Kamala Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign

National campaigns are, first and foremost, an exercise in storytelling patterned after well-known themes — David versus Goliath, the Haves versus the Have Nots, the fearless vigilante for justice. It is rarely the case that a candidate is unintentionally placed on a presidential track of any party; it’s a path years in the making, a confluence of strategic decisions, affiliations, and opportunities for high-profile moments. Whether a candidate’s messaging holds, however, is subject to whether it tracks with its target audience.

Which brings us to Sen. Kamala Harris. Harris’s national odyssey commenced in 2012 when, as California’s attorney general, she gave a brief speech endorsing then-President Barack Obama for a second term at the Democratic National Convention. When she ran for Senate in 2016, Obama gave her an endorsement of his own. The self-ascribed “top cop” rhetoric that originally came into national parlance during her congressional race (and has been a pain in her side ever since) was quickly subsumed by a newfound reputation of “unflappable truth advocate” once she was elected and went viral for handing it to Jeff Sessions in a committee hearing. By the time she made her 2020 presidential announcement in January, she was riding on both a “nevertheless, she persisted” narrative and bona fides that harked back to the characteristics of the Democratic Party’s golden child, Obama. Harris had positioned herself as not only the most accomplished Black woman to ever run for executive office, but seemingly the most electable candidate.

After a blockbuster debate performance in June, Sen. Kamala Harris shot up in the national polls, peaking at 15 percent voter support. Cut to five months later, and she’s announced her decision to drop out, after polling in the single digits.

Her departure — which comes before several candidates who are polling behind her — prompts a major question: What happened?

Sen. Kamala Harris, following a sharp decline in recent polls, is dropping out of the 2020 race.

Harris, once seen as one of the most promising presidential candidates in the Democratic field, struggled to identify a distinct message, and had trouble connecting with voters as a result. She announced her decision via a Medium post on Tuesday, after telling staff earlier in the day.

In August, Sen. Kamala Harris was praised for being the first 2020 presidential candidate to announce a plan on general disability community policy. It was clear the Harris campaign had engaged in a thoughtful discussion with community leaders about what matters to its members. But on Monday, when Harris’s campaign rolled out its mental health policy plan, it had not been nearly so thoughtful. Harris seems to have gone all-in on attacking the freedom, dignity, and privacy of people with mental health conditions. People like me.

In 2014, I voluntarily admitted myself to a psychiatric hospital while deeply suicidal. What followed was one of the most harrowing and dehumanizing experiences of my life. I wasn’t allowed to decide what to eat, what to do all day, or what to wear in any meaningful way. I was talked over like I wasn’t there.

Four of the five major 2020 Democratic candidates have released detailed plans for how to improve veterans’ care just in time for Veterans Day. And though their plans differ, they all agree on one thing: Former service members with undeserved “other than honorable” discharges should receive the full suite of Department of Veterans Affairs benefits.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) have all released new plans that include measures to expand VA benefits to 500,000 veterans who are currently denied them because of their discharge status.

Kamala Harris just unveiled a massive plan to give new parents and caregivers up to six months of paid time off from work.

The proposal is part of her new “Children’s Agenda,” which aims to cut childhood poverty in half and includes benefits such as childcare subsidies and free preschool for low- and moderate-income families.

Sen. Kamala Harris has a plan to recover from her summer polling slump: She’s going all-in on Iowa.

The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, who’s currently polling in fourth, is looking to October to give her campaign a boost in the crucial early state. Much of her campaign strategy has prioritized slightly later — and more diverse — states, like South Carolina, Nevada, and California. The increased focus on Iowa possibly signals a realization on the California senator’s part: Her “SEC primary meets the West Coast offense” strategy will only work if she survives until those states start weighing in.

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Monday released a criminal justice reform plan that would attempt to undo mass incarceration and the war on drugs — and can also be read as a rebuke of critics of Harris’s record as San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general.

Harris’s plan includes a litany of ambitious goals: legalize marijuana, abolish mandatory minimum sentences, end the death penalty and solitary confinement, stop private prisons, get rid of cash bail, and leverage the president’s clemency powers to reduce the number of people in federal prison.

CNN’s climate crisis town hall on Wednesday night was an unprecedented seven hours of discussion on climate change with 10 of the Democratic 2020 presidential contenders. It was also the most substantive discussion of climate change policies ever broadcast on primetime television.

Each candidate was given a 40-minute segment, meaning they could provide long, nuanced answers to hard questions on the most far-reaching issue of our time. There was a lot that could have gone wrong, so it’s remarkable so much went right. The town hall easily outshone the muddled discussion in the paltry half-hour or so devoted to climate change across eight hours of official Democratic debates.

Drawing on her track record of fighting the fossil fuel industry with the courts, Sen. Kamala Harris put forward a plan on Wednesday to address climate change by holding polluters to account.

One of several 2020 Democrats to unveil a climate proposal ahead of a CNN climate forum on Wednesday, Harris has a vision for how she’d get the country to carbon neutrality. She also revealed what she’d do to ensure existing social and economic disparities aren’t exacerbated in the process.

Presidential candidates are slowly starting to talk about the gig economy. Not in the vague way they express disdain for a business model that exploits workers. No, they’re starting to take sides, weighing in on one of the most consequential legislative battles taking place in the country: the fight over California bill AB 5.

The sweeping bill, backed by labor unions, would make it much harder for companies to classify employees as independent contractors, a common practice that has allowed businesses to skirt state and federal labor laws. The law would essentially rewrite the rules of the gig economy, and businesses of all kinds are panicking. lt’s why Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Postmates, and other well-known gig companies have launched aggressive lobbying and public relations campaigns to defeat the bill.

Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris marked the five-year anniversary of the Ferguson, Missouri, police shooting of Michael Brown last week with tweets claiming that the cop who shot Brown “murdered” the 18-year-old black man.

But the evidence, including a report released by President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, says otherwise.

The United States has some of the highest prescription drug prices of any developed country in the world. And for many, the costs are only continuing to climb.

Sen. Kamala Harris’s latest plan, which would enable the US government to set lower prices for all prescription drugs and boost competing alternatives, is one of the latest 2020 offerings to address this problem.

Few US workers are worse off than domestic employees.

Housekeepers, nannies, and caregivers have long been excluded from federal labor laws. They aren’t entitled to overtime pay or a minimum wage. They can’t get workers compensation if they’re injured on the job, or unemployment benefits if they’re fired. Heck, it’s essentially legal for employers to sexually harass them in most states.

If the campaign visits Sen. Kamala Harris has been making are any indication, her strategy to secure the Democratic nomination runs straight through South Carolina and the West.

According to an estimate provided by her campaign, Harris has thus far made 32 campaign stops in South Carolina, 16 in Nevada, 26 in Iowa, and 11 in New Hampshire. Throw in a handful of visits to southern states like Alabama, Louisiana, Texas and Georgia, and some time spent in her home state of California, and it all confirms the plan that one of her campaign advisers laid out for Politico last fall: “SEC primary meets the West Coast offense.”

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden aren’t done sorting out the fallout from her lightning rod moment at last week’s Democratic debate, when the senator criticized the former vice president for his record on school busing.

The attack sent Biden reeling and solidified Harris’s ascent into the 2020 presidential field’s top tier. Harris successfully portrayed Biden as out of touch with the current Democratic Party, but after her viral moment, she is also being asked to go on the record about how she would handle busing in the current era.

Since the first Democratic debate, national polls have shown former Vice President Joe Biden’s lead shrinking and Sen. Kamala Harris rising. And now, a new poll suggests a similar dynamic is at work in the nomination process’s first contest: the Iowa caucuses.

A new poll aimed at Iowa Democratic caucusgoers shows what may be the race’s new post-debate status quo — with Biden still in first, but Harris dramatically rising.

One of the most memorable moments of last night’s Democratic primary debate was California Sen. Kamala Harris going after former Vice President Joe Biden for his opposition to school busing.

When Biden was a young senator in the 1970s, he opposed busing, which helped desegregate schools. Harris challenged his position on the issue, and said she had benefited from busing as a child growing up in California.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), a longtime prosecutor prior to joining Congress in 2016, has made history in every elected office she’s held. She’s the first black woman and the first Asian American woman to serve as a California senator, as the state’s attorney general, and as San Francisco’s district attorney. And in 2020, she would be the first black woman and the first Asian American woman to be a major party nominee if Democrats choose her as their presidential candidate.

Harris’s candidacy — and identity — is one that speaks to the energy and growing diversity of the Democratic party: She’s a progressive woman of color who’s made advocacy for DREAMers, the fight for equal pay, and abortion rights core planks of her policy proposals. And she’s built an avid following among voters impressed with her pointed questioning of Trump nominees and officials like Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Attorney General William Barr from her perch on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Sen. Kamala Harris has a new plan to help unemployed and underemployed workers obtain the job training they need: give them the money to do so.

For a segment of workers, one of the barriers to finding a new role is lacking the qualifications a position may require, coupled with the prohibitively high cost of obtaining such experience. While the idea of a so-called “skills gap” has been largely disproven, there are still major inconsistencies in the kind of training that is offered by employers, putting pressure on workers to build the expertise they need for more specialized fields like health care and information technology.

Again and again during her MSNBC town hall Tuesday night, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) reminded voters and was reminded herself that the United States Senate is a sizable obstacle to any Democratic agenda.

“2020 is about the White House, but it’s also about the United States Senate,” Harris told the audience in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

California Sen. Kamala Harris has a plan to close the gender pay gap, and it’s founded on hitting companies on one of their most prized markers: their annual profits.

As Harris’s plan is structured, companies with 100 or more employees would be required to disclose pay data to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in order to demonstrate that they’ve closed the gender pay gap between men and women who perform comparable roles. Companies that aren’t able to show they’ve achieved this would be penalized a percentage of their profits.

Public defenders are notoriously overworked, underpaid, and constantly juggling an overwhelming caseload. As a startling New York Times story found this past January, one attorney in Louisiana was working 194 felony cases, while another was balancing 413. Lawyers in certain places are often fielding two to five times the cases they can effectively handle, according to the piece. And they’re doing it for pay that’s far from comparable for the work.

Kamala Harris, a long-time prosecutor and current 2020 candidate, wants to take a first step toward fixing this.

This week’s presidential town halls displayed the full range of Democratic Party thinking on the role of policy in a presidential campaign.

Elizabeth Warren has a vast stack of detailed specifics. Pete Buttigieg had an explicit defense of not having detailed policies. And Bernie Sanders elevated every specific discussion to the realm of abstract morality. It all revealed that Democrats not only have a range of ideas but a range of different ideas about the nature and value of ideas.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris received standing ovations from the audience at a forum on Wednesday dedicated to women of color — clearly emerging as favored candidates among some in an increasingly important Democratic primary voting bloc.

Both lawmakers tied their policy proposals on issues including housing, criminal justice and equal pay to longstanding racial inequities, an approach that some Democrats have been criticized for failing to take in the past.