How Kamala Harris Took Command of the Democratic Party in 48 Hours

Late Sunday morning, Vice President Kamala Harris summoned a small clutch of her closest advisers and allies to the Naval Observatory, where she lives and works, with little notice and even less information.

President Joe Biden had informed Harris earlier that morning that he was withdrawing from the race. The vice president had assembled her team so that the exact moment Biden formally quit, at 1:46 p.m. — one minute after the president had informed his own senior staff — they were ready to go.

Time was of the essence. A sprawling call list of the most important Democrats to reach had been prepared in advance, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. The vice president, in sneakers and a sweatshirt, began methodically dialing Democratic power brokers.

“I wasn’t going to let this day go by without you hearing from me,” Harris had said over and over, as day turned to night, according to five people who received her calls or were briefed on them.

She phoned past Democratic presidents, many of her potential rivals — including Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania — Democratic congressional leaders; Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; heads of various influential caucuses; and other top Democrats, a person with direct knowledge of the call list said.

The blitz demonstrated exactly the kind of vigor and energy that Biden had lacked in recent weeks. Biden had reportedly made 20 calls to congressional Democrats in the first 10 or so days after the debate, while his candidacy hung in the balance. Harris made 100 calls in 10 hours.

At the same time that Harris was dialing, a new whip operation was set up to wrangle delegates who will ultimately select the nominee, integrating her team and the preexisting Biden-Harris campaign’s delegate operation.

Within 48 hours, Harris had functionally cleared the Democratic field of every serious rival, clinched the support of more delegates than needed to secure the party nomination, raised more than $100 million and delivered a crisper message against former President Donald Trump than Biden had mustered in months.

It amounted to a remarkable display of early dominance for Harris and an organic outpouring of enthusiasm. And it allowed a Democratic Party that had been holding its collective breath in the month since Biden’s uncomfortably inarticulate debate to finally exhale.

“It was a very well-orchestrated cascade,” said Howard Dean, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee and a past presidential candidate himself. “I have to confess I am surprised myself how fast this has gone.”

The sitting vice president was always going to be the front-runner to win the Democratic nomination if and when Biden stepped aside. To deny Harris would also have meant breaking with one of the party’s most valuable and loyal constituencies: Black women.

The story of how Harris so efficiently and effectively locked down the nomination — “a perfect 48 hours,” Robby Mook, who managed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, has called it — was told through interviews with more than two dozen people who are supporting Harris, involved with her campaign or who interacted with it. Many of those people requested anonymity to speak candidly about matters they were not authorized to discuss.

Top Democrats decided to look past any nagging concerns about Harris in one fell swoop, as Republicans eagerly began to recirculate old clips of her taking liberal stances that could make her vulnerable in November, such as opposing fracking, supporting “Medicare for All” and declaring that those who cross the border illegally are not criminals.

In some ways, the window for Harris’ might-have-been rivals closed after a mere 27 minutes. That was the amount of time between when Biden announced he was quitting and when he endorsed her as his successor, at 2:13 p.m. in a post on X.

The Biden endorsement offered more than just the president’s imprimatur, which would be powerful enough. It cleared the way for Harris to access the $96 million sitting in the Biden-Harris campaign coffers and a 1,300-strong campaign team that no potential rival could compete with. The first paperwork making the formal transition was filed at 4:48 p.m. with the Federal Election Commission, records show.

The party was also primed to unify. After a chaotic and damaging three weeks of infighting about Biden’s mental capacity, a broad range of Democrats were desperate to refocus on Trump, and Harris was the only viable path to come together quickly. The speed with which the consolidation happened was reminiscent of how the party had first rallied behind Biden in 2020 after he won the South Carolina primary and a contest with Trump loomed.

Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had, in private discussions before Biden’s exit, said that the No. 1 priority for the party was unity, according to two people with knowledge of those conversations. The Clintons, these people said, believed that a speedy coming together above all else would maximize the party’s chances against Trump.

Harris called each of them separately, and within an hour of Biden’s endorsement, the Clintons had issued their own joint endorsement that served as a clarion call to the broader party that it was time to coalesce.

A wave of endorsements followed, not just from likely allies in the Congressional Black Caucus and the California delegation but also across the party’s ideological spectrum. Rep. Matt Cartwright, a moderate who has won in a northeastern Pennsylvania district that Trump has carried, said he was “proud” to support Harris.

One of the few people yet to endorse her as of Wednesday afternoon was former President Barack Obama, whom Harris had called Sunday.

Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, who previously served as the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said it was “ridiculous” that anyone besides Harris would have even been considered — and not just because she would be the “first Black woman” to serve as the nominee.

“It was that you’re going to skip over the most qualified and vetted person — our vice president — who happens to be female and a person of color?” Beatty said.

Overall, the embrace of Harris was so widespread that congressional Republicans stopped tracking which vulnerable Democrats had endorsed her and kept tabs on only the smaller list of who had not.

Money, meanwhile, was gushing into the campaign. The Harris campaign said in a memo that as of Tuesday evening it had topped $126 million raised since Biden’s exit.

The seamlessness of Harris’ ascent — all her biggest potential rivals have already endorsed her — impressed a range of party leaders after years of private sniping and second-guessing of her political skills.

Even some at the White House and the newly transformed Harris campaign in Wilmington, Delaware, privately confided that the vice president’s energetic early appearances were a refreshing change from those of the 81-year-old president, whose verbal stumbles were constant fodder on the right.

In her first appearances, Harris sketched out a new line of attack against Trump, homing in on her time as a prosecutor and his status as a felon. And the campaign is now seeking to invert the age argument that had proved so damaging, calling Trump’s age — he is 78 — a “weight” on him Tuesday in an email.

Harris assured her new campaign staff during a visit to Wilmington this week that she was keeping the operation’s top two officials, Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair, and Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the campaign manager.

But people close to Harris expect that while she will not change the existing campaign apparatus, she will make at least one addition of a high-level senior adviser. That person would function in the role of a top strategist with a direct relationship with her. Among the names that have been under discussion in the Harris orbit are David Plouffe and Jim Messina, who managed Barack Obama’s two successful campaigns for president, in 2008 and 2012, respectively.

Some members of Biden’s senior brain trust, such as Mike Donilon, are not expected to maintain as significant a role in the Harris campaign.

The Harris operation for months had been working alongside the Biden team to recruit delegates, and she had her own base of loyalists across the nation.

On Sunday at the Naval Observatory, her team had worked into the night, ordering pizza and salad from Andy’s, a Washington, D.C., chain, with anchovies on the vice president’s pizza. By the next night, less than 36 hours after Biden’s exit, Harris had secured the support of a majority of the delegates that she needs to win the nomination next month. By Tuesday, she had locked down the backing of more than 3,100 of the party’s 4,000 total delegates, according to an Associated Press survey.

The Harris takeover was completed early Tuesday afternoon, just before the 48-hour mark since Biden’s exit, when the two Democratic congressional leaders, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, both of New York, endorsed Harris.

By then, Harris was on her way to Milwaukee, for her first appearance in a battleground state as the new face of the Democratic Party.

She was greeted by a crowd the campaign estimated at more than 3,500 — larger than any campaign crowd Biden had drawn during the entirety of his candidacy.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .