New Delhi: Democratic White House hopeful Kamala Harris has announced her decision to drop out of the 2020 US presidential race. She launched her campaign in January this year and her popularity soared in June when she took on leading Democratic candidate Joe Biden in a TV debate.
Harris, 55, struggled to cement her position among top Democratic presidential candidates, including Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and finally decided to end her campaign saying that it “simply doesn’t have the financial resources we need to continue”.
In the US, the opposition party goes through a rigorous stage of state-level elections, known as primaries and caucuses, to elect their candidate for the presidential election. These elections are held at each one of the 50 US states.
Harris ended her presidential bid just two months before the first caucus was set to take place in Iowa.
Harris’ journey
Harris is a former prosecutor and was the attorney general of San Francisco. She became a senator from California in 2016 and announced her presidential bid in January earlier this year.
“The only woman of colour running for president, she received a burst of support over the summer after attacking former vice-president Joe Biden in a televised debate over his record on race,” noted a report in the Financial Times.
Given that she was the only woman of colour in the presidential race, a lot of expectations were riding on her, especially from the left-leaning and progressive voters.
“January’s launch event in Oakland felt like the beginning of something big — a presidential campaign with money, national organisation and a young, charismatic candidate whose background was as diverse as the party she wanted to lead,” writes BBC’s North America reporter Anthony Zurcher.
Flawed campaign strategy
Though Harris had a promising start and her attack on Biden raised her political credentials, she failed to capitalise the gain in momentum.
American political analysts and pundits point out her flawed campaign strategy. “She tried to walk a line between the moderate and the progressive wings of her party and ended up appealing to neither,” argues Zurcher.
The issue with such a strategy was that the centrist space in the Democratic presidential race has been dominated by Biden and the rising-Indiana politician Pete Buttigieg.
While among the left-leaning and progressive voters, she faced serious attacks for her record as the attorney general in San Francisco. These critics argued that during her tenure she had not been a supporter of “progressive criminal justice reforms”.
The issue was that the more she moved to the left, the more she ceded the centrist space to Biden and Buttigieg.
After her TV tussle with Biden, Harris’ poll numbers reached double digits. But they soon went away and never managed to regain her position as a top-rank democratic candidate.
No money left
Eventually, Harris ended her campaign because of lack of funds.
In an email to her supporters, Harris said, “I’m not a billionaire. I can’t fund my own campaign. And as the campaign has gone on it’s become harder and harder to raise the money we need to compete.”
This is being seen as a dig at media mogul and former mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg, who recently entered the presidential race.
“In the end, money is what does in most campaigns. And while Harris had posted solid fund-raising numbers in the first three quarters of 2019, her slow, steady decline in the polls and dimming electoral prospects must have been matched by dwindling donations,” noted a report in the BBC.
Also read: Kamala Harris’s withdrawal from US presidential race shows that winnowing works
It is more sad to note that for the US media Mrs. Harris is a women of color While Mrs Clinton was a presidential candidate no such references were made. Apparently, white is mot of any color. The white media is disgustingly prejudiced even when compared to RSS crowd in India.
Its sad when a competent and future ready candidate has to drop because of financial reasons.