfare is important too. Many around Harris believe Donald Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate handed them a massive opportunity, and they’re eager to keep hammering the candidate they see as an unprepared extremist. They have considered how to keep attention on him and which of the possible Democratic VPs would be the clearest contrast with Vance in a debate. It’s not obvious: Shapiro is regarded as a quick-on-his-feet debater; Walz is the originator of the “weird” line of argument that Democrats are now using to good effect; Kelly may be a less agile orator but he successfully debated Blake Masters, another Peter Thiel acolyte, in his most recent campaign; Beshear has been ripping at Vance’s Appalachian roots; and Buttigieg is widely considered one of his party’s most deft communicators.
Harris has been consulting on the pick with a trusted inner core of advisers including her campaign’s chief of staff, Sheila Nix, a former top aide to both Joe and Jill Biden and in the Department of Education; her government-side chief of staff, Lorraine Voles; and her brother-in-law Tony West, the top lawyer for Uber and a former U.S. associate attorney general. She has also been discussing the matter with Minyon Moore, a former adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton who is currently planning the convention, and Dana Remus, Biden’s former White House counsel. Outside that immediate group, a trio who worked on the Biden campaign before Harris’s ascension on the ticket has also been involved in the discussions: former congressman Cedric Richmond, a campaign co-chair; deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks; and campaign communications director Michael Tyler.
A larger circle has been discussing campaign strategy, especially the sprint out of the convention. Harris’s decision to keep the top of the Biden campaign team intact means she is relying on campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, a former top political aide for Barack Obama, and campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez, who was Harris’s California state director during her Senate years. Some top Biden advisers, previously part of his inner circle, have departed: Mike Donilon, Biden’s longtime political adviser, is out of the mix, while Anita Dunn is leaving her perch as a White House adviser to work for Harris’s super-PAC.
Harris has kept other aides close, including her campaign communications director Brian Fallon, a former aide to Holder, Chuck Schumer, and Hillary Clinton; her political adviser Megan Jones, a former adviser to Harry Reid; and her ex–chief of staff Rohini Kosoglu. She has also brought into the campaign Brian Nelson, the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, with whom she worked as California’s attorney general.
Though Harris has kept most of Biden’s senior campaign team intact, its shape is not entirely settled. Many close to Harris have advocated for Moore, who is also close to her, to join in an advisory role once she is finished with the convention. At the same time, many in Harris’s circle have been chattering about David Plouffe, the former Obama campaign manager who is under consideration to be a strategist for the race’s homestretch. They believe he would take the job if Harris were to offer it.
In the meantime, one of the campaign’s most immediate concerns has been getting enough pro-Harris and anti-Trump ads on the air in swing states after a few days of being drowned out by Republican spending. To that end, longtime Democratic ad-maker Jim Margolis, who worked for Harris’s 2020 campaign and Obama and Hillary Clinton before that, is expected to formally join the team soon.
One preoccupation has been how exactly to defend the ticket from the nastier attacks Trump and Vance are likely to soon throw at it. For now, there’s a lot of waiting to see what sticks.
For those who have been with Harris the longest, this recalls her first campaign for attorney general, when Karl Rove swooped in to advise her opponent’s attacks in an attempt to stop her from becoming a national figure. This time, they expect plenty of focus on the progressive positions she took in her failed 2020 campaign for president — most of which she has backed away from — but also more clearly racist and sexist strikes, too. One very senior Democrat close to Harris said she has recently been thinking back to the harshest ambushes her party faced in the past few decades’ worth of presidential campaigns. “They’re watching the attacks to see what lands,” she said. “Is it Willie Horton or Hillary-style or swift boat?”
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