Inside the fast-moving launch of Kamala Harris for president

Three weeks into her presidential run was the first time the Biden campaign’s pollsters — now hers — held a deep-dive call with Kamala Harris’ inner circle to discuss what she’s been saying on the stump.

Over the line came a lot of praise, but also some suggested tweaks. First, said veteran Democratic numbers man Geoff Garin, summarizing their analysis, stop saying, “We’re not going back.” It wasn’t focused enough on the future, he argued. Second, lay off all the “weird” talk — too negative.

Harris’ advisers listened. They considered the arguments. They decided to stick with what the crowds were chanting in the arenas.

When advisers who had been on the call briefed the vice president on the suggestions, according to CNN’s conversations with close to a dozen people involved with internal campaign decisions, she told them she wasn’t going to listen to the pollsters herself and would instead trust the instincts she had buried under self-doubt for so long.

Harris has shocked even people close to her with how she’s been coming across in the just four weeks since she became a presidential candidate. Many political obsessives who had largely written off the vice president can’t understand how a woman whose early struggles they still keenly remember is now projecting as succinct and punchy, comfortable onstage and in her own skin.

Part of this is a strategic decision to limit her appearances and hold off from sitting for an interview, so that her only major moment without a teleprompter or aides first editing video was on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base as she greeted the Americans returning home in President Joe Biden’s multilateral prisoner swap. A snippet of her jumbled syntax was quickly pumped out by Republican National Committee operatives and others: “This is just an extraordinary testament to a president who understands the power of diplomacy and understands the strength that rests in understanding the significance of diplomacy and strengthening alliances.”

And while several Democratic officials told CNN privately that the turnaround for a politician whose weaknesses haven’t magically disappeared may be setting the party up for devastation if she stumbles, Harris isn’t just feeding off the burst of Democratic good feelings that followed Biden’s exit. She’s feeling a sense of liberation campaigning for herself rather than calibrating around Biden.

“This is her clear voice. When she says, ‘I will sign this into law,’ those are words she has never been able to be speak before,” said her deputy chief of staff, Erin Wilson, who for the last two years helped manage many of Harris’ political relationships.

“It was her job to be that strong partner that Joe Biden needed in his administration,” said Daniele Monroe-Moreno, the Nevada Democratic Party chair and a state representative who has known Harris since before she was vice president. “The spotlight is on her now, and this is her time. And you sense that she has a renewed sense of confidence.”

Harris is also reaping the benefits from years of a quietly revamped internal operation and a small circle of advisers she tends to meet with at her dining room table at the Naval Observatory, which remains the nexus of power, while the staff still in the headquarters Biden established in Wilmington, Delaware, manages the campaign operations.

Those are the people she talks to. Those are the ones who, while the Biden campaign wasn’t much testing what his running mate should say, were coming up with their own debate prep plans, which were already underway by the time Biden took the stage for his.