Short on Funds, Harris Ends Bid for Presidency

Sen. Kamala Harris of California dropped out of the Democratic presidential race Tuesday after months of low poll numbers and a series of missteps that crippled her campaign, a deflating comedown for a barrier-breaking candidate who was seeking to become the first black woman to win a major party’s presidential nomination.

The decision came after weeks of upheaval among Harris’ staff, including layoffs in New Hampshire and at her headquarters in Baltimore, and disarray among her allies. She told supporters in an email Tuesday that she lacked the money needed to fully finance a competitive campaign.

“My campaign for president simply doesn’t have the financial resources we need to continue,” Harris wrote. “But I want to be clear with you: I am still very much in this fight.”

The announcement is perhaps the most surprising development to date in a fluid Democratic presidential campaign in which Harris began in the top tier. Her departure removes a prominent woman of color from a field that started as the most racially diverse ever in a Democratic primary and raises the prospect that this month’s debate in Los Angeles will feature no candidates who are not white.

Harris opened her campaign on Martin Luther King’s Birthday with a rousing speech in her hometown, Oakland, California, before an audience of 20,000 people, drawing comparisons to history-making black politicians like Barack Obama and Shirley Chisholm.

The speech was a signal of the careful balance her campaign tried to strike throughout the year: leaning on her personal story as a daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants while offering policy preferences that toggled between the party’s moderate and progressive ideological wings. Harris sought to focus on incremental and deliverable change rather than the type of systemic upheaval popularized by rivals like Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

But almost immediately after her campaign began, she faced questions about her policy core that resulted in damaging news cycles. She reversed her position on single-payer health care, removing herself from the “Medicare for All” bill sponsored by Sanders. She struggled with how to frame her record as a prosecutor, oscillating between defending it against progressive criticism and embracing it in a play for more moderate votes.

On a conference call with donors Tuesday, Harris said she arrived at the decision after conferring with her family over the Thanksgiving holiday. She stayed up meeting with advisers until 2 a.m. Tuesday, before concluding she had “no path” forward in the race, a person on the call said.

Harris said she would have needed to raise $5 million in two weeks, a goal she described as impossible.

Over the weekend, after a New York Times article detailed problems within her campaign, Harris did a financial audit of her operation, according to a senior aide. One of Harris’ aides, who spoke with her about her decision to drop out, said that her instinct was to keep fighting but that she was told her campaign would have to go into debt in order to continue.

In her announcement Tuesday, Harris reaffirmed her commitment to her campaign’s unifying ideals. She is likely to immediately become a top-tier option for the party’s vice-presidential nomination.

“Although I’m no longer running for president,” she said, “I will do everything in my power to defeat Donald Trump and fight for the future of our country and the best of who we are.”

Harris’ withdrawal will set off an arms race between the remaining presidential campaigns, as they try to lap up her top-tier roster of endorsements and staff members. Some of her donors have already begun to field calls from her rivals.

But it is unclear how much Harris’ exit will aid any one candidate in polling, considering how her standing had declined in recent months. She and Warren were competing for many of the same voters earlier in the year, but moderates like former Vice President Joe Biden and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, may seek a boost from her supporters in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Throughout her candidacy, Harris faced concerns about her political strategy and her campaign’s organizational structure. She relied on a stable of California political strategists, led by longtime political operative Averell Smith, who did not heed warnings from grassroots organizers to invest more heavily in early voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire. Instead, the campaign focused on later primaries in states with more nonwhite voters, including South Carolina and California.

Her campaign miscalculated. Biden remained popular with black voters, preventing her campaign from making significant headway in South Carolina. In California, Harris was increasingly boxed out, as candidates like Sanders and Warren excited the state’s liberal wing and Biden persisted among moderates.

Still, Harris had already qualified for the next presidential debate, scheduled for Dec. 19, the only nonwhite candidate to do so thus far. Without her, Democrats may have an all-white debate stage, though candidates like Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and businessman Andrew Yang may still qualify in the coming days. “No matter your candidate, you have to recognize that going from the most diverse field ever in January to a potentially all-white debate stage in December is catastrophic,” wrote Leah Greenberg, a co-executive director of Indivisible, a national progressive group, on Twitter.

It was on an earlier debate stage in June when Harris generated one of the most electric moments of the race so far, challenging Biden over his record on race and busing. “I do not believe you are a racist,” she began. Biden was so taken aback, he cut his own answer short.

Money poured into her campaign, and she spiked in the polls. But those numbers declined steadily in the months that followed, beginning when she had difficulty articulating her own position on mandated busing — undercutting her star turn.

“She really showed the importance of having different perspectives on the debate stage,” said Amanda Hunter, research and communications director at the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which supports women in politics and studies double standards. “Her personal story about being bused to school was something that a historically typical older white man would not bring to the conversation.”

But “there is still a very entrenched stereotype of what a presidential candidate looks like in this country,” Hunter said. “Simply by running, Sen. Harris challenged that and broke down stereotypes.”

Harris’ online fundraising slowed in recent months, and large donors increasingly turned toward other candidates. In the third quarter of the year, she spent more than $1.41 for every dollar she raised, burning through millions. She stopped buying ads, both online and on television, slashed her staff in New Hampshire and retrenched to Iowa, where she spent the Thanksgiving holiday with her family.

In the days leading up to her withdrawal, as her campaign grew increasingly desperate, she surprised one donor who is not a major Democratic bundler by telephoning him to see if he could reach out to his associates who had yet to give. Another donor recommended to her that she leave the race.

Even as she struggled, Harris had assembled a coveted list of more than 130 bundlers who had raised at least $25,000 for her campaign, more than half of whom were from her home state, California, one of the deepest wells of Democratic cash. Harris canceled a scheduled fundraiser with some of her top bundlers in New York on Tuesday just hours before the event. On Wednesday, she had been scheduled to attend an event in Los Angeles at the home of Sean Parker, the billionaire tech entrepreneur.

A pair of California-based Democratic strategists, Dan Newman and Brian Brokaw, had just secured the money and the implicit signoff from Harris’ campaign to begin a super PAC in support of her candidacy. The group, named People Standing Strong, was to begin a $1 million ad buy in Iowa on Wednesday.

But it was not enough, as her campaign determined that she did not have the financial resources to continue. The group quickly began canceling its reservations. In addition to the financial troubles, some of Harris’ supporters worried that a poor showing once voting began, particularly in the California primary, would leave Harris vulnerable to a Senate primary challenge in 2022.

Presidential candidates have dropped out after running out of money for decades, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke earlier this year. In 2015, Scott Walker, then the governor of Wisconsin, famously flamed out of the Republican contest months before balloting began because he was short on cash.

President Donald Trump tweeted a farewell to Harris, saying, “We will miss you Kamala,” to which she replied: “Don’t worry, Mr. President. I’ll see you at your trial.”

Harris’ former rivals for the Democratic nomination quickly expressed their admiration for her Tuesday.

“Her campaign broke barriers and did it with joy,” Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey tweeted. “Love you, sister.”

Warren praised her “commitment to fighting for the people, for justice, and to holding Donald Trump accountable.” Former housing secretary Julián Castro called her “a lifelong fighter for opportunity and justice for all Americans.”

Biden, campaigning in Iowa, called Harris “a first-rate intellect, first-rate candidate, real competitor.” He walked away when a reporter asked whether he would consider Harris as a running mate.