Subject: Re: Frank Luntz- on tonights Biden interview,
Yes, this is an issue, but I don’t see it as insurmountable as you do. There are a precious few advisors who are vital to a campaign, may be half a dozen. Strategy, media, personal, etc. For the most part the campaign is staffed by people who are semi-fungible.

Sure. There's a team of a half a dozen or so folks that make up the core of your campaign staff, and their skills and talents and particular strategies will be vital to how your campaign performs.

But you still need a campaign organization in every state, and it takes time to set all that up. It takes time to hire your state-level campaign chairs and campaign managers and communications directors, and all the people that have to work with them. To attend to the more prosaic things like getting them offices and secretaries and phones and the like.

Not a ton of time, to be sure - but you don't have a ton of time, either. It is literally eleven weeks from the DNC convention to election day. Less before the first ballots are cast in early voting.

So if it's someone other than Harris, some of your core people are going to have to spend some of that five to eleven weeks (depending on the state) getting the state level teams hired and running. It will take some amount of time - a couple of weeks at least - to build a multi-state campaign organization. So in a hyper-abbreviated campaign window, your core staff has to spend a non-trivial amount of time building the campaign organization instead of actually running the campaign.

The Biden-Harris team hired their Virginia campaign staff in April. Gretchen Whitmer doesn't have a state chair for Virginia. If she gets the nomination on August 22, she might have the top people in place to start setting up the state offices by the following Monday, and maybe they have got their offices staffed up and running to actually start the work of actual campaigning by Friday, August 30th.

Voting in Virginia starts on September 20th. Three weeks later.

So yes, it matters. There's a million moving parts and decision points and little events that affect how campaigns go, and the campaign is the sum of all of those little things - good and bad. Starting from scratch in late August is going to put a campaign at a disadvantage.