It’s a lesson many of us (hopefully) learn sometime by early adulthood. After all, it only leads to disappointment and loss of respect from the person or people who have been let down.

The campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris has, for the third time in recent weeks, allowed a story to bubble up publicly only to have it squashed by subsequent events. Most recently, the Democratic presidential nominee failed to pressure ABC News into changing agreed-upon debate rules concerning muted microphones in her Sept. 10 debate against former President Donald Trump, who is the 2024 Republican presidential nominee. Before that, Harris’s campaign inadvertently allowed Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) to be perceived as the favorite for Harris’s running mate. Then, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a flurry of rumors flew that Beyoncé would perform.

To be fair, Harris’s campaign never actually promised any of these things. And, in at least the first two cases, stories got out of hand while her campaign was still gearing up for a truncated fall fight against Trump after President Joe Biden dropped out and endorsed her. None have been deal-killers for Harris with voters. There’s no real evidence that her poll numbers have dipped due to these missteps.

Still, each has made Harris and her campaign team appear less than in command of fast-moving events. They have also been fed at least some negative stories they’ve had to rebut.

Take the Shapiro running mate episode. Harris, 59, had little time to pick a running mate after Biden, 81, quit his reelection bid after bowing to pressure from high-profile and rank-and-file Democrats concerned about his desultory June 27 debate performance against Trump. Meanwhile, Shapiro’s attributes for the vice presidency were obvious. He’d won the Pennsylvania governorship in 2022 by a wide margin in the nation’s premier swing state. Tapping him would have gone a long way to ensure the Harris ticket won Pennsylvania’s crucial 19 Electoral College votes.

But over a two- to three-day period, Shapiro came in from withering criticism from a small but vocal, anti-Israel bloc who were angry about the governor’s support for the Jewish state after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, which claimed about 1,200 lives and left hundreds as hostages of Hamas, in the Gaza Strip. Cries of “Genocide Josh” sprang up on social media — no matter that Shapiro’s, who is Jewish, position on the Middle East conflict was virtually indistinguishable from other would-be Harris running mates, such as Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) and Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ).

Harris ultimately went in a different direction to choose her running mate, tapping Walz, a progressive favorite since winning Minnesota’s governorship in 2018 after 12 years as a House member. Harris had every right to choose whoever she wanted as a running mate, for whatever reason. Yet by letting Shapiro appear as the presumed front-runner amid days of media coverage, it ended up looking, to some, as if she caved to her party’s most virulent anti-Israel forces.

Running mate choices are usually only of interest to the most die-hard political junkies, not the general population. That’s not the case with anything involving Beyoncé. The Grammy award-winning singer and entrepreneur is such a cultural icon that even rumors of an appearance by her at an event can upstage and overshadow planned programming.

That’s exactly what happened when Democrats gathered for their national convention. The chatter began weeks before, amid reports that Beyoncé had granted the vice president permission to use her 2016 song “Freedom” for her presidential campaign. Rumors soon flew about a Beyoncé concert in support of Harris. Then, about a possible DNC appearance by the singer in Chicago. (Taylor Swift, also among the biggest artists on the planet, was the subject of similar rumors.)

The buzz reached a point of ridiculousness during the final day of the four-day political convention. Beyoncé’s private plane was rumored to have landed at Chicago’s O’Hare airport while the convention’s house band could be heard practicing Beyoncé songs.

TMZ, at one point, reported that Beyoncé would indeed be performing. Media outlets tried to match the “scoop” but came up short because it didn’t exist.

“She was never scheduled to be in Chicago,” Beyoncé’s representative, Yvette Noel-Schure, said in a statement shortly after.

Of course, while it wasn’t the fault of Harris’s campaign that the Beyoncé rumors spread, it could have tried to tamp them down immediately, even if the timing was inconvenient as the nominee-in-waiting prepared for her acceptance speech — the biggest of her life.

The Harris campaign played a more active role in the most recent expectation-setting debacle. For weeks, her representatives made it clear that they wanted live mics for Harris’s presidential debate against Trump. The idea was that Trump couldn’t control himself and, with frequent interruptions and rude remarks about his Democratic rival, would look unpresidential to the millions viewing the debate. The Trump campaign gave mixed signals, with his campaign staff behind the scenes pushing for muted mics while the candidate publicly said he could go either way.

On Wednesday, Harris’s campaign gave in and agreed to the ground debate rules laid out by the host network, ABC News, for the Philadelphia debate, which meant no live mics. By that point, Harris’s team had let the story fester for days at a time, to the point that the final call, which was made by the news network, looked like a loss.

But Harris’s campaign is not alone in its struggles to keep some things private. On Wednesday, someone leaked an internal Trump campaign memo warning staff to please stop leaking.

Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, Trump’s co-campaign managers, warned employees that talking to the press could cost them their jobs.

“You should not be independently speaking or communicating with any members of the press — on or off the record,” the message said.

It’s all a reminder that campaigns only have so much in their control. Inevitably, staff conflicts, international decision-making, and other matters not meant for prying eyes do become public.

Harris’s team has had a particularly bad run of “expectations setting.” Nothing that’s been a political deal-killer. But it’s the kind of thing they’ll likely want to clamp down on in the final 61 days before Election Day.