U.S. Senator Kamala Harris
Yesterday, U.S. Senator Kamala Harris abandoned her efforts to win the Democratic Party presidential nomination for 2020. In an email to supporters, Harris wrote:
I’m not a billionaire. I can’t fund my own campaign. And as the campaign has gone on, it’s become harder and harder to raise the money we need to compete.
On paper at least, the highly accomplished Harris should have been one of the favorites to win the Democratic nomination, and, for a time, she was in the top tier, polling at 15 percent. So what went wrong?
The answer is, several things:
First, Harris overreached after an initial debate attack on front-runner Joe Biden catapulted her to a high position in the polls. Harris personally attacked Biden in subsequent debates, and her decline in the polls tracks these attacks. Harris’ “Hey, Joe” response to Biden in last September’s debate sounded especially flippant and not at all presidential.
Second, Harris did not seem to attract a significant portion of any Democratic voting bloc. In particular, much is being made of black women being the most reliable Democratic voting group. As a woman of color (Harris’ father is Jamaican and her mother was Indian), Harris naturally might have been expected to have the most support from black voters, including female black voters. However, Joe Biden maintains a big lead over his Democratic challengers when it comes to black support, possibly in part because Biden, as Vice President, stood shoulder to shoulder with President Barack Obama for eight years. Likewise, Harris did not appear to represent any particular Democratic constituency, which is currently described as occupying a “lane” in the Democratic nomination contest. In contrast, for example, Biden and Pete Buttigieg are thought of as being in the “moderate” lane, while Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are highly branded in the “liberal” lane, each with his or her own base of support.
Third, Harris’ treatment by the mainstream media seemed like their usual double standard for women. For example, the New York Times published the resignation letter of one of Harris’ staffers, which indicated that Harris’ campaign “treat[ed] its staff so poorly.” However, we heard hardly a peep, and only for a few days, out of the mainstream media regarding Bernie Sanders’ campaign burning through state directors, the third one already having resigned or been reassigned during this election cycle. This seems strangely reminiscent of the media’s hyperventilating coverage of Hillary Clinton‘s brief bout with pneumonia on the campaign trail in 2016 (which is not all that unexpected given that the candidates wear themselves out often in bitter cold temperatures, and many of them get sick), compared to the media’s near-silence after 78 year-old Bernie Sanders had a heart attack while campaigning two months ago. The fact that Harris is not just a woman, but a woman of color, only seems to have added to the media double standard against her.
The good news is that Harris has a continued bright future. She can go back to her U.S. Senate job representing California. She is also now being touted as a (possibly the) front-runner for the Vice Presidential running mate slot, or for the Attorney General position should the Democratic nominee win the election. In any case, Kamala Harris most likely will continue to be a star of the Democratic Party, and deservedly so.
Photo by California National Guard, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/zrIjKO
