By Nandita Bose, Trevor Hunnicutt, and Jeff Mason
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Kamala Harris is preparing for the fight of her life, if those closest to her are to be sure.
The vice president has surrounded herself with a group of experienced operators, many of them Black women who have been involved in Democratic politics for decades, as she prepares for a brutal three months of campaigning ahead of the Nov. 5 election.
For her part, U.S. Sen. LaVonza Butler of California struck a positive tone this week when asked on MSNBC about the possibility that Harris might be subjected to a series of sexist and racist attacks.
“Bring it,” she said. “Because we’re not new to this.”
The tight-knit group of advisers is fiercely loyal to Harris and interested in her career, with many of them having nurtured 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 members of the group have been putting particular pressure on Joe Biden to pick a Black woman — Harris in particular — as his 2020 vice presidential running mate at a time when he has only publicly committed to naming a woman, people said, asking not to be identified discussing the matter.
Harris’ inner circle includes advisers and allies such as Minyon Moore, chair of the Democratic National Convention Committee, convention rules co-chair Leah Docherty, Democratic National Committee member Donna Brazile and Tina Flournoy, Harris’s former chief of staff, according to the people.
They are no strangers to power, with several serving under Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001.
Harris, a last-minute replacement at the top of the ticket after Biden dropped out, may need all the help she can get, even though her campaign has gotten off to a strong start.
Harris remains politically untested on the national stage, despite being a former senator from California, the most populous state in the United States. She dropped out of the 2020 Democratic primary early and is trailing Republican rival Donald Trump in some of the swing states in this year’s race, according to polls.
There are signs that Harris is breaking with the past in one area. So far this year, some of her family members — long among her closest advisers — have played a less prominent role than they did in her 2020 campaign.
Her younger sister, Maya Harris, who ran that short-lived campaign, has been mostly absent during key moments this time around, three people familiar with Harris’s campaign said.
Advisers and family members cited in this article declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment. The Harris campaign did not comment.
The 59-year-old vice president faces a tight race and should be prepared for a wave of attacks, said Democratic strategist Anthony Cooley.
Trump has called Harris “crazy,” “insane,” and “dumb as a rock” and questioned her identity by suggesting she has previously downplayed her black heritage. Some Republicans in Congress have criticized her as a diverse staffer, and far-right activists and trolls have denigrated her online with racist and sexist slurs.
“The inner circle has been battle-tested in a way that will be useful over the next 99 days,” Kolay added.
“The attacks will be fast, violent and deep. We must have people who know how to respond quickly and intelligently to this type of attack.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
“A force of nature, a force for good”
Women with years of experience running the White House and campaigning also hold key organizational roles within Harris’s camp.
Lauren Falls serves as White House chief of staff; Erin Wilson is her deputy chief of staff; Shelan Nix is her campaign chief of staff; Kirsten Allen is White House communications director; and Ruhini Koseoglu is one of her closest advisers, having worked with her since she was in the Senate.
Analysts have viewed Volz, a veteran communications adviser in Washington, as a stabilizing force within Harris’ inner circle since May 2022, after turmoil in her office that included the departure of officials in the communications, national security and other teams.
“Lauren is a force of nature and a force for good who looks beyond the corners and plays to win,” said Chris Lehane, who worked with Volz in the Clinton White House.
Volz was deputy press secretary under Bill Clinton, then communications director under then-Vice President Al Gore, and then Senator Hillary Clinton.
Among the senior male staffers Clinton relies on are Brian Fallon, a former top aide to Hillary Clinton who runs her campaign communications; Ike Irby, who served as her deputy domestic policy adviser in the White House until earlier this year; and Dean Lieberman, the national security adviser, who previously served on the White House National Security Council.
Democratic strategist Joel Payne said the people around Harris have experience building coalitions, including the group of voters who rallied around the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020 and those who supported Obama in 2008 and 2012.
“These are people who have that lineage … to those earlier eras of democratic politics and an understanding of how to rebuild those alliances from the past,” he added.
Relations with influential people in Washington
The advice of figures like Moore, Daughtry, Brazil and Flournoy gives Harris years of experience from the Clinton White House and the Democratic National Convention, as well as the political skills needed to navigate a party that did not fully embrace her in her early years as vice president.
These women also have deep knowledge of Washington and connections to its power brokers, which, according to Marcia Fudge, Harris’s campaign co-chair and former housing secretary in the Biden administration, gives Harris an advantage over Trump.
“It gives her a level of expertise that her people don’t have,” Fudge told Reuters.
Trump’s campaign relies on a handful of loyal, little-known political advisers who helped him defeat many of his Republican rivals in the primaries.
Another resource Harris could turn to is Sen. Butler, a union organizer who has known Harris since she was San Francisco’s district attorney in the early 2000s and served as a senior adviser to her 2020 campaign. With her union connections, Butler provides a bridge to the blue-collar 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 political strategy group Third Way, said the team would help Harris portray herself as politically centrist while also appealing to left-leaning voters.
“They understand how to put it in moderation.”
Harris’ husband: ‘a professional wife-handler’
Although family members play a less prominent role in this campaign, they strongly support it.
Tony West, Harris’s son-in-law — Maya’s husband — and the chief legal officer at Uber (NYSE:) and a former assistant attorney general in the Obama administration, was at the vice president’s side during key moments in the trial this year.
Join her on trips as Biden’s presidential bid unravels and then again at Harris campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, where Harris addressed campaign leaders and staff for the first time as a presidential candidate.
“He is a thought partner, not an official role,” said one person familiar with the campaign.
Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, remains the team’s main fan.
The 59-year-old former lawyer has been hard at work on his campaign trail, visiting an abortion clinic in Maine and campaigning in New Hampshire, embodying what Vanity Fair called a “professional husband” — a supportive husband.