Kamala Harris Collapsed in 2020. Here’s How to Avoid a Repeat.

Kamala Harris launched her first presidential campaign five years ago to great expectations. She had a growing profile as a no-nonsense interrogator in the Senate, heavyweight support from Hollywood to Wall Street and the raw talent of a once-in-a-generation leader.

Then she crumbled .

Harris’ admirers — not to mention aides and members of her inner circle — detest the mere thought of that painful time. She’s been vice president for four years, they say, standing in for President Joe Biden around the world and becoming the party’s preeminent voice on abortion rights. She’s confident, they contend, and battle-tested. The Kamala Harris of 2024 is light-years better than the Harris of 2019.

But the searing experience remains an indelible stain on her image, even after the 59-year-old Democrat spent the last half-decade steadily improving on the biggest stage imaginable.

Her near-perfect introduction as the Democrats’ standard-bearer is a testament to the hard work she’s put in. But Harris has never dealt with an opponent as ferocious as former President Donald Trump. He’ll seize on any perceived weakness and attack every vulnerability.

That means she needs to figure out how to neutralize her exposure on the border and immigration. Harris will need a crisp answer when talking about stubbornly high inflation. She must stem the slow-rolling erosion of the Democratic coalition that occurred on Biden’s watch and energize young voters, Latinos and other voters of color while holding Biden’s white working-class support across the industrial Midwestern battleground states. As a woman of color, she has to worry about calibrating her approach in ways that may seem unfair, and, at times, limiting. She has a momentous decision to make — her own vice presidential pick — and very little time to make it. In short, there is no margin for the kind of errors that plagued her first presidential bid.

To do all these things, and win the 100-day sprint to Election Day, she’ll need to bury the ghosts of that first bid. Here’s how she can do it:

Straighten Out the Org Chart

T he multi-headed structure Harris installed atop her 2020 campaign was a disaster. It was chaotic, creating choke points that nearly ground the operation to a halt. Decisions took forever to make, advisers struggled to put a check on her family’s influence and it radiated uncertainty and dysfunction across her organization.

It wasn’t a new dynamic for her. The first year in each of her elected offices had been marked by a failure to settle on a solid organizational structure and an inability to find her own footing within it.

Like many high-achieving elected officials, she’s a demanding boss who puts top aides through the paces and expects the same level of preparation and focus down the chain of command. And when she’s made mistakes, it has rippled downstream to everyone’s detriment, including in the vice president’s office, where her first year was rocky.

Since then, Harris has become more grounded. She found a solid core of advisers. She’s tapped into her network of former aides and advisers for outside advice, even before taking over as the de facto nominee.

But she’ll need to rely on — and trust — the plug-and-play aspect of Biden’s campaign apparatus. In a compressed, three-month timeline, maintaining continuity, carefully integrating Willmington and Harris world and ensuring an effective transition is essential to exorcising the organizational demons of 2020. So is having a campaign organization marked by clear lines of authority and responsibility.

Don’t Overthink It

H arris tripped herself up in 2019 by straying too far from what was then her political North Star: crafting an image as a tough-minded and empathetic prosecutor.

In the run-up to the Democratic primaries, Harris allowed “Kamala is a cop” critiques from activists and members of her own party to get inside her head. While Harris was progressive by the standards of her era in law enforcement, she was nowhere near as permissive as today’s crop of liberal district attorneys. Still, she readily submitted to the left’s endless purity tests, and backtracked on key pieces of her record as a prosecutor and attorney general. In doing so, she undermined what Harris and her closest advisers viewed as one of her greatest strengths: her career-long commitment to pursuing justice through the legal system.

The act of creating a policy platform on the fly while simultaneously trying to prove her ideological bona fides yanked her further left and outside her comfort zone. At different moments in the primary, you could almost see her calculating answers in real time during TV interviews, which had the effect of making her appear wishy-washy.

Harris won’t need to worry about liberal carping about her prosecutorial background anymore. It may have been a liability in a Democratic presidential primary, but in a general election, it’s more likely to be an asset. And whereas she once struggled to articulate her views on broader issues like health care, she now can largely rely on the policy framework created under the Biden-Harris administration.

At the moment, Trump is throwing everything he has at Harris to see what sticks. It’s no coincidence he’s toggled between using two nicknames for Harris: Lyin’ Kamala (with her first name pronounced incorrectly), and Laffin’ Kamala. The latter, a nod to the wave of videos that capture Harris’ big, full-bodied laugh, is designed to paint her as unserious and phony.

Her ability to fend off those attacks may hinge on her ability to confidently return to her tough, pragmatic prosecutor motif, the space where she is most at ease. She’s already moving in that direction. “As attorney general of California, I took on the big Wall Street banks and held them accountable for fraud,” she said in Wisconsin last week. “Donald Trump was just found guilty of fraud on 34 counts.”

Consistency of Message

O ne of the most serious flaws of Harris’ 2020 bid was the inability of the messenger to settle on a consistent, coherent and compelling message.

In large part, that was a function of her attempts to break out of a crowded primary field. Biden occupied the moderate path, promoting narrow, incremental change. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who proposed more sweeping initiatives, crashed in a pile-up on the left. Others sought to establish themselves as candidates of generational change, laying out competing versions of the Democratic future — the mensa vibes of Pete Buttigieg, the Gen-X mystique of Beto O'Rourke, the spirituality of Cory Booker. Harris wasn’t any of that.

By the time she pivoted to her “3 a.m. Agenda,” a late-stage phase of her run that purported to address issues that kept voters up at night, much of the party had already moved on.

Now that she’s about to be handed the Democratic nomination, Harris doesn’t need to compete for eyeballs against a massive field of serious competitors. She’s free to focus on a straightforward mission.

It won’t be enough for Harris to just be the anti-Trump candidate. Her task will be laying waste to Trump while also articulating a forward-looking vision of a brighter future.

Balancing those ideas and integrating them into a cohesive message won’t be easy. But Harris has already gotten started, showing a zeal for attack in her characterization of Trump as a fraudster and an abuser of women while wrapping her campaign around the theme of fighting for the middle class.

It’s worth remembering that Harris also had a wildly successful presidential campaign rollout in 2019. Things went downhill after that. This time around, she’s far better prepared. There isn’t a lot of time to get it right, but she has the advantage of a clear enemy, an inherited campaign structure and a well-defined objective.