Is the Kamala Harris now being hailed as the Democrats savior—and who has prompted a huge injection of energy, enthusiasm and cash over the last 24 hours—the same person who crashed and burned so disastrously in her campaign for the Presidential nominee in 2019?
Democrats better hope not.
If Harris is to stand any chance of defeating former president Trump in November, she will have to learn quickly from the missteps and mistakes that beset her 2019 primary campaign. And there were many.
When Harris stepped out in front of 20,000 people in front of Oakland’s Town Hall on Martin Luther King Day in January 2019 there were heady comparisons with Obama (whose 2007 campaign launch attracted 15,000 in Chicago). Days later a Monmouth University poll placed her third in the race, trailing only Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.
It proved a false dawn.
Harris quit the primary race 10 months later, before a single vote had been cast. By then her campaign was a shambles. She was hemorrhaging cash and she was floored in the polls. She was beset by acrimonious staff departures and had been heavily criticized for policy u-turns, uneven debate performances and a failure to build a cohesive campaign narrative.
Her rise was meteoric, but her fall was precipitous.
As the New York Times noted, days before she pulled out, in December 2019, “There is only one candidate who rocketed to the top tier and then plummeted in early state polls to the low single digits: Ms. Harris.” A few days later when she announced she was quitting the race, DC news site, Politico, didn’t pull its punches, “The spectacular collapse of Kamala Harris.”
Days earlier, her senior campaign aide, Kelly Mehlenbacher, had just written a blistering takedown of the Harris campaign, which was leaked to the press. “This is my third presidential campaign and I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly. With less than 90 days until Iowa we still do not have a real plan to win.” An anonymous senior Harris aide told Politico, that the campaign had,
‘No discipline. No plan. No strategy.’
Days later she pulled out.
Kamala Harris’ problems were twofold—personal and political. In debate after debate she was overly-mannered and struggled to convey authenticity. She had pre-prepared answers and put-downs that often fell flat. On policy, she too often seemed uncertain and failed to plot a decisive course, and stick to it.
Her campaign style, and particularly in debates, was to rely on a prosecutorial experience citing empirical evidence and setting out the case. It was cold, and often seemed aloof.
And on policy issues, she often came unstuck. In June 2019 when asked by moderators at a debate which candidates would abolish private health insurance, Harris raised her hand. A day later, Harris changed her position, claiming she had misheard the question.
It was often difficult to decipher what she stood for on critical issues like criminal justice, which, as a former prosecutor, ought to have been her strongest suit. Instead, as the New York Times reported at the time, “Ms. Harris said she was being deliberate, but several aides familiar with the process said she was knocked off kilter by criticism from progressives and spent months torn between embracing her prosecutor record and acknowledging some faults.”
Supporters of Harris, rightly, point out that she was freighted with too heavy a burden throughout her career, and certainly as Vice President. They claim she has been the subject of more intense scrutiny than most.
As the Washington Post wrote yesterday, “Harris entered the history books the moment she was inaugurated as the first woman and the first person of Black and Asian descent to win a nationally elected office.” One senior staffer told the Post, “People expected her to make history every time she walked into a room,” and added that “many of the attacks appeared to be rooted in racism and misogyny. It was an impossible standard.”
The Kamala Harris of 2019 ought not to be the Kamala Harris of 2024. Four years of intense political experience at the heart of the White House operation will have strengthened her hand. Most notably, she has campaigned vigorously on women’s reproductive rights since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022 to overturn the landmark Roe v Wade ruling and the subsequent move by Republican states to restrict access to abortion. On this critical issue, she will bring the fight to Trump.
But now her challenge now is a wider one, and one that any Democratic nominee will face—how to build an anti-Trump coalition in the six swing states that will decide this election. She will need to appeal to people of color, farmers, suburban women, rustbelt and sunbelt voters in order to plot a path to victory in November.
Many believe she is ready to do that, and that the learnings of the last four years will see Harris emerge as a more assured, confident campaigner, ready to take the fight to Trump.
We may be about to find out.
Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative and longtime Harris supporter said yesterday, “You see her becoming more comfortable with being a vice president. And she now has a team of people around her that have strengthened her, and the stories that are coming out of D.C. are changing. The narrative has changed.”
Democrats better hope so.
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