Kamala Harris was greeted by a massive, cheering crowd during the first rally of her newly announced presidential campaign in 2019. Speaking on a late January day outside city hall in her hometown of Oakland, California, she framed her bid as part of something bigger than simply winning an election.
“We are here at this moment in time because we must answer a fundamental question,” Harris said, invoking Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 call for “moral leadership.” “Who are we as Americans?”
The early days of Harris’ campaign were wrapped in historical significance. She formally launched her bid on Martin Luther King Jr. Day with references to Shirley Chisholm, the first Black person and woman to seek a major party’s presidential nod.
At the time, with Democrats in despair over Donald Trump’s presidency, the first-term California senator appeared to be an ideal cure. The daughter of an Indian mother and a Black Jamaican father, Harris evoked comparisons to Barack Obama, whose powerful biography and soaring rhetoric galvanized Democrats more than a decade earlier.
But the early promise of Harris’ campaign met a more complicated reality as she spent the next 10 months struggling to break through a crowded field of candidates and churning through staff and cash. She ultimately withdrew from the race weeks before the Iowa caucuses, a disappointment mitigated only when nominee Joe Biden selected her as his running mate.
Now, after Biden ended his reelection bid, Democrats say Harris has grown into a more savvy candidate who will avoid repeating mistakes from her first campaign.
“Look, there’s been no roadmap for Kamala Harris,” said Donna Brazile, a former Democratic National Committee chair and one of the prominent Black Democrats who urged Biden to pick Harris in 2020. “But she’s really found her voice and has been going non-stop since the 2022 midterm campaign, especially. I think she’s become a generational figure and proven she can bring … leadership to the party and the country.”
Harris began her campaign as a favorite
A former prosecutor and state attorney general, Harris launched her 2020 campaign with the slogan: “Kamala Harris: For the People.” She spoke in sweeping terms about an “inflection point” for a country riven with social fissures, economic disparities and political strife. She emphasized her biography and her “stroller’s-eye view” of her parents’ activism in the Civil Rights Movement.
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