KAMALA Harris is preparing for the fight of her life, if her inner circle is anything to go by.
The vice president has surrounded herself with a group of tested operators, many of them Black women who have been involved in Democratic politics for decades, as she gears up for a brutal three months of campaigning before the Nov. 5 election.
US Senator Laphonza Butler of California, for one, struck a bullish tone this week when asked on MSNBC about the prospect of Harris facing a barrage of sexist and racist attacks.
"Bring it," she said. "Because we are not new to this."
The tight-knit group of advisers are fiercely loyal to Harris and passionate about her career, with many having shepherded her since she was a newcomer to Washington when she joined the Senate in 2017, according to Reuters interviews with four people with direct knowledge of her closest confidants.
Some privately lobbied Joe Biden to pick a Black woman - Harris in particular - as his running mate in 2020 at a time when he had only publicly committed to naming a woman.
Harris' inner circle include advisers and allies such as Minyon Moore, chair of the Democratic National Convention Committee, convention rules co-chair Leah Daughtry, Democratic National Committee (DNC) member Donna Brazile and Tina Flournoy, a former chief of staff to Harris, the people said.
They are no strangers to power, with many having served in Bill Clinton's 1993-2001 presidency.
Harris remains untested, politically, on the national stage, despite being a former senator from the most populous US state of California.
The 59-year-old vice president faces a tight race and needs to be prepared for a wave of attacks, Democratic strategist Anthony Coley said.
The inner circle is "battle tested in a way that is going to be helpful over the next 99 days," Coley said.
"It's going to be fast, it's going to be furious, it's going to be deep. And you have to have people who know how to respond quickly and smartly to these types of attacks."
Women with years of experience running the White House and election campaigning also hold key organizational roles inside the Harris camp.
Lorraine Voles serves as her White House chief of staff; Erin Wilson is her deputy chief of staff; Sheila Nix is her chief of staff on the campaign; Kirsten Allen serves as her White House communications director; and Rohini Kosoglu is one of her closest advisers, who has worked for her since her time in the Senate.
Voles, a veteran Washington communications fixer and adviser, has been credited by analysts for being a stabilizing force within Harris' inner circle since May 2022, after turmoil in her office that included departures in her communications, national security and other teams.
"Lorraine is a force of nature and a force for good who looks around corners and plays to win," said Chris LeHane, who worked with Voles at the Clinton White House.
A deputy press secretary for Bill Clinton, Voles was subsequently communications director for then-Vice President Al Gore and for then-Senator Hillary Clinton.
Some of the top male staffers she relies on are Brian Fallon, former senior aide to Hillary Clinton who runs her communications at the campaign; Ike Irby, who served as her deputy domestic policy adviser at the White House until earlier this year; and Dean Lieberman, a national security adviser, who earlier worked for the White House National Security Council.
Democratic strategist Joel Payne said the people around Harris had experience building coalitions, including the group of voters that coalesced around the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020 and those who supported Obama in 2008 and 2012.
"These are folks who have that lineage ... to those previous eras of Democratic politics and an understanding of how to rebuild those coalitions from the past," he added.
The counsel of figures like Moore, Daughtry, Brazile and Flournoy lend Harris years of experience from the Clinton White House and the DNC and the political chops to navigate a party that did not fully embrace her in the early years she was vice president.
These women also bring deep knowledge of Washington and ties to its power brokers, giving Harris an advantage over Trump, according to Marcia Fudge, a co-chair of the Harris campaign.
* The writers are from Reuters