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

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Advance teams set up the big moment Tuesday at the NAACP National Convention in Las Vegas, where Biden would show he could paint the contrast with Republicans and debut his 5 percent rent cap. The White House circulated a list of about 20 other elected leaders or union officials the president had spoken with on the plane or while traveling. About 75 members of Congress have reiterated their support for him.

Why are we even talking about coconut trees?

It needs an inspirational candidate, but it also relies on a unified staff. People close to the campaign say that lines of authority were blurred between Harris’ sister and campaign chairwoman, Maya Harris, and other advisers who’d worked on her state races but weren’t blood relatives. The sudden collapse of Biden’s control over the party he brought to power, just four months before a presidential election, is without obvious historical precedent. Behind the scenes, people working inside the bowels of Democratic politics and government described the first three weeks of July as a kind of nightmare — too extraordinary to be real, too unexpected to be believed.

• Biden is testing how far a president can lead when his followers go astray.
• At times, it seemed the code of loyalty that had long followed Biden’s operations was coming undone.
• Text messages flew between Capitol Hill, administration officials and others, trying to figure out what was going on.
• Biden was speaking in hushed tones and could barely be heard across the table.

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A Monmouth University poll released the week after she entered the race showed her running third in a crowded Democratic field that eventually numbered more than two dozen. With 11% support, she trailed only Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, both of whom had run presidential races before. With only a few months to wage a campaign against Trump, Harris couldn’t afford to repeat the mistakes that tanked her last presidential bid. Hers would need to be a virtually error-free sprint to Election Day.

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.

In the weeks before President Biden announced he would not be seeking reelection, some Democrats online rallied behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the party’s new nominee. Now people worried to each other that the future of the world order could be at stake. White House senior staff let it be known that their doors were open to underlings if anyone needed to talk through the difficulties. “Keep the faith,” senior deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates posted on social media Thursday. At times, it seemed the code of loyalty that had long followed Biden’s operations was coming undone. Some advisers shifted their focus from planning a second term to planning ways to lock in the policy wins they had achieved before Trump would take over, according to a Biden administration official briefed on the work.

Like all of us, the coconut tree moment exists in the context of all in which it lives and what came before it. Which is to say, it’s part of a larger set of memes surrounding Kamala Harris’ political persona. Harris has been spawning memes longer than she’s been vice president. But her laugh, her bus, her dance moves and her love of Venn diagrams have all become social media fodder. Then the 81-year-old president, traveling to campaign events to try to prove his vigor, contracted covid again.

And I think the coconut tree clip is a perfect example of that,” said Rebecca Jennings, a senior correspondent at Vox covering internet culture. “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. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) closed ranks. The president of the United States had spoken — with 24 million Americans watching on TV. Every Democratic leader knew Joe Biden would continue his campaign.

“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.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. issued an apology Tuesday morning on social media after his son shared a video of the longshot independent candidate on the phone with former President Donald Trump, who tried to persuade Kennedy to endorse him. By that point, Harris was running fifth, her poll numbers down to 6%. That fall, Harris’ campaign laid off staff and moved others from her national headquarters in Baltimore to Iowa to save money. Put another way, Harris — even being 59 and the incumbent vice president —represented something new in a campaign defined by old. And that stoked some enthusiasm among voters who were very unenthused. White — who is the only woman to have won AVN’s Female Performer of the Year three times — remains one of the world’s most prominent porn stars.