Kamala Harris is floundering in the polls.
Her 2020 campaign has pretty much stalled out, and she thinks she knows why.
According to her, it’s all about racism and sexism. That’s what she claimed in a recent interview.
From Axios:
Kamala Harris says running for president as a woman of color in the 2020 election is different than running as a black man or as a white woman and that the question of electability has emerged as “the elephant in the room about my campaign.”
Why it matters: In an interview with “Axios on HBO,” the California senator, stuck around 5th place in Democratic presidential primary polls, says there’s still time to regain momentum to crack the top three in the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3. She was mostly guarded in her remarks, but spoke more spontaneously on questions about race and her law-and-order background.
“Of course” it’s different to run for president as a black woman, she said. “When there is not a reference point for who can do what, there is a lack of ability or a difficulty in imagining that someone who we have never seen can do a job that has been done, you know, forty-five times by someone who is not that person.”
“I have also started to perhaps be more candid” or speak with “a candor in terms of the politics of race in the way that I’m talking during my town halls and in my rallies.”
Watch the video:
Harris’s argument really doesn’t hold water.
Stacey Matthews writes at Legal Insurrection:
It really doesn’t get much more pathetic than this, folks.
At this stage in the game, Harris and the rest of the Democratic field are trying to win over Democratic primary voters, naturally, because that’s how the process works. First, you win a lot of primaries. Second, if you have the required number of delegates then you win the nomination.
So she’s basically accusing voters in her own party of not being ready to see a woman of color in the role of president. This in spite of the fact that a black man won the Democratic nomination in 2008 and ultimately the presidency. A woman won their nomination in 2016. Plus, Sen. Elizabeth Warren is now sitting alongside Joe Biden at the top of the pack.
Doesn’t it stand to reason that if Democratic voters are willing to elevate a woman to the top tier in the last two presidential primary cycles and a black man to the nomination back in 2008 that they would be more receptive to a woman of color this time around if she had a message that appealed to them?
Harris has been a disappointing candidate for the Democrats.
People had higher expectations than she could deliver on.
Cross posted from American Lookout.
