California Senator Kamala Harris, who was elected Senator just two years ago, has announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President:
Senator Kamala Harris, the California Democrat and barrier-breaking prosecutor who became the second black woman to serve in the United States Senate, declared her candidacy for president on Monday, joining an increasingly crowded and diverse field in what promises to be a wide-open nomination process.
The announcement was bathed in symbolism: Ms. Harris chose to enter the race on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, an overt nod to the historic nature of her candidacy, and her timing was also meant to evoke Shirley Chisholm, the New York congresswoman who became the first woman to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for president 47 years ago this week.
In addition, Ms. Harris will hold her first campaign event on Friday in South Carolina, where black voters are the dominant force in the Democratic primary, rather than start off by visiting Iowa and New Hampshire, the two predominantly white states that hold their nomination contests first. She will hold a kickoff rally Sunday in Oakland, Calif., her hometown.
For the first time, the Democratic presidential race now includes several high-profile women, with Ms. Harris joining two other prominent senators who have announced candidacies, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Representative Tulsi Gabbard, a Hawaii Democrat, has also said she is running, and more women could enter the race in the coming weeks.
Ms. Harris made her announcement on “Good Morning America” and also released a video aimed at supporters and other Democrats.
“The future of our country depends on you, and millions of others, lifting our voices to fight for our American values,” Ms. Harris said in the video. She also debuted a campaign slogan that played off her background as a prosecutor: “Kamala Harris, for the people.”
“Let’s do this together: For ourselves, for our children, for our country,” she said.
Ms. Harris’s long-expected entry comes as many Democrats are eager to find new leaders and as the party grasps for a unifying message that can appeal to its increasingly progressive base and more moderate voters who have recoiled from President Trump.
“The future of our country depends on you, and millions of others, lifting our voices to fight for our American values,” Ms. Harris said in the video. She also debuted a campaign slogan that played off her background as a prosecutor: “Kamala Harris, for the people.”
“Let’s do this together: For ourselves, for our children, for our country,” she said.
Ms. Harris’s long-expected entry comes as many Democrats are eager to find new leaders and as the party grasps for a unifying message that can appeal to its increasingly progressive base and more moderate voters who have recoiled from President Trump.
As noted, Harris’s announcement does not come as a surprise. She has been on the list of potential Democratic challengers to President Trump for some time now and, shortly after the 2018 midterms, she stated that she would decide on whether or not she would run over the holidays. Shortly after that, it was reported that she would enter the race on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. While she has been polling in the single digits in recent polling of the Democratic field, it’s worth remembering that those polls are based largely on name recognition and that Harris is likely not as well known as other actual and possible candidates such as Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. As has been the case in past races, it will take some time before we get to the point where the polling is going to actually matter. Between now and then, Harris will join the growing list of candidates visiting Iowa, New Hampshire, and the other early states while also trying to line up support within the party and, of course, fundraising.
At least on paper, Harris appears to have a decent, albeit somewhat thin, resume. Before being elected to the Senate in 2016, Harris had served as California’s Attorney General since 2011 and, before that, was the District Attorney for San Francisco. Even when she was still just a candidate for the Senate, many national political leaders were talking about her as a potential Presidential candidate, in no small part due to similarities between her and former President Obama notwithstanding the fact that their level of experience and their prominence on the national scene were quite different at the respective times in their political careers. Additionally, the fact that Harris comes from the West Coast rather than the Midwest as President Obama did is potentially a mark against her in an election year where Democrats are clearly going to be interested in winning back the working class voters they lost to Trump in 2016.
In any case, Harris has been working to increase her national profile inside the Democratic Party by traveling to several early primary states to speak at party events and by campaigning for Democratic candidates in the just-concluded midterm elections. Additionally, she received significant national attention and praise from fellow Democrats for her questioning of Justice Brett Kavanaugh both during the first round of substantive hearings and during the reopened hearings aimed at investigating the allegations made by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford At the time, though, some critics accused both her and fellow Senator Cory Booker of grandstanding for the cameras and the national hearing during the course of the hearings.
Harris is still relatively unknown even inside the Democratic Party so it’s hard to judge how she’ll come across in the coming campaign. One advantage Harris does have over these other candidates, of course, is her youth, something that could be appealing to voters looking to hand power to a new generation of leaders rather than nominating and potentially electing another Baby Boomer.
Jennifer Rubin at The Washington PostHarris could be a formidable candidate, argues that while FiveThirtyEight’s Percy Bacon maps out a possible back to victory:
Her biography and record make it easy to imagine Harris doing well with African-Americans, who likely will represent about one-in-five primary voters in the Democratic primary electorate, as well as Asian-Americans. Harris narrowly lost the Latino vote in her 2016 election to a fellow Democrat1 who is Mexican-American (Loretta Sanchez), but there isn’t any particular reason to think she is disliked by Latino voters. The way Harris is likely to position herself on policy issues during the campaign — liberal as any candidate on noneconomic issues but not as liberal on economic issues as, say, Bernie Sanders — echoes Hillary Clinton’s platform in 2016 (Harris’ sister Maya was Clinton’s policy director.) So I’m sure party loyalists, particularly black voters and older women, who backed Clinton will give serious consideration to Harris. The California senator is not particularly young (54), but you could imagine millennials galvanizing around electing the first Asian and first female president in the same way they embraced Obama in 2008. (We’ll come back to The Left in a moment.)
Moreover, looking at the current primary calendar, I’m not sure about her prospects in Iowa and New Hampshire (more on that in a bit), but the order of the states is set up well for Harris after that. The third contest is in Nevada, a state that borders California, so voters there may more familiar with Harris than other candidates. South Carolina is next, and African-Americans will likely constitute a majority of voters there.
After those four early contests, nine states are currently scheduled to vote on March 3, and that could be a great day for Harris. Those nine primaries and caucuses include California — Harris’ home state, which also has a large Asian-American population — as well as four states in which the Democratic electorate will likely be more than a quarter black
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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. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey or former Vice President Joe Biden (his close relationship with Obama will help) could become the top choice among black voters — or African-Americans could split their votes among several candidates. I think a candidate who won Iowa and another early state and had momentum could carry Harris’ home state of California.
Bacon is correct that Harris could have an advantage among African-American voters, but it’s worth noting that she’ll be competing for that vote along with a number of other candidates, including Cory Booker and, if he enters the race, former Vice-President Joe Biden, who is likely to benefit from his association with Barack Obama even if he doesn’t have his formal endorsement. As Bacon also notes, the minority vote is going to be of minimal importance at best in early states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, which have relatively low African-American populations and if Harris is unable to perform well in those states then her campaign could fizzle out pretty quickly. If she hangs on through those states, though, the race eventually heads to South Carolina and its large African-American population, where she could stand to do very well. All of that speculation, of course, is premature but we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. 1
Here’s the campaign video that Harris released in connection with her announcement:
