Sen. Kamala Harris’s stunning collapse from being a leading Democratic presidential candidate to dropping out before Iowa is a lesson in what happens when a candidate tries to consciously run as a consensus choice rather than on a clear vision.
Going into the Democratic nomination battle, Harris was actually viewed by many insiders as the one most likely to be the nominee. In addition to her intelligence and political talents, on paper, the thinking was that her status as both a female and a person of color could appeal to multiple key demographics. She had a background as a prosecutor and as a traditional pragmatic liberal that would satisfy the establishment, but also had embraced policies (such as socialized health insurance) to make her more acceptable to the Left than Joe Biden. As a bonus, many analysts projected she would benefit from her home state of California — the biggest delegate prize — having moved up its primary. When she mauled Biden in the first debate over school busing and surged in polls in July, it affirmed these predictions. And yet, it’s been downhill ever since.
There will be many obituaries written about the Harris campaign — about tactics, staffing, organization, fundraising, and so forth. But ultimately what her candidacy shows is that it’s very difficult to win by trying to be the default candidate — the one that everybody is fine with, who checks all of the boxes without really having a clear defining message that can inspire people. We saw a similar pattern with Sen. Marco Rubio in 2016. He was the guy who was going to unify the Tea Party and the Establishment, who could open up opportunities for Republicans to appeal to a younger and more diverse electorate, and so forth. While he got further than Harris, in the end, he was steamrolled by Donald Trump, who connected with primary voters on a much more visceral level.
In Harris’s case, she made a major blunder by trying early on to compete with Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for the support of the far Left, most notably, on healthcare. Her cynical shifts went from endorsing the Sanders plan to eliminate private insurance, to emphasizing mythical “supplemental” policies, and then to releasing a separate plan, managing to alienate everybody. Hardcore single-payer enthusiasts came to see her as unreliable, and yet traditional liberals saw her as too radical. This cynicism was also on full display when she attacked Biden on busing only to back off her attack and eventually acknowledge that she basically had the same position as he did. Harris, the normally sure-footed debater, also struggled to square her record as a law and order prosecutor with her current rhetoric when under attack from Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.
Instead of trying to reverse-engineer the type of candidate she thought would appeal to a plurality of voters, Harris just should have run on who she is, which probably would have put her somewhere in the traditional incrementalist liberal camp, perhaps slightly to the left of Biden. In the end, there was clearly much more room for her to compete in that space, and it would have saved her a lot of the flip flops and pandering that came to undermine her candidacy.
