Kamala Harris is preparing to lead Democrats in 2024. There are lessons from her 2020 bid

ATLANTA (AP) — Kamala Harris was greeted by a massive, cheering crowd during the first rally of her newly announced presidential campaign in 2019. Speaking on a late January day outside city hall in her hometown of Oakland, California, she framed her bid as part of something bigger than simply winning an election.

“We are here at this moment in time because we must answer a fundamental question,” Harris said, invoking Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 call for “moral leadership.” “Who are we as Americans?”

The early days of Harris’ campaign were wrapped in historical significance. She formally launched her bid on Martin Luther King Jr. Day with references to Shirley Chisholm, the first Black person and woman to seek a major party’s presidential nod.

At the time, with Democrats in despair over Donald Trump’s presidency, the first-term California senator appeared to be an ideal cure. The daughter of an Indian mother and a Black Jamaican father, Harris evoked comparisons to Barack Obama, whose powerful biography and soaring rhetoric galvanized Democrats more than a decade earlier.

But the early promise of Harris’ campaign met a more complicated reality as she spent the next 10 months struggling to break through a crowded field of candidates and churning through staff and cash. She ultimately withdrew from the race weeks before the Iowa caucuses, a disappointment mitigated only when nominee Joe Biden selected her as his running mate.

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