Inside the final days of Kamala Harris’ vice presidential decision

Erin Schaff/Pool/Reuters

Vice President Kamala Harris walks to her motorcade at the White House in Washington, DC, on July 30, 2024.

Leaps of faith aren’t Kamala Harris’ style. But she’s about to have to take one.


When making decisions, the vice president like to take her time. Despite having a lot of information, she frequently requests more. Go over everything one more time. Next, see if there are any further data.

She doesn't have that luxury going into a weekend of interviews at the Naval Observatory with potential running mates for a position that will impact her campaign and the Democratic Party - and potentially her administration and the nation.

Numerous colleagues of Harris's told CNN they don't think she's entirely at ease with the pressure as she conducts her farewell interviews.


They do, however, concur that it's just another facet of this shortened and expedited campaign that might work to the vice president's advantage by reducing the likelihood of the kinds of missteps that have dogged her in the past.

"This election has the feel of one in Europe!" One attendee who witnessed Harris speak at the dinner on Wednesday night said that she made jokes to donors about the race to Election Day while she was in Houston.

Once chosen, running mates frequently become political afterthoughts. However, the Harris team is aware that, as so many Americans are still getting to know her, her decision will provide an important and early glimpse into her personality, political philosophy, and understanding of the electoral vulnerabilities she will need to overcome.

Plans already being made for the pick

Outside advisors have already offered advice on how to introduce the nominee to maintain the enthusiasm and positive energy, especially in the event that Harris finds himself in the awkward situation of not selecting Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. This is true even though the governor's battleground blitz is scheduled to begin on Tuesday in Philadelphia, which is far from his hometown and place of origin as a local politician. Replicating what Joe Biden's 2020 campaign did, which involved releasing a video of him telling Harris that she was his choice, is one approach. Another is that following the news, Harris and her selected candidate would show up by surprise.

Employees of the running mate, which includes a former Biden aide One idea is to repeat what Joe Biden’s campaign did in 2020 – putting out a video of his call to tell Harris she was his choice. Another is for Harris and her chosen candidate to make a surprise appearance after the news breaks.

Staff for the running mate – including one of the former Biden aides who helped guide Harris through her own transition onto the ticket four years ago – have already been picked. Veterans of the process jokingly call it the “prize patrol,” like the Publishers Clearing House TV ads, when a crew suddenly shows up at the door informing people they’ve won millions.

Regarding whose door they will be knocking on, however, a number of individuals acquainted with the proceedings say Harris and her small group of advisors are attempting to sort through the candidates to determine who can most effectively assist her in winning and to fit each one into the more expansive fresh-start, future-focused framework that she has set out for herself over the previous two weeks.
In an unrelated interview with CNN last week, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stated, "This is a decision that is not just a campaign decision." "This is a decision that ultimately binds the entire nation."

Speaking to reporters earlier this week in Pennsylvania, Shapiro avoided discussing his own involvement in the process out of respect for Buttigieg and the other candidates Harris is considering.
"The vice president must make a decision at this time that is quite personal. with whom she desires to run. with whom she wishes to rule. And who can support her through the most difficult decisions she must make on behalf of the American people? When she's ready, I think she'll decide that on her own terms," he remarked.
Shapiro responded, "I hope to be," when asked on Friday if he would be in Philadelphia on Tuesday when Harris makes her decision.

Looking for a personal connection

As she reaches a decision, Harris is thinking about her own process that led Biden to her four years ago. She is thinking about what, in her mind, went right and what went wrong with their dynamics over the past three-and-a-half years. She thinks often about resilience: the glare that was on her as vice president and what she endured – especially over the nightmarish July for Democrats when Biden resisted and then ultimately withdrew from the race – and now she will have to consider if others can withstand similar scrutiny.

Harris will also be thinking about relationships, especially because she doesn’t have much of a connection with any of the men who have made it to the final six. Being part of the same promising young politician fellowship in 2006 with Shapiro or bantering with Buttigieg when he played Mike Pence at her debate prep four years ago is as deep as the relationships go.

The others in contention don’t go much past the level of handshakes with Harris, though she did have Shapiro, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and several other governors over to her residence for what became a gripe session about the Biden campaign in February. She has served in the Biden administration with Buttigieg, but their relationship wasn’t always smooth. She was still attorney general in California during Beshear’s first year as Kentucky attorney general, though she was mostly occupied with running for Senate then. She overlapped for just two weeks in the Senate with Arizona’s Mark Kelly, though that included January 6.

The way Biden made a point of welcoming her into his family immediately after she was picked made an impact on Harris. With relatively short interviews to go off this time, the input of her husband, Doug Emhoff, often overlooked as a key supportive voice, will help guide who she thinks can fit in the same way.
“I watched her relationship with Biden,” said Cedric Richmond, the former Louisiana congressman who has become an informal adviser to Harris and has stayed in close touch over the past two weeks. “You have to have somebody who, No. 1, shares values, but No. 2, that you have a rapport with – because they’re going to be out running their own thing and doing their own thing, and you have to trust that they know you.”

Richmond said that from what he saw Harris take away from her time with Biden, this is about more than getting along at potential weekly lunches in the West Wing.
“They know your voice, they know your priorities, they know your values, they know your positions, and they’re going to execute,” he said. “So it’s very, very important to have somebody who you have a great relationship with.”

Pros and cons and a pragmatic mindset

Over the coming days, Harris, with her prosecutor-trained mentality, will be running pros and cons, testing out theories and looking for what aides can tell her about qualities in running mates that have actually changed votes in the past.

She has talked to Biden. She has talked to Barack Obama. Polling and focus groups have been conducted. Sample videos to play have been requested. Hours and hours of interviews with aides, on top of thousands of pages of hastily assembled documents, and in some cases with detailed follow up questions, have been coalesced by a group of lawyers led by former Attorney General Eric Holder and former White House counsel Dana Remus into briefing books.

Harris and her team know, though, that there are limits to what polling can reliably say over just two weeks, particularly given the historic upheaval the race has just gone through. They know there are questions, particularly about finances and deep dives into their backgrounds, that even the prospective choices themselves might not remember to bring up amid this rush. A chunk of the message testing on prospective choices has come from their TV appearances in the past two weeks of hurried public auditions.

Several involved with the process, though, say that they have walked away with one clear sense from the Harris team: no surprises. Nothing that could derail the honeymoon Harris is trying to keep going. Nothing that could give them their own version of JD Vance’s clunky start that they have been watching carefully or the clear tensions that have set in between some in Donald Trump’s and his running mate’s orbits.

Advice has been streaming in. Everyone who can get in the ears of anyone near Harris – whether that is her government chief of staff Lorraine Voles or her brother-in-law Tony West or campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, who helped Biden pick Harris in 2020 – has been weighing in with advice.

Some have been explicit in pitching a specific choice. Some have pantomimed subtlety, like just laying out the importance of winning Pennsylvania or Arizona. Some have tried to be reassuring, urging aides and advisers to remember that the pick probably won’t matter much politically, especially in this sprint of a race against Trump.

At almost exactly this point in the summer of 2020, when Biden confided to Obama that he was worried that given the lingering bad feelings about how Harris had attacked him during their first primary debate, the two might not be able to have the same good relationship that Biden remembered having with Obama.

Obama reminded his former vice president that they had not gotten along well at first. And, he stressed to Biden, none of that was nearly as relevant as who would help him win – because with Trump as the opponent, Democrats had to win.

Harris is less emotionally driven than Biden. And she knows, as a woman of color leading the Democratic ticket, how much is riding on her not to be seen as failing in this moment.

“She will recognize that she’s in a tough race, and she needs to pick the best running mate that will help her win,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and current candidate for Senate who has known Harris for years. “I think it’s going to be less about who does she have the best chemistry with and more about who has the best chance of helping the ticket.”


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