Report: Kamala Harris to Shake Up Campaign amid Sagging Poll Numbers

2020 White House hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) is set to shake up her flailing campaign amid sagging poll numbers, according to a report.

Politico says most of the changes will be made at the top. Senior staffers such as Rohini Kosoglu, who serves as Harris’s chief of staff in the Senate, and senior adviser Laphonza Butler are expected to be promoted to senior positions. In an attempt to streamline operations, the pair will reportedly oversee the campaign’s different departments.

Harris’ campaign manager, Juan Rodriguez, will stay in his role but will offload some of her responsibilities to Kosoglu and Butler.

“We continue to grow our organization as we enter the fourth quarter, and it has always been the plan to bring on additional management to oversee an expanded staff,” Rodriguez said in a statement to Politico, seemingly confirming the report.

“We continue to grow our organization as we enter the fourth quarter, and it has always been the plan to bring on additional management to oversee an expanded staff,” he added. “As we double our organizers in Iowa and South Carolina and expand our digital team, we’re in a strong position to execute our plan and win the nomination.

Politico adds that Harris will stop paying third-party multimedia producers:

Harris is also recalibrating her digital operation as she struggles to break out of the middle of the presidential pack. While she’ll still use Authentic Campaigns for digital ad buying, other functions — including content production, email, video, graphics and other work — are moving in-house. Harris’ campaign had already brought in Shelby Cole, the top digital aide on Beto O’Rourke’s Texas Senate run, from Authentic earlier this year.

The report comes after a Harris campaign memo blamed a so-called “summer slump” for the 2020 White House hopeful’s poor polling and fundraising numbers. “August was a rough month for fundraising and we barely scraped by hitting our goal. We expected to come out of the ‘summer slump’ this month, but the first days of September have proven even more difficult for fundraising than we expected,” the memo, according to Politico.

Since her first debate performance in June — for which she made headlines for attacking former Vice President Joe Biden’s praise of segregationists — Harris experienced a steady decline in several statewide and national polls.

The California Democrat has sunken to fifth place in the RealClearPolitics average of polls and dropped to fourth place among likely Democrat voters in her home state, a KQED survey says. She stands at 5 percent in Nevada and a mere three percent in South Carolina, according to a pair of polls.