Key members of Vice President Kamala Harris’s swing-state operation have gone public with grievances over how the campaign is managing its affairs in a key battleground that will likely determine November’s winner.

A heated blame game is ripping a schism through Harris’s Pennsylvania team right in the middle of the state’s mail-in voting period. At issue is whether the campaign’s westside leadership, led by campaign manager and Pittsburgh native Nikky Liu, is effectively targeting enclaves in Philadelphia rich with persuadable voters or wasting time in areas where Harris’s support is already robust. Insiders who spoke with Politico described a chaotic environment where Liu’s allies and underlings have lost confidence in her ability to see the target.

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“I have concerns about Nikki Liu,” said Ryan Boyer, head of the city’s influential building trades council and the foremost voice on labor issues in the capital city. “I don’t think she understands Philadelphia.” That sentiment was echoed across more than 20 interviews, most notably by Black and Latino leaders who met with Vice President Harris weeks early to privately press their concerns, asking for Liu and Harris’s deputy chief of staff Sergio Gonzales to enhance the campaign’s visibility and operation at major local events. Others requested that staffers boost their surrogate operation, which they described as flailing and rudderless when it comes to engaging with diverse voting blocs.

Liu, who did not respond to a request for comment by the outlet, may already be running out of time to steer the ship out of troubled waters. The Harris and Trump campaigns have poured a combined $500 million into the Philadelphia TV market, saturating the airwaves with both positive and negative messages that threaten to nullify any modest ground game Liu could cobble together in time. Democrats admitted that, without a robust round of door-knocking and get-out-the-vote operations, they may see the statewide scale tip toward former President Donald Trump.

“I feel like we’re going to win here, but we’re going to win it in spite of the Harris state campaign,” said one Democratic elected official who requested anonymity to speak freely. “Pennsylvania is such a mess, and it’s incredibly frustrating.” Harris national campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodriguez weighed in in an attempt to extinguish the bubbling Keystone dissent. “Our campaign is running the largest and most sophisticated operation in Pennsylvania history,” she told Politico, adding, “We have 50 coordinated offices and nearly 400 staff on the ground,” “We invested in targeted advertising to Black and Latino voters starting in August of 2023, and we have now spent more than any previous presidential campaign on outreach to these communities,” and “We are leaving no stone unturned.”

Asked about President Trump’s ground game, spokesperson Kush Desai pointed to two dozen surrogates crisscrossing the state with focuses on Latino outreach in the city of Reading and Black community outreach in Philadelphia. “There’s no part of the commonwealth that we’re ignoring,” said Desai.

Others who lamented the Harris campaign’s operations described Liu as “AWOL” and said she “empowers a culture” that disrespects, and therefore disengages, powerful Democratic elected officials. One example cited is the misuse of Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, a Black woman who was elected last year on a tough-on-crime message, the kind of centrist who allies say could be a powerful spokeswoman for the vice president.

“We need young African American men to come home. We need African American women … to come out in record numbers, and disaffected African Americans,” Boyer said. “We have surrogates in this area that have tremendous credibility in our communities. And Nikki Lu was slow to get to them.”

According to FiveThirtyEight, Harris holds a 0.6% lead across an amalgam of the latest polls, well within the margin of error for most. A poll last month found Trump with a 2% lead, meaning it’s anyone’s guess as to how the Keystone State will fall.

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