‘Pennsylvania is such a mess’: Inside Team Harris' unusual levels of finger-pointing

PHILADELPHIA — Top Democrats in Pennsylvania are worried Vice President Kamala Harris’ operation is being poorly run in the nation's biggest battleground state.

They say some Harris aides lack relationships with key party figures, particularly in Philadelphia and its suburbs. They complain they have been left out of events and surrogates haven’t been deployed effectively. And they’ve urged Harris staff in private meetings to do more to turn out voters of color.

Some are even pointing fingers at Harris’ Pennsylvania campaign manager, Nikki Lu, who they say lacks deep knowledge of Philadelphia, where the vice president must drive up voter turnout in order to win.

“I have concerns about Nikki Lu,” said Ryan Boyer, who, as the first Black head of the city’s influential building trades council, is one of the most powerful labor leaders in the state. “I don't think she understands Philadelphia.”

For some Pennsylvania Democratic elected officials, party leaders and allies, 20 of whom POLITICO spoke to for this article, they’re anxious the in-state operation has set them back.

Latino and Black Democratic leaders met with Harris officials behind closed doors in separate meetings in Philadelphia late last month and pressed the campaign on their concerns, said five people who attended or were briefed on them. In the conversations, which included Lu and Harris deputy chief of staff Sergio Gonzales, the leaders asked for a greater presence at local events, an improved surrogate operation and a more sophisticated understanding of how to engage with diverse voting blocs.

Lu did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

In recent weeks, the in-state campaign has brought on new staff, which has given some Democrats more confidence. But they fear they are running out of time.

Pennsylvania is seen by both Harris and former President Donald Trump as pivotal in the presidential race — drawing more than $500 million in TV ad spending and reservations through the end of the year, the most of any state in the country. And Democrats fret that any mistake here, big or small, could tip the election away from them.

Harris’ path to victory depends on her ability to turn out the heavily Democratic voters in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and their surrounding suburbs, a coalition that relies on a strong performance with voters of color. If the campaign can't get them to the polls, the state — and the presidential race — could be lost.

“I feel like we’re going to win here, but we’re going to win it in spite of the Harris state campaign,” said a Democratic elected official in the state, who, like others for this story, was granted anonymity to speak freely about a sensitive matter. “Pennsylvania is such a mess, and it’s incredibly frustrating.”

In a statement, national campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodriguez said Harris’ ground game and outreach to voters of color are stronger than Trump’s. Republicans have sounded alarms about Trump’s turnout machine in Pennsylvania and other states. Chávez Rodriguez also said that Harris is “aggressively” crisscrossing the state.

“Our campaign is running the largest and most sophisticated operation in Pennsylvania history,” she said, adding that “We have 50 coordinated offices and nearly 400 staff on the ground,” “We invested in targeted advertising to Black and Latino voters starting in August of 2023, and we have now spent more than any previous presidential campaign on outreach to these communities,” and “We are leaving no stone unturned."

Chávez Rodriguez did not comment directly on complaints about Lu and her leadership. The Trump campaign declined to provide the number of staff it has in Pennsylvania, but Trump spokesperson Kush Desai said it has more than two dozen offices in the state, including one focused on Latino outreach in Reading and another in Philadelphia, where much of the team’s Black voter engagement takes place.

“There’s no part of the commonwealth that we’re ignoring,” said Desai.

Some of Democrats' frustrations could be exacerbated by Pennsylvania’s size and long-standing regional differences: Lu hails from Pittsburgh, which is located on the other side of the state from Philadelphia and the major Black and Latino communities in southeastern Pennsylvania.

And complaints about outreach to voters of color are common in Democratic politics in Pennsylvania.

But this level of frustration and finger-pointing is not.

A second Democratic elected official in the state described Lu as “AWOL.” A Pennsylvania Democratic strategist said that Lu “empowers a culture” in the campaign that has left elected officials feeling unengaged and disrespected.

As an example of what some Democrats feel is missing, Boyer said the campaign wasn't effectively using Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker as a surrogate. He argued that Parker, an African American woman who won office last year on a tough-on-crime message, would help Harris win over disillusioned Black voters and working-class white men.

“We need young African American men to come home. We need African American women ... to come out in record numbers, and disaffected African Americans,” he said. “We have surrogates in this area that have tremendous credibility in our communities. And Nikki Lu was slow to get to them.”

In a statement, Parker said, “I know what's at stake, that's why I have been directly involved in the Harris-Walz campaign since day one.” She said she has given national interviews, rallied college students, hosted a debate watch party and participated in other events for Harris.

Former Philadelphia City Councilmember Maria Quiñones-Sánchez, a Democrat who was at the meeting with Harris aides and Latino leaders, praised the vice president herself for traveling to a Hispanic neighborhood in North Philadelphia as a candidate in 2020. The change she wants, she said, “is getting her team to honor the candidate and what she would want to see.”

“Part of this is that politics has gotten so scientific around door-knocking and connecting, that they forget, culturally, Latinos like just noise,” said Quiñones-Sánchez, who is Puerto Rican.

A third Democratic elected official in Pennsylvania said that the campaign “is completely flooded with money” and should use those funds to support grassroots organizations that reach Asian and Latino voters, “where the party infrastructure is non-existent.”

Philadelphia City Councilmember Kendra Brooks, a member of the Working Families Party who has endorsed Harris, said "there's been a lot of struggles" on the in-state Harris campaign, which she attributed to "folks coming into Philadelphia that are making assumptions about what needs to happen in Philadelphia and not necessarily having the relationships to move Philadelphia politics."

Harris’ coordinated campaign’s former Latino coalition manager in Pennsylvania, Mariel Joy Kornblith Martin, left after two weeks on the job and wrote a blistering memo to state party leaders in August saying that she was provided with “no access to necessary data on Latino demographics” and “no infrastructure to plan events or engage the Latino community.”

“Please give us the tools to win,” wrote Martin in the memo, which was obtained by POLITICO, “for as we all know, you do not win PA without Latinos, and you do not win the presidency without PA.”

Martin later said she wrote the memo because she wanted to suggest changes to help the campaign rather than “passively observe the status quo.”

A Harris official said it was “untrue” that she was not given access to those tools.

The Harris campaign provided a list to POLITICO of several examples of surrogate events in Pennsylvania aimed at engaging voters of color, which featured names such as former President Barack Obama, actress America Ferrera and acting Labor Secretary Julie Su, as well as local elected officials like Pennsylvania state House Speaker Joanna McClinton and Philadelphia City Council President Kenyatta Johnson. The campaign said it has 50 staffers dedicated to engagement in majority-Black areas in the state and 30 for the job in majority-Latino regions.

The campaign also highlighted a mix of advertisements, interviews and get-out-the-vote operations targeting voters of color, such as Harris’ appearances on Black radio stations, vice presidential nominee Tim Walz’s stop on an Allentown-based Spanish-language station, and ads targeting Chinese, Korean, Indonesian and Vietnamese communities in Philadelphia.

In recent weeks, Democrats have seen some changes in the Pennsylvania campaign that they like.

Paulette Aniskoff, who served as Obama’s 2008 field director in Pennsylvania, has taken leave from the firm Bully Pulpit International to serve as a senior adviser focused on the state’s get-out-the-vote efforts and voter contact efforts, the campaign announced late last month. Some Pennsylvania Democrats applauded a move they saw as diminishing Lu’s role.

And they said two senior advisers to the state campaign, Brendan McPhillips and Kellan White, have helped make up for some campaign shortcomings. Both men have managed big races in Pennsylvania and have deep ties to Philly.

Asked if Aniskoff was brought onto the campaign to address concerns and if Lu reports to her, the Harris campaign official said “she works alongside” Lu, McPhillips and White, “a team that is responsible for three statewide wins in Pennsylvania in the last four years.”

Not all Pennsylvania Democrats are displeased with the in-state campaign or Lu.

Monica Taylor, a Delaware County councilmember, said she is "very happy with our staff" on the Harris campaign and touted its voter canvassing efforts.

State Sen. Vincent Hughes, who represents Philadelphia, said he has “no complaints about the campaign leadership” in Pennsylvania and that he communicated that to the vice president’s sister, Maya Harris, as well as top national staff.

Still, Hughes, who attended the recent meeting with Harris aides and Black leaders, said that “all forms of communication should be ramped up” for Harris, “from TV to digital to door-knocking to radio to whatever.”

“It's not that they were in deficit mode,” he added. “I just want more.”

Going into the recent meeting with Harris officials, state Rep. Danilo Burgos said Latino leaders had concerns about the campaign.

But Burgos, who co-chairs the “Latinos con Harris” group in Pennsylvania, said Harris' team “addressed” their worries, and he feels now that “things are moving in the right direction.”

He said Democrats’ complaints are a reflection of their anxiety over a tight race with high stakes.

“Everybody's very nervous,” he said. “And I think that as we get closer, people get more tense. And they're more vocal.”