Kamala Harris is preparing to lead Democrats in 2024. There are lessons from her 2020 bid

Associated Press

ATLANTA (AP) — Kamala Harris was greeted by a massive, cheering crowd during the first rally of her newly announced presidential campaign in 2019. Speaking on a January day outside city hall in her hometown of Oakland, California, she framed her bid as part of something bigger than winning an election.

“We are here at this moment in time because we must answer a fundamental question,” Harris said, invoking Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 call for “moral leadership.” “Who are we as Americans?”

With Democrats in despair at the time over Donald Trump’s presidency, the first-term California senator appeared to be an ideal cure. The daughter of an Indian mother and a Black Jamaican father, Harris evoked comparisons to Barack Obama, whose powerful biography and soaring rhetoric galvanized Democrats more than a decade earlier.

But the early promise of Harris’ campaign met a more complicated reality as she spent the next 10 months struggling to break through a crowded field of candidates and churning through staff and cash. She withdrew from the race weeks before the Iowa caucuses, a disappointment mitigated only when nominee Joe Biden selected her as his running mate.

Harris began her campaign as a favorite

A former prosecutor and state attorney general, Harris launched her 2020 campaign with the slogan: “Kamala Harris: For the People.” She spoke about an “inflection point” for a country riven with social fissures, economic disparities and political strife. She emphasized her biography and her “stroller’s-eye view” of her parents’ activism in the Civil Rights Movement.

An early entrant to the race, Harris’ initial media blitz and massive opening rally solidified her status as a presumed favorite.

Her aides outlined a wide path to the nomination.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders led Democrats’ progressive wing, with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren offering his biggest challenge. Biden, then the 76-year-old ex-vice president, hadn’t announced but was expected to anchor the more centrist wing, and he stood strong among Black voters who figured prominently in the first-in-the-South primary in South Carolina and many Super Tuesday states that followed.

Harris came to the campaign having hit her stride during Senate Judiciary Committee sessions, especially when questioning Trump’s judicial nominees. She’d also signed on as a co-sponsor to Sanders’ push for a “Medicare for All” national health insurance system. She was a regular on cable news and social media.

Some younger progressives distrusted her record as a prosecutor. “Kamala is a cop” became a social media tag line. That contingent, however vocal, was not viewed as large enough to sway a national primary contest — and its opposition actually affirmed one of Harris’ arguments: “My entire career has been focused on keeping people safe,” she told ABC News. “It is probably one of the things that motivates me more than anything else.”

At her full potential, Harris’ aides reasoned, she could appeal to nearly all branches of the party. It was, more or less, a campaign intended to chip away and eventually overtake Biden’s coalition, presuming he joined the race, bolstered with a leftward reach that Biden, the white, male veteran of the Washington establishment, could never manage.

‘That Little Girl Was Me’

Harris’ early appearances in Iowa, first in the nominating calendar, and South Carolina were dominated by working-age women, a key Democratic demographic. In South Carolina, far more diverse than overwhelmingly white Iowa, her audiences were racially diverse.

But as the field widened, Harris faded from de facto front-runner status. She became one of many candidates vying for money, media attention and votes — especially once Biden announced in the spring. She raised $12 million in the first quarter of 2019, a solid sum but not one reflecting the electricity of her opening salvo in Oakland.

The argument for a Harris presidency never crystallized. Her “For the People” motto notwithstanding, she didn’t project Sanders’ or Warren’s economic populism. Entreaties about democracy weren’t central to her brand compared with Biden, whose “Soul of the Nation” pitch framed 2020 as a singular mission: sparing the country another Trump term.

And there was another contender Harris didn’t account for: Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old ex-mayor of South Bend, Indiana, built a grassroots network in Iowa, enjoyed glowing national media attention and became a generational counter to Biden in the primary’s moderate lane.

Harris managed a hit moment in the primary’s first debate in June, criticizing Biden for having opposed court-ordered busing in the 1970s as an answer to continued public school segregation. She personalized her broadside, telling of a young minority student who attended an integrated school only because of federal action.

“That little girl was me,” she told Biden.

Harris’ campaign immediately marketed campaign merchandise with the quote, drawing criticism the line was canned.

A sputtering finish

The debate gave Harris her best fundraising surge since her launch. But the good news was short-lived. She clarified in succeeding days she didn’t necessarily support federally mandated busing — the position Biden held as a young U.S. senator. And even with the boost, her second-quarter fundraising haul was only $12 million, well behind Biden, Sanders and Buttigieg, who doubled her mark.

In the summer, Harris unveiled her health care plan, proposing to add a Medicare-like public option to existing private health insurance exchanges. It was a shift that abandoned her single-payer position in the Senate and highlighted her difficulty finding a core message. In debates, rivals attacked her record as a prosecutor, especially her aggressiveness against drug offenders. By the fall, her speaking time on stage was middle of the pack, making it difficult to change the dynamics.

Biden was faltering in Iowa and New Hampshire. But Biden’s support among Black voters remained steady, and Harris couldn’t afford television ads. Harris’s ideal scenario — an impressive start in Iowa, then moving ahead of 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 it was never a rejection of Harris.

She ended her campaign Dec. 3, 2019, saying, “In good faith, I can’t tell you … that I have a path forward if I don’t believe I do.”