ATLANTA (AP) — Kamala Harris was greeted by a huge, cheering crowd during the first rally of her newly announced 2019 presidential campaign. Speaking at City Hall in her hometown of Oakland, Calif., on a tardy January day, she portrayed her candidacy as part of something bigger than just an election victory.
“We are here at this moment because we must answer a fundamental question,” Harris said, citing Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 call for “moral leadership.” “Who are we as Americans?”
The first days of Harris’ campaign were historic. She officially launched her candidacy on Martin Luther King Jr. Day with references to Shirley Chisholm, the first black person and woman to seek the presidential nomination of a major party.
Back when Democrats were despairing over Donald Trump’s presidency, the first-term senator from California seemed like the ideal remedy. Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and a black Jamaican father, drew comparisons to Barack Obama, whose impressive biography and lofty rhetoric had electrified Democrats more than a decade earlier.
But the initial promises of Harris’ campaign were met with a more complicated reality, as she spent the next 10 months struggling to make her way through a immense field of candidates, squandering staff and money, and eventually withdrew from the race just weeks before the Iowa caucuses, a disappointment tempered only by candidate Joe Biden’s selection of her as his running mate.
Now that Biden has ended his re-election campaign, Democrats say Harris has become a more accomplished candidate who will avoid repeating the mistakes of her first campaign.
“Look, there was no plan for Kamala Harris,” said Donna Brazile, former chair of the Democratic National Committee and one of the prominent black Democrats who urged Biden to select Harris in 2020. “But she’s really found her voice and has been at it nonstop since the 2022 midterm campaign. I think she’s become a generational figure and has proven that she can bring … leadership to the party and the country.”
Harris began her campaign as the favorite
Harris, a former prosecutor and attorney general, launched her 2020 campaign with the slogan: “Kamala Harris: For the people.” She spoke in sweeping terms of a “turning point” for a country torn by social fissures, economic inequalities and political unrest. She emphasized her biography and her “walker’s perspective” on her parents’ involvement in the civil rights movement.
Harris entered the race early, and her initial media offensive and massive early comeback cemented her status as the presumptive favorite.
Her staff outlined a broad path to nomination.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont led the progressive wing of the Democrats, with his main challenger coming from Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Biden, the then 76-year-old former vice president, had not yet announced his candidacy but was expected to anchor the more centrist wing. He stood well among the black voters who played such a prominent role in the first Southern primary in South Carolina and many of the Super Tuesday states that followed.
Harris joined the campaign after gaining momentum during Senate Judiciary Committee meetings, particularly questioning Trump’s judicial nominees. She had also signed on as a co-sponsor of Sanders’ push for a national health insurance system, “Medicare for All,” and was a regular on cable news and social media.
Some younger progressives distrusted her record as a prosecutor. “Kamala is a cop” became a slogan on social media. That group, however vocal, was not seen as immense enough to sway a national primary — and their opposition actually validated one of Harris’ arguments: “My entire career has been about keeping people safe,” she told ABC News. “That’s probably one of the things that motivates me more than anything else.”
If she reached her full potential, Harris’ aides argued, she could appeal to nearly every branch of the party. It was more or less a campaign designed to weaken and eventually overtake Biden’s coalition – assuming he would enter the race bolstered by a reach to the left that Biden, the white, male veteran of the Washington establishment, would never achieve.
“That little girl was me”
In presidential politics, there is an art to captivating voters so that they see what they want to see: Obama’s “hope and change,” Trump’s “make America great again.” The risk of aiming everywhere, however, is that a candidate ends up going nowhere.
Harris’s initial appearances in Iowa, first on the nominating calendar, and South Carolina were dominated by working-age women, a key Democratic demographic. In South Carolina, which is much more diverse than predominantly white Iowa, her audience was racially mixed.
But as the field grew, Harris lost her status as the de facto frontrunner. She became one of many candidates vying for money, media attention and votes – especially after Biden announced his pick in the spring. She raised $12 million in the first quarter of 2019, a solid sum but one that did not reflect the energy of her opening salvo in Oakland.
“It was a scramble of all against all,” said Boyd Brown, a former Democratic National Committee member who supported former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke for the nomination. “Everyone was trying to catch Biden.”
The case for a Harris presidency never became clear. Despite her motto “For the People,” she did not embody the economic populism of Sanders or Warren. Appeals to democracy were not a central trademark for her, unlike Biden, who in his “Soul of the Nation” slogan portrayed 2020 as a single mission: to spare the country another Trump term.
And there was another challenger Harris had not counted on: Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who built a grassroots network in Iowa, enjoyed glowing national media attention, and emerged as Biden’s counterpart of a generation in the moderate camp of the primaries.
Harris scored a hit moment in the first debate of the June primary when she criticized Biden for opposing court-ordered school busing in the 1970s as a response to persistent racial segregation in public schools. She put her own spin on her broadside by telling the story of a youthful minority student who was only able to attend an integrated school because of a federal measure.
“That little girl was me,” she told Biden.
Harris’ campaign team immediately brought the quote to market and was criticized for saying it was no longer relevant.
A stuttering finish
The debate gave Harris her biggest fundraising boost since taking office. But the good news was short-lived. In the days that followed, she made it clear that she did not necessarily support government-mandated busing – a position Biden held as a youthful U.S. senator. And even with the boost, Harris only raised $12 million in the second quarter, well behind Biden, Sanders and Buttigieg, who doubled her numbers.
In the summer, Harris unveiled her health care plan, proposing to add a government option modeled on Medicare to existing private health insurance exchanges. In doing so, she abandoned her position in favor of a one-size-fits-all government system in the Senate and highlighted how hard it is for her to find a central message. In the debates, her opponents attacked her record as a prosecutor, particularly her aggressive approach to drug offenders. In the fall, her speaking time on the stage was in the middle of the pack, making it hard to change the lively.
Biden faltered in Iowa and New Hampshire. But Biden’s support among black voters remained stable, and Harris could not afford TV advertising. Harris’ ideal scenario – an impressive start in Iowa, then a lead over Biden in South Carolina and on Super Tuesday – did not materialize.
“Joe Biden has always been our man,” said Antjuan Seawright, a prominent adviser to black Democrats in South Carolina, explaining that this was never a rejection of Harris.
She ended her campaign on December 3, 2019, saying, “I cannot in good conscience tell you that there is a path ahead for me if I do not believe in it myself.”
Still enough for second place – and now first place
The harshest assessment is that Harris ran a indigent campaign, which mainly reflected a warning about her prospects for 2024.
“She’s just a terrible candidate who has failed to communicate the reasons for her candidacy,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, speculating that the 81-year-old Biden might have put his own re-election ambitions on hold more quickly if he had had more confidence in his vice president.
Most Democrats are more generous in hindsight. That was certainly the case with Biden when he was considering his options for the post of deputy president.
“We argued that she could bring the right energy and help make the case. … Obviously he saw something there too,” Brazile said.
Biden himself ran “a lousy presidential campaign” in 2007-2008, Brown noted, only to become Obama’s vice president and ultimately overthrow Trump. Now Harris has that chance.
“In politics,” Brown said, “timing is everything.”
___
Follow AP’s coverage of the 2024 election at https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.
