Too little, too late: In final weeks, Kamala Harris campaign sidelined Florida leadership, launched ineffective field work

Kamala Harris. Image via AP.

Few political consultants realistically believed Kamala Harris could win Florida’s electoral votes in November. However, sources inside the Florida arm of the Democratic presidential campaign say that the extraordinary disorganization left the operation rudderless for weeks before the election.

Sources familiar with Harris’ campaign dynamics indicated that the campaign sidelined Florida director Jasmine Burney-Clark in September.

“There was turmoil with staff,” one source told Florida Politics.

Burney-Clark remained on the payroll and denied being removed from a leadership position. She acknowledged that the campaign struggled with infrastructure and challenges in the field.

“This is a state battered and bruised by a Republican Legislature who does not want to see free and fair elections happen in this state,” she said. “That is not a recipe for success for everyone and not an environment anyone can thrive in.”

In the first week of October, Harris campaign adviser Adam Hoyer said he effectively took over state director duties but never the title. That switch occurred roughly one month before the Nov. 5 General Election when Harris lost nationwide to Republican Donald Trump. In Florida, Trump won more than 56% of the vote, contributing to an electoral vote landslide.

Florida officials say that throughout the campaign, the state attracted little attention, even as Democrats openly asserted that it remained competitive.

“It’s no secret or surprise that the national campaign didn’t treat Florida as a true ‘battleground’ state — in funding, or principal/surrogate visits,” Hoyer said. “We advocated for more resources to come to Florida every single week, but ultimately, they decided that it wasn’t the best investment toward their win goal. So, we were very limited in what we had to work with — particularly in a state as big and as expensive as Florida.”

Sources within the campaign said the Florida team never enjoyed the resources spent in the state in prior cycles. Moreover, the state campaign sat on those resources too long, failing to put a field organization in place early. Many Democrats working on other campaigns in the state suggested the Harris Florida team’s failures impacted other races negatively and ultimately contributed to a night of political failures even compared to low expectations for the blue team within the state.

 In April, the Biden campaign named a Florida team with Burney-Clark, founder of Equal Ground, serving as the state director. Philip Jerez, executive director for the Florida Democratic Party, also came on as a senior adviser, as did Orlando political consultant Jackie Lee. But unlike any other major state, Burney-Clark said she was never assigned a deputy state director.

“I knew it was going to be a difficult election to invest at the levels we believed were necessary,” Burney-Clark said. “But I was happy to know post-2020 that the Biden-Harris campaign wanted to make an investment in the state of Florida.”

But Florida wouldn’t receive the same resources as prior cycles. While Biden’s 2020 campaign budgeted $20 million and established a staff of 400 in the state, the Florida campaign received just $5 million and could build a staff of just over 100 this cycle.

Sources say the frugal demands proved especially painful in Florida, where consultants had grown accustomed to swing state status. Every indicator, though, signaled such prestige was unmistakably in the past. Republicans were on track to have greater than a one-million-voter registration advantage in Florida before the General Election. And Joe Biden, in 2020, unseated an incumbent Republican President without winning Florida, creating little incentive to invest in the state in 2024.

National developments rocked the campaign in Florida and across the country. In July, Biden announced he would not seek a second term and quickly endorsed Harris, his Vice President, as a successor. Harris quickly consolidated national support as the nominee and largely inherited Biden’s campaign as it promoted a new candidate.

At an August news conference, Burney-Clark and Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried told media the transition sparked renewed interest in the campaign. The state party reported more than 40,000 new volunteers signed up after Harris’ nomination.

Harris, though, never showed up to campaign in Florida for the rest of the cycle, despite numerous visits while Biden was the nominee.

Sources in the Florida campaign said that mattered little since the organization under Burney-Clark never set up a proper field operation. The campaign set up networking events for coalitions, something many staffers saw as more a chance for Burney-Clark to mingle with donors than any earnest attempt to win Florida’s electoral votes. The campaign authorized the hiring of just 40 field organizers, roughly one person per 1,000 volunteers.

But even those spots were not filled immediately. For a period, the Florida operation put a hiring freeze in place, though apparently without the authorization of the national campaign. Officials said many top applicants landed jobs in Georgia, Pennsylvania and other swing states before Florida started hiring.

Additionally, internal staff dynamics became a problem, with many complaining about Burney-Clark as a leader who publicly scolded staff. While Burney-Clark was never formally removed, national campaign officials informed Florida staffers that they would no longer report directly to her as of late September.

But that didn’t mean a successor in the Florida campaign immediately stepped up. Instead, multiple meetings passed with different people in charge. Internal managers tried to fill the leadership void, and the South Pod director for Harris’ campaign briefly directed state efforts. Ultimately, Hoyer, who had worked with the Harris campaign as a senior adviser since July, effectively took over the director’s duties.

Immediately, he renewed a focus on field organizing.

“The area where I thought it was most important to focus resources was our organizing program,” he said. “I am a longtime field guy; I got my start in politics as a Field Organizer for Obama in the Iowa Caucuses.”

The national campaign also authorized hiring 80 more field organizers; a move officials said was unrelated to leadership change. Several said the injection of new resources and the layering of Burney-Clark renewed the energy in the operation. But again, organizers felt handicapped by timing. Even fewer professional field organizers could be found weeks from the General Election, and the state campaign was still hiring people as late as Oct. 15. Additionally, Hurricanes Helene and Milton struck the state in the final six weeks of the election cycle, hampering a field program that already launched late.

Hoyer remains proud of the work done during his short time in charge of the Florida campaign.

“We tripled the organizing staff during the final stretch, and I am really proud of the work that they did,” he said. “In the final 10 days of the campaign alone, we knocked on 169,241 total doors and made 3,422,163 calls. That’s a Herculean effort that rivaled the numbers of some of the “true” battleground-state operations on the campaign. And we spent nearly $100,000 in paid phones during GOTV — specifically to target Spanish speakers, Creole speakers, and voters who lived in targeted State House districts across the state.”

The result was yet another statewide defeat for Democrats in Florida and a new round of finger-pointing.