ATLANTA– ATLANTA (AP) — Kamala Harris was greeted by a huge, cheering crowd during the first rally of her recently announced 2019 presidential campaign. Speaking outside City Hall in her hometown of Oakland, California, one day in late January, she pitched her candidacy as part of something bigger than just winning the election.
“We are here at this moment in time because we need to answer a fundamental question,” Harris said, referring to Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 call for “moral leadership.” “Who are we as Americans?”
The early days of Harris’ campaign were shrouded in historical significance. She formally launched her bid on Martin Luther King Jr. Day with nods to Shirley Chisholm, the first Black person and woman to seek a major party’s presidential endorsement.
At the time, while Democrats were desperate about Donald Trumps presidency, the first-term senator from California seemed like the perfect medicine. The daughter of a Native American mother and a black Jamaican father, Harris drew comparisons to Barack Obamawhose powerful biography and lofty rhetoric galvanized Democrats more than a decade earlier.
But Harris’ early campaign promise ran up against a more complicated reality as she spent the next 10 months struggling to break through a crowded field of candidates and funnel staff and money. She ultimately withdrew from the race weeks before the Iowa caucuses, a disappointment only mitigated when nominee Joe Biden selected her as his running mate.
Now, after Biden ended his re-election bidDemocrats say Harris has emerged as a smarter candidate who will not make the mistakes of her first campaign.
“Look, there’s no road map for Kamala Harris,” said Donna Brazile, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee and one of the prominent Black Democrats who urged Biden to pick Harris in 2020. “But she’s really found her voice and has been nonstop since the 2022 midterm campaign, especially. I think she’s become a generational figure and has proven that she can … bring leadership to the party and the country.”
Harris, former prosecutor and state attorney general launched its 2020 campaign with the slogan: “Kamala Harris: For the People.” She spoke in general terms about an “inflection point” for a country torn by social rifts, economic disparities and political unrest. She emphasized her biography and her “walker’s-eye view” of her parents’ activism in the Civil Rights Movement.
Harris entered the race early and her media campaign and massive opening rally established her as the favorite.
Her staff mapped out a broad path to the nomination.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont led the Democrats’ progressive wing, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts posing his biggest challenge. Biden, then the 76-year-old former vice president, had not yet announced himself but was expected to lead the more centrist wing, and he carried strongly among the black voters who were so prominent in the first Southern primary in South Carolina and many of the Super Tuesday states that followed.
Harris came to the campaign after finding her feet during the Senate Judiciary Committee sessions, particularly when questioning Trump’s judicial nominees. She also signed on as a co-sponsor for Sanders’ push for a “Medicare for everyone” national health insurance. She was a regular on cable news and social media.
Some younger progressives distrusted her record as a prosecutor. “Kamala is a police officer” became a social media slogan. That group, while vocal, wasn’t seen as large enough to sway a national primary — and the opposition actually reinforced one of Harris’s arguments: “My entire career has been about protecting people,” she told ABC News. “It’s probably one of the things that motivates me more than anything else.”
At her full potential, Harris’s aides reasoned, she would appeal to nearly every branch of the party. It was, more or less, a campaign designed to chip away at and eventually overtake Biden’s coalition, assuming he would enter the race, bolstered by a leftward reach that Biden, the white, male veteran of the Washington establishment, could never pull off.
There is an art to presidential politics in seducing voters in ways that allow them to see what they want to see: Obama’s “Hope and Change,” Trump’s “Make America Great Again.” The risk of aiming for everything, however, is that a candidate ends up stuck nowhere.
Harris’ early appearances in Iowa, first on the nomination calendar, and South Carolina were dominated by working-class women, a key Democratic demographic. In South Carolina, far more diverse than overwhelmingly white Iowa, her audiences were racially diverse.
But as the field expanded, Harris faded from de facto front-runner status. She became one of many candidates vying for money, media attention and votes — especially once Biden made his announcement in the spring. She raised $12 million in the first quarter of 2019, a solid sum but not one that reflected the electricity of her opening salvo in Oakland.
“That was a free-for-all,” said Boyd Brown, a former Democratic National Committee member who backed former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke for the nomination. “Everybody was trying to get Biden.”
The case for a Harris presidency never crystallized. Despite her “For the People” motto, she did not project the economic populism of Sanders or Warren. Pleas for democracy were not central to her brand, compared with Biden, whose “Soul of the Nation” pitch cast 2020 as a singular mission: to spare the country another term of Trump.
And there was another candidate Harris didn’t count on: Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who built a grassroots network in Iowa, enjoyed rave national media coverage and became a generational divider between Biden and the moderate party in the primaries.
Harris delivered a hit moment in the first debate of the June primary, criticizing Biden for opposing court-ordered busing in the 1970s as a response to persistent segregation in public schools. She personalized her broadside by recounting a young minority student who only pursued integration because of federal measures.
“That little girl was me,” she told Biden.
Harris’ campaign team immediately released campaign merchandise featuring the quote, but was criticized for cutting the phrase.
The debate gave Harris her best fundraising surge since her launch. But the good news was short-lived. She clarified in the days that followed that she did not necessarily support federally mandated busing — a position Biden held as a junior U.S. senator. And even with the boost, her second-quarter fundraising totaled just $12 million, far behind Biden, Sanders and Buttigieg, who doubled her tally.
Over the summer, Harris unveiled her health care plan, proposing to add a Medicare-style public option to existing private health insurance exchanges. It was a shift that both relinquished her single-payer position in the Senate and highlighted her difficulty finding a core message. In debates, rivals attacked her record as a prosecutor, particularly her aggressiveness against drug criminals. By the fall, her speaking time on the podium was average, making it difficult to shift the dynamic.
Biden faltered in Iowa and New Hampshire. But Biden’s support among black voters remained steady, and Harris couldn’t afford to run TV ads. Harris’ ideal scenario — a commanding start in Iowa, then outpacing Biden in South Carolina and on Super Tuesday — was closed.
“Joe Biden has always been our guy,” said Antjuan Seawright, a prominent Black Democratic consultant in South Carolina, explaining that it was never a rejection of Harris.
She ended her campaign on December 3, 2019, saying, “In good faith, I cannot tell you … that I have a path forward if I don’t believe I do.”
The harshest assessment is that Harris ran a poor campaign that reflected the principle: a warning to her outlook for 2024.
“She’s just a terrible candidate who couldn’t give any rationale for her candidacy,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, who suggested that Biden, at 81, might have put aside his own reelection ambitions more quickly if he had had more confidence in his vice president.
Most Democrats are more benign in their hindsight. Biden certainly was as he considered his options for second in command.
“We argued that she could bring the right energy and help drive the argument. … It was clear that he saw something in that as well,” Brazile said.
Biden himself ran “a terrible presidential campaign” in 2007-08, Brown noted, only to become Obama’s vice president and ultimately defeat Trump. Now Harris has that chance.
“Politics,” Brown said, “is all about timing.”
___
Follow AP’s coverage of the 2024 election at https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.