Sen. Kamala Harris has ended her bid for president. Here's how California factored into her rise and fall

U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, California’s highest-profile presidential candidate in decades, dropped out of the Democratic primary race on Tuesday morning following reports of divisions within her campaign, months of plummeting poll numbers and struggles to raise the necessary money to compete with the top tier of candidates.

“In good faith, I can’t tell you, my supporters and volunteers, that I have a path forward if I don’t believe I do,” Harris wrote to the thousands of supporters on her campaign’s email list on Tuesday.

The senator’s candidacy amplified California’s most pressing political issues, including immigration, homelessness and the criminal justice system, on the national stage. But critics also questioned the former prosecutor's progressive bonafides. Harris struggled to simultaneously campaign on her experience as a prosecutor and advocate for now-popular criminal justice reform policies she eschewed while San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general.

Polling also showed California progressives gravitated toward candidates with more explicit proposals for systemic change, like Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

With Harris’s withdrawal, billionaire Tom Steyer is the only California candidate to have qualified for the Dec. 19 debate in Los Angeles. Steyer, and the other five candidates who have qualified for the debate, also are white.

Eye toward the future?

Harris's withdrawal from the primary race ensures a disappointing result in her home state won’t endanger her future political aspirations, said Bob Shrum, a former political consultant who worked for both Al Gore and John Kerry’s presidential campaigns.

“She was down in the polls, her fundraising dried up and she didn’t want to be on the California ballot and come in fifth or sixth,” he said. “All that said, she’ll be top-of-the-list for vice president if Biden, Buttigieg or even Sanders is the nominee.”

Presidential candidates had to file paperwork by Nov. 27 to appear on California’s March primary ballot. The secretary of state will publish a list of candidates on Dec. 6 and those wanting to withdraw have until Dec. 26 to do so in order to keep their names off the ballot.

Although presidential hopefuls from California have struggled historically, Shrum, who now works as director of USC’s Center for the Political Future, said Harris’s troubles had little to do with her home state.

Her penchant for changing her campaign slogans, her early disregard of Iowa and New Hampshire and her underestimation of the durability of former Vice President Joe Biden’s support among African Americans were more decisive factors than anything having to do with California, Shrum said.

“She had a real chance to win,” he said, contrasting her candidacy with Gov. Jerry Brown’s three runs for president in 1976, 1980 and 1992. “She had the personality, the potential fundraising base and a lot of assets that would’ve let her be a strong contender for a nomination.”

Aside from reports of disorganization and warring factions within her campaign, Harris has proven unable to sustain her initial popularity, especially in California. A July poll of likely Democratic primary voters put her in first place with 19% support, but by September, her support had fallen to 8%, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

The morning Harris withdrew from the race, UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and the Los Angeles Times published a poll that awarded her 7% support in the state among likely primary voters and found that 61% of those voters thought she should drop out of the race.

As of the end of September, Harris had raised $37 million in campaign contributions, less than half the amount Sen. Sanders had raised. With the Iowa caucuses less than 2 months away, she had less than $11 million in cash on hand to spend on campaign staff salaries, television advertisements, glossy mailers and digital media.

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, whose rise in the polls has mirrored Harris’s fall, had raised almost $52 million over the same time period and had $23 million cash-on-hand, more than twice the amount in Harris’s campaign coffers, heading into the “first four” primary contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.

Early hopes fizzle

Harris launched her bid for the presidency in January from the heart of her hometown, Oakland, Calif. Surrounded by an excited crowd of roughly 22,000, she was expected to win big across the state early on, with many supporters believing her to be the candidate best equipped to unite the progressive and centrist wings of the Democratic Party.

She quickly garnered support from other high-profile California elected officials, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, Rep. Barbara Lee, and California Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins, and endorsements from most Democrats in the state senate.

“My campaign is about returning power to the people in this country, and these leaders represent California’s diversity and reflect the broad commitment we share to move our state and our nation forward,’’ Harris said in a statement in February. “This level of support from my home state of California makes me so proud, and I am honored to have them fighting beside me.”

But when her numbers began to drop — both in fundraising and the polls — her team was quick to scratch their California focus. In October, with resources running low, campaign manager Juan Rodriguez released a memo outlining their plan to “go all-in on Iowa” and push her sprawling home state — and its 8.6 million registered Democrats — to the back burner.

The campaign relocated California-based staffers and cut campaign consultant salaries in a last-ditch attempt to boost Harris’s support in the Iowa caucuses.

“These moves will increase the number of field organizers and staff we have on the ground in the first contest and give our campaign the organizational muscle needed to compete in every precinct,” Rodriguez wrote in the memo.

In September, the last month covered in the quarterly filings, Buttigieg, Warren, Biden and Sanders all raised more than Harris in California.

“My campaign for president simply doesn’t have the financial resources we need to continue,” Harris wrote in the email to her supporters. “I’m not a billionaire. I can’t fund my own campaign. And as the campaign has gone on, it’s become harder and harder to raise the money we need to compete.”

After growing up in an immigrant family in Berkeley, Harris was the first woman and the first African-American woman elected as San Francisco’s district attorney in 2004. In 2016, she again made history when she became the second African-American and first South Asian woman elected to the U.S. Senate.

But her past has also sparked questions from criminal justice reform advocates, who’ve grown in influence within the Democratic Party. A prosecutor who came up in the 1990s, Harris was part of a “tough on crime” cohort during an era in which California developed one of the country’s most draconian criminal justice systems.

Even with an ambitious criminal justice plan, released in September, she couldn't quiet critics who questioned her record. Despite campaign slogans that pay tribute to her prosecutorial past like “Kamala for the People” and “Justice is on the ballot,” Harris struggled to settle on and ultimately reconcile her criminal justice record with the political identity driving her ambitions.

'Everybody is looking for some meaningful inspiration'

State Sen. Holly J. Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, who endorsed Harris early in her candidacy, called the senator’s withdrawal from the race a lost opportunity.

“In this next election, everybody is looking for some meaningful inspiration,” Mitchell, who calls Harris a friend, said. “I wonder where those people will turn for that inspiration and that sense of hope for all things possible for their country.”

Mitchell also questioned the degree of negative scrutiny that followed Harris as the only woman of color running in the primary. “I was saddened as a black woman elected myself. Every day I experience the double standard of being a woman, and a woman who looks like me, engaged in electoral politics.”

Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia said he was saddened by Harris’s decision to suspend her campaign and wished more people across the country had seen the attributes that led him to endorse her.

Harris, whose father is African-American and late-mother was Indian-American, was the only non-white candidate to have reached the top tier of national polls before she suspended her campaign.

Even though each of the four candidates hovering near the top of the polls are all white, Garcia said the diversity reflected in the Democrat’s large primary field was encouraging.

“I’m proud that we now have a much broader and more diverse field, but it’s important we push harder to ensure our leaders and those at the top of the ticket reflect the whole country,” he said.

Both Mitchell and Garcia said they had yet to decide if they would support a different candidate in the lead-up to California’s March primary.

“It is going to take me a minute to get over my disappointment, to figure out what my next step is,” she said. “Whoever I then choose, I will hold them to the same standard and expectation in terms of how will a little girl, born in my district of South Los Angeles today, be better off in 4 years or 8 years because they were president?” she adds. “This next president will be that little girl’s president so the questions I will be asking, will be on her behalf.”

Despite her early withdrawal, in the email to her supporters, Harris said her presence in the campaign “demanded no one should be taken for granted by any political party.”

“Our campaign uniquely spoke to the experiences of Black women and people of color — and their importance to the success and future of this party,” she said. “We will keep up that fight because no one should be made to fight alone.”

Sam Metz covers politics. Reach him at [email protected] or on Twitter @metzsam.

Gabrielle Canon is the USA Today Network's California reporter based out of Sacramento. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter @GabrielleCanon

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: California Senator Kamala Harris drops out of presidential race