How the Biden Campaign Transformed Into the Harris Campaign

Staff members inside and outside the room have described the past handful of hours as hectic, overwhelming and emotional.

Listen to this article · 6:01 min Learn more

Share full article

Vice President Kamala Harris speaking with campaign staff in Wilmington, Del., on Monday.

After President Biden announced his departure on social media, it was somehow fitting that the call to flip the campaign to Vice President Kamala Harris was delivered over Slack.

“Please give a wave to this message if you’re online and available to do some design work right now,” the campaign’s creative director, Kate Conway, wrote to a team of designers in the messaging app on Sunday about 45 minutes after Mr. Biden made his announcement. “We are gearing up toward some quick pivots.”

This was an understatement.

A wave of hand emojis in various skin tones flew up, and campaign staffers worked through the night to pull down ads for Mr. Biden and replace them with ones for Vice President Kamala Harris. They designed a “Harris for President” logo in red, white and blue. They printed reams of new posters. And then, around midnight, there was a whiskey toast at the campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del.

It was not an easy feat, as one campaign official put it, for a Sunday afternoon in July.

“The Harris for President creative and web teams sprang into action, rebranded the entire campaign overnight, and launched a new website in just 26 hours,” Ms. Conway said in an email. “There’s really no overselling how difficult a task that is — the brand exists everywhere from yard signs and rally placards to the website, our social channels, and our ad.”

Mr. Biden’s surprise decision to end his campaign not only upended the 2024 presidential race, it led to a rebranding frenzy at campaign headquarters — not to mention campaign offices throughout the country — and more than a little bit of whiplash.

For legions of campaign workers who had been trying to get Mr. Biden re-elected — some of whom have described the past few weeks as some of the hardest of their lives — there was not much time to grieve Mr. Biden’s departure.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.