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

Choose a Girl

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.

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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.”

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During the call with Kennedy, Mr. Trump shared details about his attempted assassination, describing the feeling of the bullet grazing his ear as “the world’s largest mosquito.” Also on the show, actress Rubi Valentine said she is “scared” of how porn has affected her relationship with sex. However, gay porn star Woody Fox, 33, offered a different perspective. Meanwhile, actress Arianna Kody also sat down to answer candid questions on “You Can’t Ask That,” and also admitted that porn had negatively impacted her dating life. “They say do something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life,” she told the show. But despite the stink — and the struggle to find Mr. Right — White hasn’t grown tired of being a porn star after almost two decades in the biz.

• Hers would need to be a virtually error-free sprint to Election Day.
• A campaign is akin to an expensive startup business on a national scale.
• The X-rated rompers were probed on the Australian TV series “You Can’t Ask That,” which went to air Down Under on Wednesday.
• Political polling and analytics deal in probabilities, not absolutes like “No way.” They create snapshots in time, out of focus.

The campaign budget had been built on the assumption that tens of thousands of people who are not yet engaged would give millions of dollars. There is no survey data to say whether they will show up in September with $10 or $25 checks. There is no poll to predict whether the party comes back together. Even before the debate, approval of Trump’s remembered presidency was running well ahead of Biden’s current one. Democrats assumed that Trump would get a bump out of his convention and probably a further boost in favorability once the trauma of the failed assassination was digested by voters.

• The fate of the Democratic Party now hinged on the gut sense of a man who has spent the last 52 years working in national politics.
• 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 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.
• 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.

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.

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.

He echoed others when he said he was not sure how Biden finds a way out of the spiral in which he is caught — a constant questioning about the path to victory that only makes the path to victory harder. At the White House, officials stoked the fires they could control. The policy shop began to fast-track plans that had long been in the works, including a blueprint to create term limits for the Supreme Court and impose new ethics rules on the justices — catnip for the liberal base. Propeller heads finalized a plan for legislation to take away tax rebates from corporate landlords who increased rent by more than 5 percent a year, a potentially massive new federal intervention to reverse a major driver of inflation. But Fulks spoke those words on behalf of a president no longer backed by an entire party. Two-thirds of the country, including 56 percent of Democrats, said in a Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll in early July that Biden should drop out.

She would have a plethora of promising choices to balance the ticket, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, all of whom won in places where Trump performed well. From the coconut trees to the Venn diagrams, the Harris memes embrace what detractors might consider a gaffe. Trump, for instance, has dubbed Harris “laughing Kamala,” saying the laugh makes her seem “crazy.” Angela White — the infamous “Meryl Streep of porn” — almost died after filming a brutal hourlong sex scene with a well-endowed co-star. James Carville, the Bill Clinton strategist who had long called for Biden to get out, worked the phone from a cruise ship off the coast of Alaska, trying to divine what happens next and get his party to a better place.

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.