The Failure of Kamala Harris

Now is the time for a little schadenfreude. Kamala Harris, the first anointed corporate Dem of the 2020 presidential presidential campaign, has dropped out. Astead Herndon, Shane Goldmacher and Jonathan Martin have the main write-up in The New York Times, "Kamala Harris Says She’s Still ‘in This Fight,’ but Out of the 2020 Race."

Ostensibly, Harris threw in the sponge because she couldn't raise the money. There's definitely truth to that. On the other hand, she could have have pared down and rebooted her campaign, continuing on as a candidate while a super PAC did her ad buys. According to Herndon et al.,

Ms. Harris’s online fund-raising slowed in recent months, and large donors increasingly turned toward other candidates. In the third quarter of the year, she spent more than $1.41 for every dollar she raised, burning through millions. She stopped buying ads, both online and on television, slashed her staff in New Hampshire and retrenched to Iowa, where she spent the Thanksgiving holiday with her family.

In the days leading up to her withdrawal, as her campaign grew increasingly desperate, she surprised one donor who is not a major Democratic bundler by telephoning him to see if he could reach out to his associates who had yet to give. Another donor recommended to her that she leave the race. 

Even as she struggled, Ms. Harris had assembled a coveted list of more than 130 bundlers who had raised at least $25,000 for her campaign, more than half of whom were from her home state, California, one of the deepest wells of Democratic cash. Ms. Harris canceled a scheduled fund-raiser with some of her top bundlers in New York on Tuesday just hours before the event. On Wednesday, she had been scheduled to attend an event in Los Angeles at the home of Sean Parker, the billionaire tech entrepreneur.

A pair of California-based Democratic strategists, Dan Newman and Brian Brokaw, had just secured the money and the implicit signoff from Ms. Harris’s campaign to begin a “super PAC” in support of her candidacy. The group, named People Standing Strong, was to begin a million-dollar ad buy in Iowa on Wednesday.

The real reason Harris quit is that she was worried about what a poor showing in her home state on Super Tuesday would mean for her reelection as a senator in 2022. Ryan Grim tweeted

Some context: Harris only had a few days to get out before her name would appear on the California ballot, which gets mailed to voters in early February. Getting crushed in California would have been devastating, and set her up for a challenge in 2022 for her reelection.

The big picture is that Kamala Harris fronted the huge "block Bernie" fake narrative peddled by the media. According to this storyline, Bernie was old news this go-round. Voters were abandoning him in favor of bright and shiny new candidates, candidates like Kamala Harris, who shared some of Bernie's policy perspectives but who were "fresh."

When Harris stumbled badly in early appearances in Iowa -- staff having to coach her from the wings while she struggled on stage -- Joe Biden decided to enter the race, and there went the whole "voters yearning for a fresh face" narrative.

The spectacular failure of Harris' campaign is mulled this morning by the media elite. David Leonhardt took the opportunity to boom Buttigieg. None were more honest than Perry Bacon of FiveThirtyEight:

Here’s a final thought on Harris: I wonder if she and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke were both overhyped as candidates by the press, myself especially in the case of Harris. (I wrote a piece about her presidential prospects in June 2018.) As Joel Wertheimer, who served as associate staff secretary to Obama, wrote, “The story of Kamala Harris is one sports fans are familiar with: The scouts just got it wrong. That’s really it.”

Harris had been touted as the “female Obama” for years. A lot of the reporters and political staffers, including me, who now have a big role in America’s political conversation came of age professionally during Obama’s rise. We were (and probably still are) inclined to look for the next Obama. (I think looking for the next Obama also resulted in Sen. Marco Rubio being overhyped in the 2016 cycle, for example.)

But Harris is not Obama, and 2019 is not 2007. The rise of Trump and his brand of identity politics have probably made Democrats more wary of a female or minority presidential candidate. Obama is the defining figure of the party — multiple candidates, such as Biden and Buttigieg, are casting themselves as his logical heir, even if they aren’t black. And Harris, unlike Obama, was not the leading alternative to an establishment-backed candidate (Hillary Clinton) who had been wrong on the central issue of the day (the Iraq War). She was running in a primary with lots of viable candidates where one of the big questions is exactly what the primary is about (electability, restoring stability or big structural change).

Perhaps Harris, had the campaign unfolded a little differently, could have held onto the polling gains she made in the wake of the first debate. It’s possible that she got a bit unlucky and simply underperformed in a few crucial moments. But it’s also possible that pundits like me overestimated her chances from the start.

Anyone paying attention should have known that Obama was no longer popular in 2016. That's why Trump won. To miss the obvious means that mainstream political pundits get their talking points from some sort of central command. Whatever or wherever that corporate behemoth hive mind is.

Still, what I want to know is did Kamala Harris really turn out 20,000 people to her campaign kickoff in Oakland or was that number fictitious; and if it was real, how did she do it.