Remember Kamala Harris’s Dismal Presidential Campaign?

By mid November of 2019, Kelly Mehlenbacher had had enough of Kamala Harris’s failing presidential campaign. The veteran Democratic operative who’d been serving as the Harris campaign’s state-operations director abruptly resigned.

She laid out her concerns in a searing letter: “This is my third presidential campaign and I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly,” she wrote, adding that, with fewer than 90 days until the Iowa caucuses, “we still do not have a real plan to win.”

As the Harris campaign’s ship was sinking, other aides and staffers similarly weighed in. Harris, they told reporters, had been unable to impose order in her campaign; she failed to effectively straddle the center and far-left wings of the Democratic Party; and she struggled to connect with voters, trying out and discarding one slogan or one-liner after another.

By the time Harris finally ended her campaign in early December, she’d churned through $35 million only to watch her poll numbers flatline in the low single digits.

“You can’t run the country if you can’t run your campaign,” one former aide told the New York Times after Harris officially exited the race.

More than four years later, with President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign floundering amid increasing concerns about his age and ability to serve until he is 86, prominent Democrats are reconsidering replacing Biden with Harris, his vice president, at the top of the ticket. The idea comes with some clear advantages: At 59 years old, Harris is more than two decades younger than Biden; she could run on the current administration’s accomplishments (a positive in Democratic circles), and she alone among Democrats could inherit the Biden-Harris ticket’s more than $90 million in campaign cash.

But Harris’s performance as a presidential candidate in 2019, along with her far-left politics and her ongoing struggles connecting with voters and retaining staff, should give Democrats pause about putting too much faith in her.

A former prosecutor, California attorney general, and senator, Harris was seen by many Democrats as a potential top contender for the Democratic nomination in 2020. Harris, the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, aimed to assemble a diverse coalition similar to the one that carried Barack Obama to victories in 2008 and 2012.

She launched her campaign on Martin Luther King Day in 2019, in Oakland, her birthplace, standing in front of a large American flag and promising to be “a president of the people, by the people, for all the people.”

While the mainstream media attempted to portray Harris as a moderate, her campaign website and statements showed that she was anything but.

She backed a single-payer Medicare-for-All health-care system, because: “in America, health care should be a right, not a privilege only for those who can afford it,” according to her website. During a CNN town hall, she said her plan would get rid of private health insurance, although she almost immediately began walking that back.

She supported forging “a Green New Deal to tackle the climate crisis,” including spending $10 trillion in public and private funds over ten years to “stave off the worst climate impacts,” her website said. She said she would require private businesses to prove that they’re not engaging in pay discrimination against women by obtaining “Equal Pay Certification,” and she would fine companies deemed to be out of compliance. “Harris won’t wait for Congress to act,” her website said. “She’ll take executive action herself.”

On immigration, she vowed to roll back the Trump administration’s “disastrous and cruel border strategy,” her website said. She proposed “placing a third gender option on federal identification cards and documents.” She aimed to empower unions, increase the minimum wage to $15 nationally, and make community college free (i.e., taxpayer-funded).

She promised to act alone to curb gun violence if Congress didn’t give her what she wanted. “If Congress fails to send comprehensive gun safety legislation to Kamala’s desk within her first 100 days as president — including universal background checks, an assault weapons ban, and the repeal of the NRA’s corporate gun manufacturer immunity shield — she will take executive action to keep our kids and communities safe,” her website said.

And while some Democrats took issue with Harris’s work as a prosecutor, Harris suggested that she had been a “progressive prosecutor,” back when that was still in vogue.

In the weeks after she entered the race, Harris rose steadily in the polls. By the end of February, she had 12.3 percent support, good enough for third place in a crowded field.

In June, during the first Democratic debate, Harris set out to make her mark, accusing Biden of working with segregationist senators to oppose busing to desegregate schools. Biden called it a “mischaracterization of my position across the board.”

But the attack received the attention that Harris seemingly intended. Her poll numbers rose to 15.2 percent support, putting her briefly near the top of the field.

It was all downhill from there, though.

The attack on Biden backfired when reports revealed that Harris and Biden essentially agreed on the busing issue. She faced charges of preplanning the attack.

In the following months, while Harris gloated about “obviously” being a “top-tier candidate,” her poll numbers flagged, exposing the rot inside her campaign.

Harris’s aides and staffers complained to reporters about infighting and disjointed messaging. Harris, they said, failed to impose order on her Baltimore-based campaign, which was chaired by her sister, Maya. Her campaign “soon became a hotbed of drama and backbiting,” according to CNN. The Times reported that “Harris and her closest advisors made flawed decisions about which states to focus on, issues to emphasize and opponents to target.”

In an October debate, rather than tackling pressing issues or taking aim at her Democratic rivals, Harris repeatedly spent her time calling for Trump to be kicked off Twitter. “Join me in saying that his Twitter account should be shut down,” she said.

In her efforts to appeal broadly across the Democratic coalition, Harris struggled to win the strong support of any faction of the coalition.

By late fall, her campaign was broke. In a last-ditch effort to remain viable, Harris and her campaign leaders went all-in on winning Iowa, shifting the bulk of their resources there.

Mehlenbacher accused Harris and her campaign leaders of mistreating employees.

“It is not acceptable to me that we encourage people to move from Washington, DC, to Baltimore only to lay them off with no notice, with no plan for the campaign, and without thoughtful consideration of the personal consequences to them,” she wrote in her resignation letter. “It is unacceptable that we would lay off anyone that we hired only weeks earlier. It is unacceptable that with less than 90 days until Iowa we still do not have a real plan to win.”

In early December — less than a year after launching her campaign and before a single primary vote had been cast — Harris exited the race. She left early, in part to preserve her political capital and to set herself up for a possible VP nod, which came after Biden won the nomination and faced pressure to select a black woman as his running mate.

As vice president, Harris has faced some of the same charges she faced as a candidate. In 2021, Politico reported that her office was dysfunctional, “rife with dissent,” and was an “abusive environment.” One person with knowledge of the office said, “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s***.”

A similar report in the Washington Post noted that Harris “churns through top-level Democratic staff, an issue that has colored her nearly 18 years in public service.” One former staffer described Harris as a “bully” who subjects her staff to “soul-destroying criticism.”

Last year, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and around the nation told the Times that Harris “had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country” and that they had “lost hope in her.”

She’s also struggled to appear relatable, receiving pushback for her banal efforts to come across as profound over things like “the great significance to passage of time” and “how people are experiencing life.” The Republican National Committee recently compiled a four-minute montage of Harris encouraging her audience to be “unburdened by what has been.”

In response, Democrats are trying to position her as a “likeable oddball,” according to the Post.

During their first term, Harris has typically struggled with lower approval ratings than Biden. And while that hasn’t been the case since the president’s disastrous debate performance last month, Democrats probably can’t take much comfort in her current standing: As of mid July, Harris’s approval rating was only 37.5 percent to Biden’s 36.8 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight polls.

Although Biden continues to insist that he’s not stepping back, and despite Harris’s well-documented struggles, desperate Democrats are eyeing her as the person best positioned to fill in if the president does eventually decide against running.

Times opinion columnist Lydia Polgreen argued in late June that the “young, vigorous and talented” Harris has the “true superpower” to defeat Trump in November. Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Solomon Jones wrote on Friday that Harris is the most qualified Democrat to take on Trump if Biden does not, adding that Republicans are already ramping up attacks on her “sprinkled with a healthy dose of racism and misogyny.”

A widely circulated memo from Democratic operatives, “The Case for Kamala,” obtained by National Review, similarly insists that “Harris has the strongest claim to Democratic legitimacy.” The memo acknowledges that Biden is losing to Trump, and that his efforts to course-correct with last month’s debate “failed miserably.”

It also acknowledges that Harris’s political deficits are real but insists they are addressable.

“Like it or not,” the memo concludes, “there’s one realistic path out of this mess: Kamala.”