Both The Washington Post and The New York Times have a front-page article today about how the Kamala Harris campaign is failing.

At The NYT, it unraveled: "How Kamala Harris’s Campaign Unraveled/Ms. Harris is the only 2020 Democrat who has fallen hard out of the top tier of candidates. She has proved to be an uneven campaigner who changes her message and tactics to little effect and has a staff torn into factions."

At WaPo, it fizzled:



The internal headline is "Harris faces uphill climb amid questions about who she is."

At first, Harris pitched herself as the candidate “speaking truth” and asserted that she alone would talk candidly about the nation’s problems, including racism, sexism and gun violence. But she tiptoed around specific aspects of her record, which undermined the truth-talk, as did equivocations on Medicare-for-all and other policies....

Harris has... been hindered by the internal dynamics of her campaign, which is run by her sister, Maya, along with longtime advisers and their partners in a California-based consulting firm. Multiple people in and around the campaign described competing power centers and said it’s unclear who, exactly, is in charge....

Maya Harris, whose political leanings developed in liberal activist circles, advocated a more apologetic posture to appeal to criminal justice advocates and black activists — and has tried to pull her sister further left, according to multiple campaign staffers and longtime Harris allies. Other advisers opposed that approach, wondering what Harris could offer to voters if not her criminal justice résumé, and suggested she trumpet it. Initially, they settled somewhere in between, using her record as a prosecutor to explain her experience but not necessarily leaning on it as a staple of her pitch....

Is the sister— the campaign chairwoman — the biggest problem?! From the NYT:

In early November, a few days after Senator Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign announced widespread layoffs and an intensified focus on Iowa, her senior aides gathered for a staff meeting at their Baltimore headquarters and pelted the campaign manager, Juan Rodriguez, with questions....

Some Harris aides sitting at the table could barely suppress their fury about what they saw as the undoing of a once-promising campaign. Their feelings were reflected days later by Kelly Mehlenbacher, the state operations director, in a blistering resignation letter obtained by The Times. “This is my third presidential campaign and I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly,” Ms. Mehlenbacher wrote”...

[E]ven to some Harris allies, her decline is more predictable than surprising. In one instance after another, Ms. Harris and her closest advisers made flawed decisions about which states to focus on, issues to emphasize and opponents to target, all the while refusing to make difficult personnel choices to impose order on an unwieldy campaign, according to more than 50 current and former campaign staff members and allies, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations and assessments involving the candidate.

The NYT reporting goes much deeper than WaPo's. You don't have to guess. There is a horrible failure of management within the campaign. Isn't Harris herself the one demonstrating poor executive skill?

[Harris] created an organization with a campaign chairwoman, Maya Harris, who goes unchallenged in part because she is Ms. Harris’s sister, and a manager, Mr. Rodriguez, who could not be replaced without likely triggering the resignations of the candidate’s consulting team. Even at this late date, aides said it’s unclear who’s in charge of the campaign. Many of her own advisers are now pointing a finger directly at Ms. Harris.

I remember when Barack Obama was running for President and challenged over his lack of executive experience, and he offered his experience running the campaign as probative evidence of his ability:

On September 1, 2008, Barack Obama, fresh from his Roman-colonnade speech on the final night of the Democratic convention in Denver, talked to CNN’s Anderson Cooper... The question: As president, could he handle an emergency like [[Hurricane Gustav]? Obama pointed to the size of his campaign and its multi-million dollar budget as evidence of his executive abilities. “Our ability to manage large systems and to execute, I think, has been made clear over the last couple of years,” Obama said. That executive ability, he added, “indicates the degree to which we can provide the kinds of support and good service that the American people expect.”

If that argument was any good as a positive, it should also count as a negative. Of course, unlike Obama in 2008, Harris has other executive experience. She was California's Attorney General.

The NYT article seems to be channeling the message from campaign staff that Harris needs to fire some people, but it also sounds as though it's leaning on her to drop out:

Yet it has come to this: After beginning her candidacy with a speech before 20,000 people in Oakland, some of Ms. Harris’s longtime supporters believe she should consider dropping out in late December — the deadline for taking her name off the California primary ballot — if she does not show political momentum. Some advisers are already bracing for a primary challenge, potentially from the billionaire Tom Steyer, should she run for re-election to the Senate in 2022. Her senior aides plan to assess next month whether she’s made sufficient progress to remain in the race.

“For her to lose California would be really hard and it’s not looking good,” said Susie Buell, a longtime Harris donor from the Bay Area....

She's not in the running to win California, according to the polls. She hasn't done better than 4th place since July. At least one poll has her in 5th place, behind Buttigieg, who's on the rise.

The fact that Ms. Harris is now banking on an Iowa-or-bust strategy highlights a major strategic miscalculation early on that set her off on the wrong track.

Iowa! The most recent poll put her in 7th place in Iowa, behind even Klobuchar and Yang.