According to the latest 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary polls, Sen. Kamala Harris’s campaign is in real trouble.
The CNN and SurveyUSA polls released on Wednesday show Harris at 3 and 5 points, respectively. The Economist/YouGov poll released on Thursday has Harris at 4 points. Even in California, her home-base, Harris is at 10 points, significantly behind her opponents former vice president Joe Biden (28 points), Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (18 points), and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (13 points).
Making matters worse, a scathing letter written by a former aide who has just recently resigned has made headlines, slamming the California senator for treating her staff “poorly” and having “no real plan to win.”
"While I still believe Senator Harris is the strongest candidate to win the General Election in 2020,” Kelly Mehlenbacher, the campaign’s director of operations, wrote in a resignation letter in November, "I have never seen an organisation treat its staff so poorly.”
She said, “It is not acceptable to me that we encouraged people to move from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore only to lay them off with no notice, with no plan for the campaign, and without thoughtful consideration of the personal consequences to them or the consequences that their absence would have on the remaining staff.”
Harris also laid off staff and closed offices in New Hampshire early November as “a strategic decision to realign resources and go all-in on Iowa.”
Mehlenbacher added that “with less than 90 days until Iowa we still do not have a real plan to win.”
“I no longer have confidence in our campaign or its leadership,” she wrote.
Her letter was published by The New York Times, which recently interviewed “more than 50 current and former campaign staff members and allies” about the campaign’s shortcomings.
Mehlenbacher's resignation was effective Nov. 30.
Harris is currently "all-in" in Iowa campaigning. In the latest Iowa Democratic Presidential Caucus poll conducted by Iowa State University and released on Nov. 21, Harris is at 2 points. South Bend, Ind. mayor Pete Buttigieg is at first with 26 points, followed by Sen. Warren at 19 points, Sen. Sanders at 18 points, and former vice president Joe Biden at 12 points.
As for Mehlenbacher, she is now working for former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 2020 campaign.