WASHINGTON — Kamala Harris had one great day in her ill-fated 2020 presidential campaign: her first.
Then came a rapid collapse.
The freshman senator who announced her candidacy in January 2019 before 20,000 cheering supporters in Oakland, California, dropped out in December before a single vote had been cast.
By the time she quit, Harris lacked money, a message and a cohesive campaign operation — all ingredients of a successful candidacy.
It was a hard fall for someone whose youth and biracial identity evoked the appeal of the last Democratic president, Barack Obama.
“I have mixed emotions about it,” her rival and the eventual winner, Joe Biden, said upon hearing she had withdrawn from the Democratic nomination contest. He called her a “first-rate intellect.”
Now, Harris is set to get another shot. As the sitting vice president, she is a leading candidate to succeed Biden after his exit from the race, receiving his immediate endorsem*nt. Other elected officials might step forward to challenge Harris, dividing Democrats and clouding the general election picture ahead of a November showdown with Donald Trump.
“I know there are people working behind the scenes who think she may not be the best one suited to take us to victory,” said Maria Cardona, a member of the Democratic National Committee’s rules panel, speaking before Biden's withdrawal. “If that is seen as a full-on, inorganic tactic that is being led by senior people within the Democratic Party, there will be a civil war inside the Democratic Party the likes of which we will not survive.”
With only a few months to wage a campaign against Trump, Harris couldn’t afford to repeat the mistakes that tanked her last presidential bid. There would be little time to recover. Hers would need to be a virtually error-free sprint to Election Day.
When Harris gave that announcement speech before a hometown crowd five years ago, her prospects seemed dazzling. A Monmouth University poll released the week after she entered the race showed her running third in a crowded Democratic field that eventually numbered more than two dozen. With 11% support, she trailed only Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, both of whom had run presidential races before.
Harris had earned her bona fides as a former prosecutor and had distinguished herself in Senate committees as a feared interrogator who could pick apart a witness’s testimony.
A pro-Harris super PAC prepared an ad that showed her grilling Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and two Trump-era attorneys general, William Barr and Jeff Sessions.
It never aired. On the day the $1 million ad buy was supposed to begin running, Harris dropped out.
Making the leap from state to national politics proved daunting for her. Rivals like Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren had spent much of their adult lives steeped in policy.
Harris hadn’t mastered policy questions that dominated the Democratic debates. She had originally backed Sanders’ “Medicare for all” plan, but later released her own version that carved out a continued role for private insurers.
She quickly faced incoming fire from the left and center of the ideological spectrum.
Sanders’ aides denounced her proposal as a “terrible policy.” Biden’s campaign joined the attack, warning that she would undercut Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act.
“She was trying to figure out where she landed in the primary field on a bunch of issues,” one of her former California campaign advisers said. As a state official, Harris “hadn’t had to deal with that level of nuance.”
Another policy stumble marred what seemed to be her breakthrough moment. In a debate in June, she attacked Biden for opposing school busing in the 1970s.
Harris mentioned a “little girl” in California who had been bused to school every day. “That little girl was me,” she said. Within hours of the exchange, her campaign triumphantly started selling “That little girl was me” T-shirts for $29.99 apiece.
But after the debate, she struggled to offer a consistent answer to whether she believed federally mandated busing should be used to integrate schools.
A Biden campaign aide seized on the equivocation, tweeting that she was “tying herself in knots trying not to answer the very question she posed” to Biden.
This time, instead of facing off against fellow Democrats, Harris would be able to elevate one to serve as her running mate. She would have a plethora of promising choices to balance the ticket, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, all of whom won in places where Trump performed well.
Admirers say that Harris has grown in the job. Early in her campaign, she traveled to South Carolina and spoke to a group of Democratic women.
“The woman that I met in early 2019 was not as confident and was significantly more tentative in the way she presented herself to potential voters,” Amanda Loveday, a senior adviser to a pro-Biden super PAC called Unite the Country, said before Biden withdrew.
While affirming she wanted Biden to remain at the top of the ticket, Loveday said of the vice president: “The woman I met back then is very different from the woman I see on TV today. She’s grown as a leader and she has developed more confidence.”
Both Harris’ government office and the Biden-Harris campaign declined to comment for this article before Biden's withdrawal.
A campaign is akin to an expensive startup business on a national scale. It needs an inspirational candidate, but it also relies on a unified staff. Harris didn’t have one. People close to the campaign say that lines of authority were blurred between Harris’ sister and campaign chairwoman, Maya Harris, and other advisers who’d worked on her state races but weren’t blood relatives.
In November 2019, a campaign staff member wrote a letter, obtained by The New York Times, that depicted a campaign in crisis.
“Campaigns have highs and lows, mistakes and miscalculations,” wrote Kelly Mehlenbacher. “But because we have refused to confront our mistakes, foster an environment of critical thinking and honest feedback, or trust the expertise of talented staff, we find ourselves making the same unforced errors over and over.”
By that point, Harris was running fifth, her poll numbers down to 6%. Money was dwindling, accelerating the downward spiral. That fall, Harris’ campaign laid off staff and moved others from her national headquarters in Baltimore to Iowa to save money.
Any hope of reviving her candidacy with a strong showing in the Iowa caucuses in January was short-lived. On Dec. 3, Harris dropped out. She emailed staff that she “simply doesn’t have the financial resources we need to continue.”
A Harris sequel would look nothing like the original, former advisers said. She’d be buoyed by a Democratic Party that would coalesce behind her, desperate to defeat Trump. Donors who’ve bailed on Biden might take a fresh look at the race with a younger candidate atop the ticket.
She would also likely inherit the parts of Biden’s campaign that are working — like the massive field and data operations that are designed to drive voter turnout. While Biden’s most senior aides would likely be gone, many rank-and-file campaign staff with long resumes may choose to remain.
Harris’ background as a prosecutor could prove advantageous in a future debate. Rather than sparring with fellow Democrats over health care and education policy, she would be boring in on Trump’s criminal conviction in Manhattan.
“Literally everything” would be different, starting with her pitch to voters, a longtime Harris adviser told NBC News. “It is a three-month sprint and not a two-year slog.”
