Inside the final days of Kamala Harris’ vice presidential decision
The vice president likes to take her time with decisions. However much data she has, she tends to ask for more. Go over it all again and again. Then check again if there’s more data.
Heading into a weekend of interviews at the Naval Observatory with running mate prospects for a choice that will shape her campaign and the Democratic Party – and potentially her presidency and the country – she doesn’t have that luxury.
Multiple people who have worked with Harris tell to news they doubt that she’s fully comfortable with the rush as she does her final interviews.
But they agree that it’s just another aspect of this accelerated and abbreviated campaign that may end up benefiting the vice president by limiting opportunities for the kind of pitfalls that have plagued her in the past.
“It’s like a European-style election!” Harris joked to donors in Houston about the sprint to Election Day, according to one person who heard her at the event Wednesday night.
Running mates often become political afterthoughts once they’re picked. But the Harris campaign knows that with so many Americans still getting to know her, her choice will offer a key and early window into who she is, how she thinks, what sort of politics she is going to practice and her sense of what the electoral weaknesses she needs to account for are.
Plans already being made for the pick
Outside advisers have already chimed in with suggestions for how to introduce the pick to keep the excitement and good vibes going, particularly if Harris ends up in a potentially awkward position of not going with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, even though the planned first stop Tuesday of the new ticket’s battleground blitz is in Philadelphia, miles from where the governor grew up and started out as a local politician. One idea is to repeat what Joe Biden’s campaign did in 2020 – putting out a video of his call to tell Harris she was his choice. Another is for Harris and her chosen candidate to make a surprise appearance after the news breaks.
Staff for the running mate – including one of the former Biden aides who helped guide Harris through her own transition onto the ticket four years ago – have already been picked. Veterans of the process jokingly call it the “prize patrol,” like the Publishers Clearing House TV ads, when a crew suddenly shows up at the door informing people they’ve won millions.
But as for whose door they’ll be showing up at, several people familiar with the current process say Harris and her small circle of advisers are trying to parse who could best help her win and to fit each of the candidates into the larger future-oriented fresh-start frame that she’s laid out herself over the past two weeks.
“This is a decision that is not just a campaign decision,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in an unrelated interview with News last week. “This is a decision that the whole country ends up being bound by.”
Pros and cons and a pragmatic mindset
Over the coming days, Harris, with her prosecutor-trained mentality, will be running pros and cons, testing out theories and looking for what aides can tell her about qualities in running mates that have actually changed votes in the past.
She has talked to Biden. She has talked to Barack Obama. Polling and focus groups have been conducted. Sample videos to play have been requested. Hours and hours of interviews with aides, on top of thousands of pages of hastily assembled documents, and in some cases with detailed follow up questions, have been coalesced by a group of lawyers led by former Attorney General Eric Holder and former White House counsel Dana Remus into briefing books.
Harris and her team know, though, that there are limits to what polling can reliably say over just two weeks, particularly given the historic upheaval the race has just gone through. They know there are questions, particularly about finances and deep dives into their backgrounds, that even the prospective choices themselves might not remember to bring up amid this rush. A chunk of the message testing on prospective choices has come from their TV appearances in the past two weeks of hurried public auditions.
