‘Managerial machine’ or right place, right time? Explaining Kamala Harris’s rapid rise

Democrats dragged President Joe Biden for weeks, questioning his physical and mental acuity and whether he could be a winner for them in November. 

During the Republican National Convention, the idea of former President Donald Trump returning to the White House almost felt like a formality. 

Fast-forward a few days and Biden’s decision to drop out of the race, and the lightning quick coalescing round Vice President Kamala Harris has re-energized the Democratic Party and gotten the gears of its well-funded political machine going. 

Within hours of Biden stepping down on Sunday, Democrats, which were divided on a path forward just hours earlier, were all in on Harris. 

In one afternoon, she had taken control of the president’s enormous political operation, managed to contact more than 100 party officials, labor union leaders, and Democratic heavyweights in Congress to ask for their support. The Biden campaign formally recast itself as “Harris for President,” that very afternoon, giving her access to $96 million in cash. And now, she’s clinched a majority of the delegates needed to shore up the nomination.

It helps that no other top Democrat has announced plans to challenge her either. 

“We have 107 days until Election Day,” she said in a statement. “Together, we will fight. And together, we will win.”

People like former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy have complained that the GOP is not up against a candidate but a political “managerial machine,” while conservative strategist Scott Jennings claimed hard launching Harris’s White House bid at record speed might have been something that was always in the works. 

“I was right, though, that the Democrats would turn to Vice President Kamala Harris as Biden’s replacement,” he said. “Though Harris piously proclaims she wants to ‘earn’ the nomination, anyone can see that the fix is in. Biden was taken out in an undemocratic way, and Harris will be installed through a rigged process. Inspiring.”

Others, like Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report, said Harris is benefitting from an unusual set of circumstances. 

“I think they realized that it was getting late very quickly,” she said. “It’s only three weeks until the convention. We only have four months until Election Day, and that they had spent three weeks basically wringing their hands after the June 27 debate about what to do about Joe Biden, watching their poll numbers really sink very deeply and down ballot candidates really starting to get incredibly nervous about the impact of the top of the ticket on their own races.”

In other words, Democrats were waiting and worrying but the second Biden stepped down, it was go-time. 

Harris has been able to quickly place herself at the top of the minds of donors, delegates, and voters because “Democrats want to turn to the general election as quickly as possible and avoid more chaos and uncertainty,” Elaine Kamarack, founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management at Brookings, said. 

Harris was also able to shore up support so quickly because people were familiar with her.

“Harris passed the vetting test, and four years in the White House was plenty of time for any other skeletons in her closet to be outed. Not so for the other possible candidates,” Kamarack added. 
It also helps that delegates know and like her. 

“Throughout this long process, everyone has wanted to know what members of Congress, senators, and former presidents have to say,” Kamarack said. “While their influence is heavy, they have only one vote each. No one has managed to actually poll the several thousand state delegates on this topic. Vice presidents traditionally do a lot of political work, and Harris was no different. Of all the people mentioned as successors to Biden, I bet that aside from Biden, Harris is the person who has actually met the most delegates.”

With the momentum rising, Harris’s campaign announced Tuesday morning that it had raised more than $100 million from 1.1 million donors since Sunday afternoon. She also not so subtly went after Trump during a visit to her new campaign headquarters. 

Harris, a former San Francisco prosecutor who took on “predators” and “fraudsters,” told a cheering crowd, “Hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”  

Behind the scenes, Harris tapped former Attorney General Eric Holder to vet her choice of a potential running mate, the New York Times, citing two people briefed on the matter, reported. Her top two political advisers, Sheila Nix and Brian Fallon, made their presence known on a Monday morning senior staff call on the Biden-turned-Harris campaign. 

Another thing helping Harris are all of the endorsements coming in from high-profile Democrats like Biden, former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), to name a few. Former President Barack Obama is the only Democratic big hitter who has yet to endorse her.

“President Biden’s very quick endorsement went a long way to make sure the Democratic mayors and other local elected officials across the country united around the vice president,” Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb told the Hill. 

Bibb said he was glad it happened fast. 

“This is a unique opportunity to be united as a party, because this is going to be a hard election,” he said. 

The excitement for Harris was also palpable among Democratic-allied groups, including the American Federation of Teachers. The union’s president, Randi Weingarten, noted that the convention’s order of business had been changed on Monday to endorse Harris. 

“You’re seeing Democrats from all of the Democratic ideologies; you’re seeing them all come home,” Weingarten said. Even though Harris has been on a roll, Walter warned not to get too comfortable. 

“They’re conveying the Biden campaign to the Harris campaign, but that’s going to be an integration that’s going to take a little bit of time. I’m sure there are going to be some bumps along the way there,” she said. “And then Harris has to go out and perform as a candidate. She hasn’t had to do that as a candidate since she was on the — well, not even on the trail in 2020, when they were sort of campaigning remotely, and then before that in her failed bid for the nomination. So this is a very different experience that she is going to have to get up to speed on.”