Reporting on Kamala Harris, the manager

Some thoughts after digging into how the VP runs her office

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Something I’ve learned as a reporter: Management stories are hard to do.

It’s hard to get staffers to be specific, on-record, about their boss’s behavior.¹

It’s hard to know things like a manager’s tone or demeanor when you're learning about it secondhand. Did a boss really “yell” at someone, or just deliver a stern message?

And it’s hard to know if you’re talking to the right people. Virtually every Washington leader who’s run a congressional office, a government agency, even a not-for-profit organization, has dedicated fans and committed detractors.² As a reporter, are you hearing from a representative mix of staffers — or just the ones willing to talk to the media?

It’s particularly hard when you’re two months out from a presidential election and trying to report on sensitive details about one of the candidates.

There have been years of stories about Kamala Harris’s management style — many of them critical. There were stories about her unhappy staff as California attorney general. There were stories about the infighting in her 2019 presidential campaign as it flamed out. There were stories about her difficult first year in the White House, when turnover in the vice president’s office spiked. 

At The Washington Post, my colleague Cleve Wootson and I spent weeks trying to understand Harris’s management style, how she runs her office now, and what it portends if she’s elected president later this year. We ended up talking to more than 30 people, often at length and in extreme detail, about what it’s been like to work for Harris over the years.

You can read our story here, which ran on The Washington Post’s front page today:

A few consistent themes emerged from those dozens of conversations.

Harris really is a tough boss. She can pepper staffers with detailed, granular questions; she can be direct in ways that flustered some deputies and colleagues, particularly those new to working with her. Even her allies readily admitted on record that she’s a demanding manager.

Of course, that’s no different than many other prominent political leaders; multiple staffers said Harris’s management style was basically the same as their other white or male bosses who have received far less scrutiny. And there are lots of obvious reasons why the vice president of the United States should be grilling her team.

“She holds herself to an incredibly high standard, and therefore, she holds her team to a really high standard,” Daniel Suvor, a former Harris aide in her attorney general’s office, told me.

Her office had a rough 2021. Harris and her new staff at the White House faced a learning curve — both in their jobs and with each other, given that Harris hadn’t worked with key deputies like her chief of staff before. Making things worse: the difficult working conditions of the pandemic, and the contrast against the relative stability of President Biden’s team.

Starting in the summer of 2021, the vice president’s management was criticized anonymously in multiple news stories, amplified by high-profile departures. Things got so bad that Biden summoned his senior staff and told them to either stop leaking about Harris or find new jobs.

But as we reported, Harris’s workplace situation has stabilized. The vice president has brought back alums who know how to work with her. She’s found issues, like reproductive health care, that she can dig into and that better mobilize her team. She’s learned how to operate in the White House and quickly took control of her new presidential campaign.

And since 2021, Harris’s turnover has generally been on par with the rest of the White House, our story revealed.

Some of the highest-profile criticism of Harris has been secondhand or lacking context. One notable example is a 2019 op-ed by the father of a former Harris intern that resurfaced a few weeks ago. The op-ed claimed that Harris’s staff lived in “complete fear” of her and was required to stand and greet her by saying “good morning, general,” among other allegations that received ample coverage in conservative media in recent weeks.

But I tracked down the intern, and while he didn’t want to talk about his dad’s op-ed, he confirmed on record that he’s voting for Harris this year.

Meanwhile, Harris has seen more than 90 percent turnover of her office since she started as vice president in January 2021, based on an analysis of the Senate-funded staff that represent the bulk of her team. That’s also received a fair amount of attention.³ But these White House positions have long been associated with burnout and high turnover; as vice president, Mike Pence saw more than 80 percent turnover by the same metric, and there weren’t similar stories written about him.

Also: about that screenshot on Twitter. You may have seen a clip from our story floating around, where former staffers talked about how briefing Harris can feel stressful because of how she grills her team. Those screenshots have racked up millions of views; readers appeared to be widely interpreting the quotes as criticism of the vice president.

Having done the interviews, these Harris staffers weren’t criticizing her. They were responding to questions about what it’s like to work with her and explaining why some staffers, especially those new to working with Harris, felt so thrown off by that environment.

There’s much more in our story, which you can read here.

1. Over the years, I’ve heard many staffers convey things like “my boss is a bully.” But they don’t want their specific claims to appear in print because the anecdotes are so identifying.

2. I remember watching two prominent health care people on CNN during the height of the pandemic, and as the host praised their leadership on air, former staffers for both were sending me messages about their horrible management decisions.

3. Harris’s turnover has received a lot of attention in conservative circles, but liberal ones too. TV host Bill Maher joked about it on a recent episode of his HBO show, saying that Harris should use it to her advantage.

“She’s had this ridiculously high turnover,” Maher said, adding that Harris should “blame” any policy flip-flops on them. “You know why these [people] are gone? Gave me the wrong information on fracking.”