Kamala Harris Announces Run for Presidency
As had been widely reported, Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) announced she will be seeking the Democratic nomination for president in 2020.
I’m running for president. Let’s do this together. Join us: https://t.co/9KwgFlgZHA pic.twitter.com/otf2ez7t1p
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) January 21, 2019
A 54-year-old former California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney, Ms. Harris is something of a bridge between the Democrats eyeing the race who are in their 70s, like former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and Senator Bernie Sanders, and those in their 40s, like former Representative Beto O’Rourke and Senator Cory Booker. Further, while she hails from one of the country’s most famously liberal cities, she has ties to both the pragmatic and leftist wings of the party: she is rooted in the Bay Area’s Democratic establishment but has embraced a more progressive agenda since being elected to the Senate in 2016.
“I love my country,” Ms. Harris said on “Good Morning America’’ Monday. “And this is a moment in time where I feel a sense of responsibility to stand up and fight for the best of who we are.”
Ms. Harris is not yet well known to voters, but there is deep curiosity about her among the party rank-and-file as they face a Democratic nomination contest that is defined primarily by its uncertainty.
That part about being a “bridge” is no doubt part of the plan for the Harris campaign, but it also means being caught in the middle of a generation shift that the 2020 Democratic primary is shaping up to be a test of. So far, the pattern has been for a candidate to announce, then the parsing of record begins. With her candidacy being expected, that process started early for the junior senator from California, and her career as a prosecutor and AG of California was where critics started:
In part because of the complexity of Harris’ record, Bazelon touched off a vigorous debate about Harris’ criminal justice stances, both on Twitter and in early voting states like Iowa and South Carolina, where Harris is scheduled to visit next week.
If Harris runs, it is a debate that will likely play out for many months among her 2020 rivals, particularly as Harris tries to consolidate the African-American vote in South Carolina and the early states of the Southeast where that demographic makes up a large portion of the electorate.
The Democratic California senator, who has worked closely with Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul on bail reform and co-sponsored legislation making lynching a federal crime, has clearly been expecting these attacks from the left, particularly as criminal justice reform became a focal point for Democratic activists.
In addition to traditional early state South Carolina, a change to 2020 that Senator Harris is also anticipating is the primary move of her home state California to early March for Super Tuesday, right after the traditional first four of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. The plan would be to grab an early, and insurmountable, delegate lead in a very crowded primary. Harris has her core staff in place, including some important names from both the Obama and Clinton campaigns of years past, and starts off with many considering her a strong contender.
How strong, though, is a matter of perspective. Nate Silver at 538 puts it this way:
Also in terms of her strengths, Harris has stood out among colleagues during Senate hearings, putting her prosecutorial skills on display with her sharp and quick questioning of witnesses. Debate performances can really matter in primaries, and the hearing performances suggest she might be strong in debates.
She’ll need to be. To be clear, all of Harris’ strengths outlined above are really potential strengths. In most national primary polls conducted so far, she’s been in the single digits. Those polls mostly reflect a lack of national name recognition, but Harris will have to build her support almost from scratch. And a lot could go wrong for her.
The biggest potential problem for Harris may be that her campaign simply never really catches on with voters. Despite seeming to reporters like me to be a strong candidate on paper, Harris could be the 2020 Democratic version of Marco Rubio or Scott Walker, who both struggled in the GOP’s 2016 primary despite being hyped for years as potential GOP nominees because of their potential to appeal to a broad swath of their party.
After all, Harris likely will be competing for attention with a lot of candidates. And if she doesn’t do well in one of the first two contests, in mostly white Iowa and mostly white New Hampshire, then I don’t think there is any guarantee African-American voters or even California voters will get behind her.
Each time a candidate declares, the conversation starts on whether or not they can rise from the primary fight victorious then unify the party to take down President Donald Trump. It seems many people on paper look able to do that second part of unifying the party, and hope to be able to defeat President Trump, but the question remains which one survives the first hurdle of the primary battle royal.
“That’s why I’m running for President of the United States. I’m running to lift those voices. To bring our voices together,” Senator Harris said in her announcement. Now we will see if the Senator can deliver on her years of “potential candidate” hype.
Somewhere in the last couple of years my e-mail address got onto Harris’s list (probably a donation I made to some other Western candidate). I got her announcement e-mail this morning. Speaking broadly, there’s not enough policy difference between her, or Warren, or Gillibrand to matter. There’s exactly one mention of the environment: “Where every single person can breathe clean air and drink clean water.” Not a word about climate change. So far, Jay Inslee is still my guy. Not that he’s got a snowball’s chance of getting the nomination — this will not be a good cycle for white male governors.Report
I don’t think there is going to be huge policy differences between the main contenders. Each will pick one or two things to stand out on but all will pick from the buffet of current D consensus. The primary process will lead the winner to pick up the other popular proposals from the others. Harris will have some enviro policies if she doesn’t now that will be in the general consensus of the D’s. If she is slow on that she will pick up popular polices from the other candidates.Report
My feed is full of pinkos arguing that Kamala Harris cannot be the nominee because she was a particularly earnest prosecutor and nominating her would be a slap in the face to the whole #BlackLivesMatter movement alongside people arguing that this shouldn’t be held against her and we need to nominate someone who can appeal to the center and, like it or not, Law&Order appeals to the center.
So the nomination fight is going to be bloody. (Who is the most populist of the Democrats who have thrown their hat into the ring? Is it Harris?)Report
She wasn’t just a prosecutor. She was a bad one. One who fought any accountability for cops or prosecutors, tried to deny compensation to people unjustly imprisoned, brought garbage lawsuits against backpage, argued against decarceration because the state would lose cheap labor and thought parents of truant kids should be arrested. Fie on her faux progressivism.Report
This shouldn’t be held against her and we need to nominate someone who can appeal to the center and, like it or not, Law&Order appeals to the center.Report
By the current Democratic definition of ‘populist’, probably Warren, but only because she’s been someone whose made her political brand (earliest) as being a foe of ‘Big Finance’ as popularly imagined.
Castro has some cred as a ‘populist’ insofar that his resume has ‘HUD Secretary in a Dem adminstration’. But I couldn’t name any actual accomplishments. And it’s kinda hard for any Obama alum to make the ‘populist’ case for themselves.
But really, like said elsewhere on the thread, it’s going to be the tyranny of small differences between anyone in the front 5-6 of the field. Ecept for Bernie and Biden, and Gabbard too if she manages to get that 6th seed. Both Bernie and Biden are going to get obliterated, but for different reasons.
Although, I can see a scenario – Gillibrand, Harris, Warren, and Booker are so close that they split the field almost evenly between them, Biden and the kids table pick up close to 10% of the total vote , so Bernie manages to squeak in with a low 20s percentage vote total.Report
I have Warren in the “Damaged Goods” category in my head so I no longer see her as particularly relevant to the nomination debate (though her endorsement will be worth a considerable amount).
My assumption is that the Trump Backlash among the Dems will manifest as antithesis and so, as such, I see The Populistest among them as being the one who will eventually get the nomination. (Well, if the invisible nomination process isn’t hijacked by the money people and superdelegates before the fact.)Report
Aaaaaand she got a dog.
(It’s a pretty smart move. I don’t think it will work, but I did waver for a second.)Report
I really doubt that any man gets through the process, not in this political environment. Harris has way too much Brown baggage, what with her getting a start in politics being the “girlfriend” of the Wiley one. Warren is already a punching bag for Trump, though she is the populist choice. That leaves Gillibrand, Kohlbluchar, and Tulsi.
Weak.
All Biden and Sanders, Booker, Beto, and Castro will do is weaken the field during the primaries. So, who else will pop up in the next few months? That might be the answer.Report
Has Booker declared? I thought he’s waiting this one out?Report
The NYT has this handy resource, according to which he’s “all but certain” to run.Report
Harris’s video is a bit on the nose. She really needs a token white male in there.Report