politics

Multiple leading Democrats, anxious about a campaign they fear might be stumbling past a point of no return, say their conversations with Harris have been a surprising and welcome change, after months of feeling sloughed off by the White House and Biden campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware.

“The ‘bedwetting’ complaints are running thin with people,” said a person who attended one of the meetings, describing the general state of anxiety circulating in top Democratic circles. “The West Wing and the campaign need to be better.”

Kamala should start running against/debating with Nicky Haley and just ignore Trump, sends a signal and would likely result in an actual debate on policy… Imagine that!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Her office has largely stabilized after early years of intense dysfunction, and she has been slowly asserting herself more confidently in public, including in her speech Friday at the Munich Security Conference that was aimed at reassuring Europeans alarmed about a potential Donald Trump return to the White House.

Harris tends to end the often strung-out conversations with a reassuring “By the way, we’re gonna win.” But each gathering has led to her asking staff to put together more meetings, often interspersed with more calls and demands for follow-up as she digs deeper into what many feel has been going wrong.

“Folks like seeing the vice president not just playing the role of cheerleader and promoter of the ticket but having deep conversations about how we message and how we win,” said Levar Stoney, the mayor of Richmond, Virginia, who attended a meeting of several dozen Black men in politics and finance last month at the Naval Observatory.

Rep. Debbie Dingell has pushed her repeatedly to get the White House to take more seriously how hard Biden’s response to the Gaza war is hitting Arab Americans in her home state of Michigan.

In a room stocked with potential 2024 replacement candidates and expected 2028 challengers to Harris for the Democratic nomination, they all took moments at both the middle and the end to reaffirm that they were behind Biden as the nominee but also that he absolutely had to win.

This is a more assertive role for a running mate than has traditionally been the case, and one that risks banging into an often insular and guarded Biden inner circle, which likes to point out that the 2020 and 2022 elections went better for him than almost any outsider would have predicted.

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