Harris campaign slashes staff in New Hampshire with eye on Iowa

Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-Calif.) White House campaign is slashing its staff in the crucial primary state of New Hampshire to help it reallocate resources “to go all-in on Iowa.”

The campaign confirmed to The Hill that it is closing its field offices in Nashua, Portsmouth and Keene and will scale down its staff at its New Hampshire headquarters in Manchester. It is also laying off all of its field organizers in the Granite Sate and is cancelling a trip Harris planned on making there next week.

{mosads}“Senator Harris and this team set out with one goal — to win the nomination and defeat Donald Trump in 2020. To do so, the campaign has made a strategic decision to realign resources to go all-in on Iowa, resulting in office closures and staff realignments and reductions in New Hampshire. The campaign will continue to have a staff presence in New Hampshire but the focus is and will continue to be on Iowa,” Nate Evans, the Harris campaign’s New Hampshire communications director, said in a statement. 

“Senator Harris will not visit New Hampshire on November 6 and 7, but her name will still be placed on the primary ballot.”

Evans confirmed to The Hill that the layoffs impact over a dozen staffers.

The cuts are part of a campaign-wide effort to double down on Iowa, the first nominating contest of the primary race. 

The campaign is getting ready to lay off dozens of Harris staffers at her Baltimore headquarters and will redeploy others to the Hawkeye State as it works to rejigger its structure amid financial concerns, according to a memo obtained by The Hill. 

“These decisions are difficult but will ensure the campaign is positioned to execute a robust Iowa ground game and a minimum 7-figure paid media campaign in the weeks leading up to the caucus,” campaign manager Juan Rodriguez wrote in the memo. 

“Plenty of winning primary campaigns, like John Kerry’s in 2004 and John McCain’s in 2008, have had to make tough choices on their way to the nomination, and this is no different,” he added.

The shuffling comes as Harris fights to remain in the top-tier of the crowded primary race, as a decline in the polls has coincided with a cash burn rate of nearly 125 percent.

Harris’s campaign has recently cast the Iowa caucus as a do-or-die moment for her White House chances, with the California senator visiting the state in October as many times as she did in the first six months of her presidential campaign combined.