'Bring it': Kamala Harris' inner circle girds for battle

[August 02, 2024]  By Nandita Bose, Trevor Hunnicutt and Jeff Mason

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Kamala Harris is preparing for the fight of her life, if her inner circle is anything to go by.

The vice president has surrounded herself with a group of tested operators, many of them Black women who have been involved in Democratic politics for decades, as she gears up for a brutal three months of campaigning before the Nov. 5 election.

U.S. Senator Laphonza Butler of California, for one, struck a bullish tone this week when asked on MSNBC about the prospect of Harris facing a barrage of sexist and racist attacks.

"Bring it," she said. "Because we are not new to this."

The tight-knit group of advisers are fiercely loyal to Harris and passionate about her career, with many having shepherded her since she was a newcomer to Washington when she joined the Senate in 2017, according to Reuters interviews with four people with direct knowledge of her closest confidants.

Some of the group privately lobbied Joe Biden to pick a Black woman - Harris in particular - as his running mate in 2020 at a time when he had only publicly committed to naming a woman, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss the matter.

Harris' inner circle include advisers and allies such as Minyon Moore, chair of the Democratic National Convention Committee, convention rules co-chair Leah Daughtry, Democratic National Committee (DNC) member Donna Brazile and Tina Flournoy, a former chief of staff to Harris, the people said.

They are no strangers to power, with many having served in Bill Clinton's 1993-2001 presidency.

Harris, an 11th-hour substitute at the top of the ticket after Biden dropped out, may need all the help she can get, even though her campaign has made a strong start.

Harris remains untested, politically, on the national stage, despite being a former senator from the most populous U.S. state of California. She dropped out of the 2020 Democratic primary early and she trails Republican rival Donald Trump in some battleground states in this year's race, according to opinion polls.

There are signs of a break from the past for Harris in one area. So far this year, some members of her family - long among her closest advisers - have played a less prominent role than in her 2020 run.

Younger sister Maya Harris, who ran that short-lived campaign, has been mostly absent during key moments this time round, three of the people familiar with Harris' campaign said.

The advisers and family members included in this article either declined comment or didn't respond to requests for comment. The Harris campaign didn't comment.

The 59-year-old vice president faces a tight race and needs to be prepared for a wave of attacks, Democratic strategist Anthony Coley said.

Trump has called Harris "crazy," "nuts", "dumb as a rock" and questioned her identity by suggesting she had previously downplayed her Black heritage. Some Republicans in Congress disparage her as a diversity hire. Right-wing activists and trolls have smeared her online with racist and sexist barbs.

The inner circle is "battle tested in a way that is going to be helpful over the next 99 days," Coley said.

"It's going to be fast, it's going to be furious, it's going to be deep. And you have to have people who know how to respond quickly and smartly to these types of attacks."

The Trump campaign didn't respond to a request for comment for this article.

'FORCE OF NATURE, FORCE FOR GOOD'

Women with years of experience running the White House and election campaigning also hold key organizational roles inside the Harris camp.

Lorraine Voles serves as her White House chief of staff; Erin Wilson is her deputy chief of staff; Sheila Nix is her chief of staff on the campaign; Kirsten Allen serves as her White House communications director; and Rohini Kosoglu is one of her closest advisers, who has worked for her since her time in the Senate.

Voles, a veteran Washington communications fixer and adviser, has been credited by analysts for being a stabilizing force within Harris' inner circle since May 2022, after turmoil in her office that included departures in her communications, national security and other teams.

Democratic 2020 U.S. presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) and her sister and campaign chairwoman Maya (R) order during a campaign visit to the Narrow Way Cafe and Shop in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., July 29, 2019. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo

"Lorraine is a force of nature and a force for good who looks around corners and plays to win," said Chris LeHane, who worked with Voles at the Clinton White House.

A deputy press secretary for Bill Clinton, Voles was subsequently communications director for then-Vice President Al Gore and for then-Senator Hillary Clinton.

Some of the top male staffers she relies on are Brian Fallon, a former senior aide to Hillary Clinton who runs her communications at the campaign; Ike Irby, who served as her deputy domestic policy adviser at the White House until earlier this year; and Dean Lieberman, a national security adviser, who earlier worked for the White House National Security Council.

Democratic strategist Joel Payne said the people around Harris had experience building coalitions, including the group of voters that coalesced around the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020 and those who supported Obama in 2008 and 2012.

"These are folks who have that lineage ... to those previous eras of Democratic politics and an understanding of how to rebuild those coalitions from the past," he added.

TIES TO WASHINGTON POWER BROKERS

The counsel of figures like Moore, Daughtry, Brazile and Flournoy lend Harris years of experience from the Clinton White House and the DNC and the political chops to navigate a party that did not fully embrace her in the early years she was vice president.

These women also bring deep knowledge of Washington and ties to its power brokers. They give Harris an advantage over Trump, according to Marcia Fudge, a co-chair of the Harris campaign and former housing secretary in Biden's administration.

"It brings her a level of experience that his people don't have," Fudge told Reuters.

Trump's campaign is built around a handful of loyal, little-known political advisers, who helped him sweep away multiple Republican challengers in the primaries.

Another sounding board for Harris is Senator Butler, a union organizer who has known Harris since she was San Francisco district attorney in the early 2000s and served as a senior adviser to her 2020 campaign. With her union ties, Butler offers a bridge to the labor community, an important Democratic constituency for Harris.

This week, the United Auto Workers union endorsed Harris for president, providing a potential boost for her in the swing state of Michigan.

Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a political strategy group, said this team would help Harris portray herself as politically in the center, while also appealing to left-leaning voters.

"They understand how to position her as a moderate."

HARRIS HUSBAND: 'PROFESSIONAL WIFE GUY'

Although family members are playing a less prominent role in this campaign, they are strong supporters.

Harris' brother-in-law - Maya's husband - Tony West, chief legal officer at Uber and former associate attorney general in the Obama administration, has been by the vice president's side during key moments on the trail this year.

He joined her on trips while Biden's own presidential bid was collapsing and then again at the Harris campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, where Harris addressed campaign leaders and staffers for the first time as the presidential candidate.

"He's a thought partner, no formal role," said one of the people with knowledge of the campaign.

Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff, remains cheerleader-in-chief.

The 59-year-old former lawyer has hit the campaign trail hard, visiting abortion clinic in Maine, stumping in New Hampshire and channeling what Vanity Fair calls "professional Wife Guy" - the supportive husband.

(Reporting by Nandita Bose, Trevor Hunnicutt and Jeff Mason; Additional reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Heather Timmons and Pravin Char)

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