A former staffer for Vice President Kamala Harris is opening up about what it’s like to work for the presidential candidate.
In a heartfelt op-ed penned for Teen Vogue, Symone D. Sanders-Townsend, a political strategist and political commentator who hosts MSNBC’s The Weekend, revealed that she spent many hours working with Harris as her senior advisor and chief spokesperson.
“In my experience, Vice President Harris is someone who understands the gravity of the moments she has repeatedly found herself in, but she is not enamored by their spectacle, Sanders-Townswend begins. “She does not relish in the ability to make history; rather, she focuses on what work needs to be done and how she should go about doing it.”
She further went on to write that if Harris wins in November, it is because she successfully rallied a large swath of the country to follow her in her quest to shape a better future for the nation. But before she can continue to maintain her winning streak, she must first do to things, the 34-year-old believes.
“First, she needs to reintroduce herself.”
She continues: “Once Harris became the presumptive nominee, her campaign moved quickly to share key parts of life story and work. She introduced herself as a former prosecutor that took on criminals, sexual predators and fraudsters. Her campaign released an ad where they talked about her being a child of immigrants and working at McDonalds to pay her way.”
“That image-shaping is important because of the amount of misinformation and disinformation that exists about her record. Most people are unaware of the work that a vice president does daily. Now that the vice president is at the top of the ticket, everyone is about to find out.”
Secondly, Harris must make voters feel seen and that her work will directly impact them
“When it came to policy, while I worked for her she always wanted us to cut the fluff and be straightforward. She wanted numbers that people could identify with and when we did not do that, she would find the numbers herself.”
The Nebraska native recalled one time when she was preparing Harris for a press conference in France. Harris wanted to know specific data on the price of gas and how that would affect Americans. The numbers were not in her prep materials, so she looked them up herself.
“Did the French press care about the price of gas in America? No, but the Americans reading or watching the coverage of her press conference did, and she cared about that.”
Sanders-Townsend concludes that people want to be inspired without ignoring the reality of life in America, and she feels Harris is just the person to take on the task.
“It again feels like change is in the air,” she ends.