Kamala Harris 2020 campaign was a mess If she replaces Biden, this time could be a lot different.

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Significant parts of the president’s campaign and White House team were saying privately that, after a disastrous debate performance on June 27, they no longer believed. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) sat down with Biden after the news conference to warn the president that his candidacy imperiled Democratic hopes of taking back the House. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) shared the same warning days later. In the video, Mr. Trump is heard through Kennedy’s speakerphone, agreeing with Kennedy’s discredited sentiments about vaccines before trying to coax the independent candidate into endorsing his campaign. The former president also shared details about his attempted assassination during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday and the phone call that followed between him and President Biden. A campaign is akin to an expensive startup business on a national scale.

• And I think the coconut tree clip is a perfect example of that,” said Rebecca Jennings, a senior correspondent at Vox covering internet culture.
• House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) sat down with Biden after the news conference to warn the president that his candidacy imperiled Democratic hopes of taking back the House.
• While Biden’s most senior aides would likely be gone, many rank-and-file campaign staff with long resumes may choose to remain.
• “My mother … would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ ” Harris said with a laugh.

Kamala Harris’ 2020 campaign was a mess. If she replaces Biden, this time could be a lot different.

As Trump welcomed his new running mate this week in Milwaukee, video footage showed a delicate Biden struggling to get up the short stairs to Air Force One on his way to further isolation. Aides passed along the footage in dismay, a person familiar with the messages said. But now even Pelosi was saying Biden needed more time to decide what he said he had already decided. Former president Barack Obama, Biden’s old running mate and governing partner, told allies that the path to victory had diminished. House Democrats, who had planned to cast Republicans as “chaos agents” in the fall, edged toward revolution. Seven more called for Biden to step aside on the day of his NATO news conference.

Future Darkly: Smart House of Horror…

The campaign has been comforted by internal data showing that most of the people Biden has lost since the debate are unlikely to vote for Trump, suggesting they may come back. But polling matters little when your party infrastructure is not behind you. Political polling and analytics deal in probabilities, not absolutes like “No way.” They create snapshots in time, out of focus.

• The mantra of former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — “Diversity is our strength.
• Text messages flew between Capitol Hill, administration officials and others, trying to figure out what was going on.
• In May, Kennedy told reporters during a presentation that he believed he had a path to victory if Mr. Biden dropped out of the race, leaving him in a head-to-head race against Mr. Trump.
• Aides passed along the footage in dismay, a person familiar with the messages said.

Another policy stumble marred what seemed to be her breakthrough moment. In a debate in June, she attacked Biden for opposing school busing in the 1970s. Making the leap from state to national politics proved daunting for her. Rivals like Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren had spent much of their adult lives steeped in policy. On the day the $1 million ad buy was supposed to begin running, Harris dropped out. By the time she quit, Harris lacked money, a message and a cohesive campaign operation — all ingredients of a successful candidacy.

“The polling isn’t good, and it feels like things are just getting worse every day,” the campaign adviser said. One campaign aide said that junior and even some senior staff were in the dark about how Biden wanted to forge ahead. Text messages flew between Capitol Hill, administration officials and others, trying to figure out what was going on. Hungry journalists began reporting the impressions of their sources, who offered guesses about what might happen on the assumption that something different had to happen.

The X-rated rompers were probed on the Australian TV series “You Can’t Ask That,” which went to air Down Under on Wednesday. Some of the world’s most famous adult actors are exposing themselves in a very different way — speaking out about how their kinky careers have adversely impacted their personal lives. Harris’ background as a prosecutor could prove advantageous in a future debate. Rather than sparring with fellow Democrats over health care and education policy, she would be boring in on Trump’s criminal conviction in Manhattan. But after the debate, she struggled to offer a consistent answer to whether she believed federally mandated busing should be used to integrate schools.

But this look—with only some extremely well-placed seams preserving her modesty—is by far her boldest to date. Jennings said it’s reminiscent of the critiques hurled at Trump throughout his political career, only to be welcomed by his base. The moment was first meme’d in earnest in February of this year, when for a period of time, one could not open X, formerly known as Twitter, without seeing clips of or oblique references to those remarks. “I put her into hospital and this was actually not on purpose,” Lee, 39, told the Pillow Talk podcast on Tuesday.

“We only have one chance to beat Donald Trump, and we need a nominee who can get the job done. And that would be me,” Kennedy said during a presentation on campaign polling in Brooklyn. Elsewhere, the X-rated star was asked by the audience how his family reacted to news of his porn pursuits. Fox told the show that while he does some eye-popping positions on camera, he prefers much more vanilla lovemaking in his personal life. Kody appeared alongside ’80s adult actress Nikki Stern, who left porn to become a librarian.