No. of Recommendations: 5
Unlike any other August, Harris is still putting together her campaign
I'm going to push back on this a little bit.
How much of her campaign is she really putting together? And how much of Biden's campaign apparatus is she simply stepping into?
Of course, she's going to want some of her own picks in leadership, but I think she's also smart enough to ask a lot of people already working on Biden's campaign to stay in place. Further down in the campaign organization, at the state and local level, it's pretty much a swap out of the Biden signs for Harris signs. Those folks are very likely to be as happy working for Harris as they were for Biden. (Maybe even happier.) The few that do resign probably have others already working in the campaign that can step up and into that vacancy.
Now I do agree that she's lost some time in front of audiences, re-learning the skills of campaigning. But it's not like she hasn't campaigned before. She's run campaigns for local and state positions, the senate, and with Biden in a presidential campaign. But that's more of refreshing old skills instead of learning from scratch.
Most importantly, she absolutely will need to get her own positions and strategy together. But again, she's got a leg up on that. She was already a part of setting up the Biden positions and strategies, and likely agrees with most. Sure, she'll have some tweaks here and there to make it her own. But she's not starting from scratch. She's thought about those things as part of the Biden campaign, and almost certainly knows where she differed from Biden and had to yield to the person at the top of the ticket.
Rather than starting from scratch, I'd think of it more as losing your first string quarterback at the end of the third quarter and switching to the backup. The team is there, ready to go, and just has to make a few adjustments to deal with the minor differences between the two quarterbacks.
--Peter
