Harris isn’t ready to talk about who might serve in her potential administration

Kamala Harris has a packed schedule these days: multi-state campaign stops; briefings from advisers on issues at home and abroad; a steady stream of phone calls, meetings and interviews, all as she hopes that she will defeat Donald Trump in next week’s election.

Kamala Harris has a packed schedule these days: multi-state campaign stops; briefings from advisers on issues at home and abroad; a steady stream of phone calls, meetings and interviews, all as she hopes that she will defeat Donald Trump in next week’s election. But amid the flurry of activity in the final stretch of the 2024 campaign, there is one discussion the vice president has made clear to aides she will not entertain, even in private: who might serve in a future Harris Cabinet and administration. Wary of tempting fate, Harris has been explicit to advisers in the final weeks of the campaign that she is not interested in having those conversations, four sources told CNN. “She has been pretty resistant to having those conversations,” said one senior Democrat familiar with the pre-election discussions with the vice president. “Her position has been very much: I’ve got to go win this thing.” The vice president’s refusal to participate in those planning discussions in earnest is, at least in part, rooted in superstition. Harris, who once quipped that she’s “a little superstitious,” has long believed that no good can come from putting the cart before the horse, those familiar with her thinking said. “She’s superstitious,” one longtime Harris associate told CNN. “She is a rational and logical and linear thinker and that means she focuses on immediately what’s in front of her and she resists the temptation to look too far down the line.” That trait could be one of the few she shares with Trump. The former president, too, has voiced wariness at transition planning before winning an election, in part because he believes it could amount to bad luck for the final outcome.