Harris’ 2020 Campaign Was Not a Failure

How do you think she ended up as the 2024 nominee?!

It’s conventional wisdom among the jaded political press that Kamala Harris’ 2020 primary bid was an embarrassing disaster. Mark Leibovich at the Atlantic provides a recent example of this supposedly self-evident narrative—in an analysis of Harris’ CNN interview Leibovich refers to Harris’ “short-lived and ill-fated presidential campaign of 2019.”

There are a couple of problems with this formulation. First, it’s false. And second, it’s false in a way that glibly advances racist and sexist talking points which paint Harris as incompetent and unworthy.

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There is no benefit in staying in and losing

There are a lot of problems with horserace campaign coverage. It can distract from discussion of issues. It tends to treat both sides as equivalent. It can be shallow and unenlightening.

One big, not much discussed difficulty though is that it treats the presidential horserace as…well, aa horserace. And presidential elections are very different than horse races in a number of respects. One big difference being that, unlike in horseraces, you can sometimes win by quitting.

The goal of a horse race is generally to win, or to come as close to winning as possible. If you can’t cross the finish line first, you want to cross the finish line second. If you can’t do that, you want to cross the finish line third. Unless you’re illegally trying to throw the race because you’re involved in gambling, you pretty much never want to just stop before the halfway point. Stopping before the halfway point is losing.

A lot of pundits treat presidential nomination contests as if they are literally races between horses. Whoever stays in the longest is the winner; whoever stays in second longest is the runner up. People who drop out early are losers.

The problem with this is that it is ignorant, foolish, and wrong. The goal of a presidential nomination contest is not to stay in as long as possible. The goal is to advance your career. That can mean that you come out of the nomination as president, ideally. But that’s not the only way to win.

In 2020, there were literally dozens of candidates who ran in the 2020 Democratic primaries. The ones who stayed in the longest were Bernie Sanders, who dropped out April 8, 2020; Tulsi Gabbard, who dropped out March 19, Elizabeth Warren, who dropped out March 5, and Michael Bloomberg, who dropped out March 4.

If this were a horserace, you’d say, well, Sanders finished second and Gabbard finished third. But it doesn’t take much perspicuity to figure out this is not at all what happened.

Sanders and Warren ended up as important progressive voices informing the Biden administration. It seems likely that that would have been the case even without their primary runs though. They were both influential Senators before 2020 and remained influential Senators afterwards. Their campaigns excited progressives (including me), but in retrospect, in terms of advancing their own influence and goals, the primary was probably a wash.

For former Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and former NY mayor Michael Bloomburg, on the other hand, the 2020 presidential race was an epitaph on their careers in the Democratic party.

Gabbard was on her way out of the party after her constituents figured out she was a fascist in liberal clothing; the 2020 run just confirmed her on her trajectory towards Trumpism.

Bloomberg spent a billion dollars of his own money to have Elizabeth Warren get up on the debate stage and remind the world that he’s a sexual harasser and a toad. Even though he was one of the last candidates in the race, Bloomberg was probably the biggest loser of the cycle.

So, if none of those candidates won, who did?

Pete Buttigieg is one obvious answer. He started the campaign as a mostly unknown mayor of a smallish Indiana city. He won the Iowa caucus in an impressive upset, and by the time he dropped out on March 1, he had a national reputation and an enthusiastic fanbase which he parlayed into a position under Biden as Secretary of Transportation. During the last four years, he’s become a staple on television, including Fox, skillfully defending Biden’s record, and as a result is well-known and popular.  

At only 42, Buttigieg is well positioned to try for president again, or for another office. He dropped out before Sanders, Warren, or Bloomberg, but he had a much more successful campaign than any of them did.

Harris came in second in 2020

The one person besides Joe Biden who had a better 2020 than Buttigieg was, of course, Kamala Harris.

Harris was better known than Buttigieg before she entered the race; she was a California Senator. And she stayed in much less time than he did, dropping out before Iowa on December 3, 2019.

Harris looked like a real contender early in the race, with strong polling and fundraising. She got a major boost after the first Democratic debate in June 2019, when she challenged Biden on his (terrible) record of opposing busing and school integration during his Senate career.

The standard narrative is that Harris could not capitalize on those early gains and ended up with fundraising troubles and no path forwards. So she dropped out.

That’s not exactly wrong. But it ignores the extent to which decisions to drop out are not just admissions of failure. They’re strategies in their own right. Harris almost certainly could have pressed forward into 2020, hoping for better polling or a better than expected showing in Iowa. That is, after all, what Warren and Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar did, with varying success.

Harris though decided that she didn’t really have a path forward, and that she’d be better served by getting out early so that she wouldn’t have to continue criticizing and/or clashing with the potential nominee. She (rightly) figured that if the party chose Biden or Sanders (as seemed likely) they would probably want someone who wasn’t a white guy for Vice-President. Harris, in showing strength and then wisdom, was in a good position to benefit.

Obviously, Harris couldn’t be sure that she’d be the Vice-Presidential pick. She was making a calculated gamble—which paid off. More, by using her position as VP to cultivate her relationships within the party, she ended up being a consensus choice when Biden stepped down.

So, Harris’ 2019 campaign was not “short-lived and ill-fated.” She is, in most ways that matter, still running the same presidential campaign she ran in 2019.

A five-year presidential campaign is admittedly relatively brief compared to Joe Biden’s 35-year presidential run. But it’s still not exactly “short-lived.” And while we don’t know the 2024 outcome yet, at the moment Harris’ (long-lived) presidential campaign looks like it has better than even odds of making her president in November. That’s not ill-fated (at least, not yet.)

Yes, Harris is a talented politician

It’s irritating that Atlantic pundits who are paid to provide election commentary don’t understand how elections work. But does it really matter? After all, horserace coverage is horserace coverage. It’s shallow by design. What’s the difference if it’s shallow and correct rather than shallow and wrong?

In this case, the problem is that Harris is a Black woman, and that racist, sexist scripts stereotypically denigrate the intelligence and competence of Black women.

Trump’s campaign constantly insists that Harris is fake and doesn’t deserve to be the nominee. Trump has said that when Biden stepped down and endorsed Harris, it constituted a coup on Harris part.  (This is a lie.) He’s also amplified social media posts suggesting Harris has advanced her career by trading sex for political advancement, a vile, false, racist, sexist smear which leverages vicious stereotypes about the hypersexuality of Black women.

Mike Leibovich’s comments aren’t as disgusting as Trump’s, obviously. But his confused analysis nonetheless advances MAGA talking points by erasing Harris’ agency and tactical smarts.

Harris did not fail in 2019 and then, somehow, magically, become the Democratic nominee in 2024 through luck. On the contrary, she succeeded in 2019, which is why she was in a position to succeed from 2020 to 2024 and why she is now the Democratic nominee with $500 million in cash and a strong polling position for November.

There are plenty of policy positions on which one can reasonably criticize Harris. I think her position on immigration is ugly and disheartening. I think her refusal to even contemplate changing Biden’s disastrous Gaza policy is morally indefensible.

But if you are discussing her campaign for president as a campaign for president, you should probably note that (like just about everyone who runs for president) she has been working towards the job for many years. You should note that she is the first Black woman major party nominee because she is very, very good at politics.

Harris’ 2020 campaign was an impressive demonstration of her political skills. Her 2024 campaign has also been very well-coordinated, to put it mildly. That doesn’t guarantee victory. But analysts at major news organizations should acknowledge her accomplishments. If they don’t, they’re playing into the racism and sexism directed at Black women in general, and at Harris in particular.