How Kamala Harris took control of the Democratic Party

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As long as Joe Biden still believed, there could be no Plan B.

The boss had earned that much. Vice President Harris approved no discussions. Campaign advisers did not break ranks in public.

But some key preparations were still put in place for the most spectacular transformation in recent American political history – a flashbang midsummer swap at the top of the presidential ticket, an outpouring of volunteer energy, a rebound in the polls and a flood of campaign cash best described in fractions of $1 billion.

The national party bosses quietly consulted their rule books. State party chairs met in secret. Others operated without orders to prepare the ground.

Donna Brazile, the former Democratic Party chair, and Bakari Sellers, the former South Carolina lawmaker, started running their own delegate whip operation weeks before Biden bowed out. There was no public list of the 4,000 or so first-ballot convention voters – the risk of it leaking, causing harassment and death threats, hung in the air. But Brazile and Sellers knew the local politicians, the union leaders and the state party chairs who ran most delegations.

They also knew the rules. It didn’t matter how many donors or members of Congress called for Biden to step aside, or how many scripts the playwright Aaron Sorkin published on op-ed pages. Pledged delegates would decide, and they could betray Biden. According to Rule 13 (J), they had the power to vote on the first ballot “in all good conscience.” So Brazile and Sellers made sure everyone held firm, reporting back to the campaign’s whip operation and White House senior counselor Steve Ricchetti that the troops remained in formation.

“I had people call me and say, ‘Is the vice president ready?’ I said, ‘No, she wants Joe Biden. She is sticking with Joe Biden,’” Brazile remembered.

But when it came up, Brazile also told people that the party already had a backup quarterback on the roster. Sellers told others Harris could not be skipped. There was no question in those calls what would happen if Biden made a different choice. “I said, ‘Oh hell no, you are not taking Vice President Harris out. That is not going to happen,’” Brazile said.

Two days before Biden announced his decision, Ken Martin, the chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, convened a meeting of the executive committee for the Association of State Democratic Committees – about 50 people from around the country and territories.

They didn’t know what Biden would choose, but they decided what they would do. If Biden recommitted to the race in the coming days, they would publicly back his decision. If he bowed out, they would immediately back Harris to end the suspense.

“There is a real need to unify. Time is not on our side. We can’t have internal conversations over a month that focuses us inward,” Martin said. “There was nobody that objected on that executive committee call.”

Biden bowed out of the race at 1:46 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, July 21, sending Harris’s advisers scrambling to the vice president’s residence, where she wore a Howard University sweatshirt while placing more than 100 calls over the first ten hours. Aides rushed to the campaign office in Wilmington, Del., to flip an entire brand from a dead stop – before passing around late-night beer and whiskey to wind down.

By the time the state party chairs released a statement backing Harris at 9:12 p.m. that night, most of her potential rivals for the nomination had fallen in line. State delegations were endorsing. Hundreds of thousands of Americans would gather spontaneously by Zoom to pledge their support over the days that followed.

Brazile thought it would take 48 hours to finish the switch. The Associated Press declared a new presumptive nominee about 32 hours later.

This story about how Democrats handed Harris the nomination, saved themselves from oblivion and restarted the 2024 presidential contest is based on interviews with more than a dozen officials who made it happen, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private events. They told a wide-eyed tale of hope emerging from despair, unity stumbling out of division.

“If she’d had to raise money starting from zero, hire her first staff, open her first office and do all of that right out of the gate, I don’t know that she would have had time to execute. What we saw was the exact inverse of that,” said Robby Mook, the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid. “She inherited everything that had already been built and then expanded it at an extremely rapid rate.”

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Flipped script

Biden decided on a Saturday night, but slept on the decision. Harris was one of the first beyond the walls of his Rehoboth Beach vacation house to find out the following morning.

She had a few hours to get ready, with her husband back home in Los Angeles planning a SoulCycle Sunday and not paying attention to his phone. Campaign chief of staff Sheila Nix and Harris’s White House chief of staff Lorraine Voles told others to head to the vice president’s residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory. When Kirsten Allen, Harris’s communications director found out, her first call was to Lawrence Jackson, the vice president’s photographer. There needed to be pictures.

Campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon got the news early as well. Her first call was to deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty, who was taking in the summer breeze in a Wilmington park. There would be a letter, she said. The whole country needed to see it at the same time. Who else needed to know to make it happen?

The campaign had spent Saturday calling delegates to prepare for Biden’s nomination. One adviser had confided, half stunned, half proud: “I don’t think he’s getting out.” The mood was resignation mixed with myopia. The previous weeks had been a kind of torture for these young professionals who had taken a job to win and saw victory slipping away. But they served a president whose life was built on turning personal pain into public purpose. So they kept working.

Flaherty told O’Malley Dillon he needed to tell one other person, and the circle soon expanded further. They got the letter, with the signature, loaded into Biden’s social media account. O’Malley Dillon was listening to Biden’s 1:45 p.m. senior White House adviser call when she told Flaherty to go – a minute later.

They gave Biden some time alone in the world, but not much. Twenty-seven minutes after that, Biden endorsed Harris on the same account. The campaign high command had not seriously entertained any other option, said several people familiar with the conversations.

Harris told her aides that her response, declaring that she would run for the nomination, had to be issued by the team in Wilmington as a signal that she was taking over. Harris aides noticed during final proofreads that the statement had been drafted with the Biden logo on top. Wilmington had it removed and hit send.

People spontaneously appeared at the headquarters office. Salute emojis filled up campaign Slack. The Biden-Harris campaign had something like 30 social media accounts to flip. The door knockers and fundraisers needed new scripts. The campaign needed a new logo.

For years, KamalaHarris.com had just redirected to Biden’s website. That would have to change, but no one in Wilmington knew who controlled the internet domain, setting off a frenzied search through records at the Democratic National Committee.

One hundred miles away, Harris was hitting the phones, as her team began polishing her remarks for the following day. Harris political advisers Megan Jones and Erin Wilson had a list of delegation leaders who could trigger phone trees in each of the states. After Biden’s endorsement, Harris aides called Jones from the residence to give the green light to start calling. “Tell the boss, we’ve got this,” Jones responded.

Allen insisted that Harris be in front of a camera by Monday. The team discussed a possible event in Philadelphia, but time was short. The solution was a twofer: Go rally the campaign staff with the speech in Wilmington headquarters. The Harris team cleared the idea with the West Wing. Juan Ortega, part of the Harris advance staff, found out the second floor of the headquarters building had been leased but not yet filled. They had a venue.

Her speechwriter Steven Kelly and communication director Brian Fallon were at the residence, working with top adviser Adam Frankel, who was remote. They recast the 2024 presidential campaign around a new theme – a former prosecutor taking on the convicted criminal Donald Trump. Harris offered edits, cutting some details of the perpetrators she had put in prison. Then she added a line. “So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”

“Team Biden and Team Harris were like two high speed trains running in parallel, with folks on board tossing bags back and forth,” Flaherty said.

Modern campaign fundraising is about catching waves and popping off the lip. Six minutes after Biden’s endorsement, the campaign had a destination. “[D]onate to her campaign here,” read the post.

Never mind that the lawyers had not yet filed the name change with the Federal Election Commission. The team waited for the paperwork before blitzing out more emails, text messages and the other pieces of what became a $122 million windfall in just over 48 hours.

The writers in Wilmington had to learn a new voice. Shelby Cole, the DNC’s chief mobilization officer, had been digital director for Harris’s 2020 campaign. She got on the phone with Wilmington for a live-fire training of how to write for the vice president, how to talk to voters without words like “malarkey” or references to ice cream.

At 8:29 p.m., Charli XCX, a hot British pop star, blessed Harris with her brand – “kamala is brat,” she wrote on X, a post that would be shared 55,000 times. One mercenary cell inside Flaherty’s digital team of about 200 – none of its members older than 25 – ran a more aggressive account called BidenHQ, a place for generating memes and spreading opposition research. They saw opportunity.

They took the dirty chartreuse of Charli’s album cover and reskinned the account as KamalaHQ, after running the idea by Harris’s team. Celebratory TikToks blossomed, baffling CNN pundits. Pitchfork, the high tribunal of hipster culture, soon surrendered. “By the end of the day, Brat Summer had been pronounced dead,” the website’s critic sniffed about July 21.

Before midnight, there were new scripts for voter contact. By Monday morning, there were new fliers for the door knockers. The signs were ready Tuesday when Harris showed up in Wisconsin for the biggest Democratic campaign event since the 2020 nomination fight. The ad of those cheering crowds was ready days later.

“At the end of the day, for all my days, I will be so proud of what these guys did. They did it because they believed in the boss. And they did it because they never lost sight about what this was about. This was about beating Donald Trump,” O’Malley Dillon said. “They became a team. From the leadership on down, they became a team.”

The Harris inner circle left the Naval Observatory around 10 p.m. last Sunday. “This team was built for this moment,” Harris told them. Outside the gates stood the digital display of the U.S. Navy’s atomic clock, the master timekeeper for the federal government.

Someone had put a handmade Kamala 2024 sign on top of it. The vice president’s staff stopped for selfies.

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Flash flood

Numbers like this have never been seen.

In less than a week, the coordinated campaign raised more than $200 million, with 66 percent coming from new donors. An affiliated super PAC claimed $150 million of commitments in the first 24 hours. The campaign had more than 170,000 volunteers signed up.

“When is our call? Men are thirsting,” Sellers texted a group of other Black male strategists at 12:17 a.m. Monday. An independent group of Black women, who had been meeting regularly for years, had just finished a Zoom that evening that had 44,000 participants and raised $1.5 million in three hours.

Win With Black Men went live later that day, roughly matching the fundraising and participation. A call for White women organized by the head of the gun regulation group, Moms Demand Action, featured the singer Pink and the actress Connie Britton and soon attracted 160,000 people on a Zoom call. The “White Dudes For Harris” Zoom came next.

“We knew the potential was there, but to see it realized and realized so quickly is historic,” said Quentin James, a Democratic organizer who helped put together the call for Black men.

He was in the swimming pool on vacation in Cancún when Flaherty posted the letter. Now there was a movement to lead. “Over 100,000 African Americans in 48 hours raising over $4 million,” he said. “It shows the potential we have to transform the nation.”

Inside the DNC, the first crisis meeting was around 5 p.m. on the Sunday of the announcement. Director of party affairs Veronica Martinez Roman and others began drafting the rules of the new nomination fight, with a press release explaining that the game was not rigged. The DNC was always an awkward hybrid, a neutral arbiter of the nominating process and a longtime partner of Biden’s campaign.

On paper, anyone could challenge Harris for the nomination, if they got 300 delegate signatures of support. That was also in the rule book. Arthur Thompson, the national party’s chief technology officer and former engineering boss at Wayfair, was given a couple days to build a virtual nomination system to make it happen. No elected party leaders have challenged Harris.

Now everyone has to keep going. One week later, despite the success, nothing is solved. Harris is up in the polls, but still behind Trump in some surveys and far behind where Biden was at the same point in 2020. The Wilmington team is intact, but its White House support system has faded.

Harris asked campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, her old adviser from 2020, and O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s 2020 campaign manager, to stay on. The latter accepted with a promise that she would remain in control, without another high command second guessing her from the shadows. Everyone agrees new people need to be added to replace the forever Biden aides, like Ricchetti and adman Mike Donilon. It’s a work in progress.

Both Democrats and Republicans have taken to calling this period “the Harris Honeymoon.” The question is what happens when she stumbles or comes under a damaging attack. These campaigns have no simple trajectory. The Trump campaign ads have not yet hit the airwaves. The nation remains dyspeptic, frustrated, ready for change.

But the week that just happened cannot be taken away. Democrats have regained their footing, in time for the 100-day sprint. The chaos that threatened to envelop the party has passed. “The amount of immensely talented people turning this battleship on a dime was really incredible,” said Sam Cornale, the executive director of the DNC.