Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign is collapsing. She’d like you to think it’s because voters aren’t ready for a female president, or for that matter, a female president of color.
“I have also started to perhaps be more candid, talking about what I believe to be the elephant in the room about my campaign,” Harris told Axios. “Electability. You know, essentially, is America ready for a woman and a woman of color to be president of the United States?”
According to Harris, the answer is no: “There is a lack of ability or a difficulty in imagining that someone who we have never seen can do a job that has been done 45 times by someone who is not that person,” she said.
Discussing her campaign with “Axios on HBO”, Kamala Harris says electability is the “elephant in the room”, questioning whether America is ready for a woman — and a woman of color — to be president. pic.twitter.com/vykBmAvIhL
— Axios (@axios) October 28, 2019
It’s no wonder Harris is looking for excuses to justify her recent dive in the polls. Many Democrats thought she had a real shot at the nomination after she successfully yanked Democratic front-runner Joe Biden down during the first primary debate. But that success was short-lived. Recent polling consistently shows her campaign dying, and it suggests that Harris’s unpopularity has less to do with her gender and ethnicity and more to do with her inconsistent platform and general unlikeability.
Even if we were to give Harris the benefit of the doubt, though — assuming that voters aren’t ready for a woman of color to sit in the Oval Office — how would we explain Tulsi Gabbard’s recent leap in the polls? Gabbard is now up to 5% in New Hampshire, according to a recent CNN/UNH poll, while Harris has sunk to 3%.
New CNN/UNH poll in New Hampshire:
Sanders 21%
Warren 18%
Biden 15%
Buttigieg 10%
Gabbard 5%
Klobuchar 5%
Yang 5%
Harris 3%
Steyer 3%
Booker 2%
O’Rourke 2%
Everyone else 1% or less— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) October 29, 2019
Gabbard is also a woman of color — of Asian and Polynesia descent. It doesn’t seem to have hurt her campaign. If anything, it has helped. Diversity is an asset among Democratic voters. Harris knows this, but she’s determined to play the victim.
If ethnicity and gender aren’t Harris’s problem, then what is it? Harris’s problem is that she’s an inconsistent candidate, waffling on her healthcare proposals, school busing — the key issue she used to attack Biden. And then there are her past prosecutorial scandals that other candidates, Gabbard included, have used to delegitimize Harris’s record as a former prosecutor, senator, and now presidential candidate. In fact, Harris seems to have faded slowly ever since Gabbard called her out on her prosecutorial record during the debate that took place in July.
Harris’s problems go much deeper than electability. If she plans to stay in this race, she needs to stop making excuses and start finding solutions.
