It’s about over for Kamala Harris.
The leftist U.S. senator from California can’t control her campaign, the liberal New York Times reported today, and numbers in the Real Clear Politics average of voter surveys have shown for some time that her support is close to zero.
In other words, the splash she made in the second Democratic debate when she zinged top contender Joe Biden for his decades-ago support of Southern “segregationists” didn’t help her.
Expect Harris to drop out of the race shortly after she is soundly defeated in the Iowa caucuses, if not before.
Resignation Letter
A few days after Harris’s campaign laid off workers in early November and shifted its focus to Iowa, which chooses its candidates for president on February 3, the Times reported that “senior aides gathered for a staff meeting at their Baltimore headquarters and pelted the campaign manager, Juan Rodriguez, with questions.”
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The meeting did not go well, and then the state operations director, Kelly Mehlenbacher, resigned in a furious “To Whom it may Concern” letter.
She quit, she wrote, because she has “never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly, and “the treatment of our staff over the last two weeks was the final straw.”
Mehlenbacher wrote that the campaign “encouraged people to move from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore only to lay them off with no notice, with no plan for the campaign, and without thoughtful consideration of the personal consequences to them or the consequences that their absence would have on the remaining staff.”
Laying off workers hired “only weeks earlier,” she wrote, is “unacceptable,” and it is also unacceptable that with less than 90 days until lowa we still do not have a real plan to win.”
“Diverse talent,” she continued, “is being squandered by indecision and a lack of leaders who will lead” and “morale has never been lower.”
And on and on.
Concluded the Times, “even to some Harris allies, her decline is more predictable than surprising. In one instance after another, Ms. Harris and her closest advisers made flawed decisions about which states to focus on, issues to emphasize and opponents to target, all the while refusing to make difficult personnel choices to impose order on an unwieldy campaign, according to more than 50 current and former campaign staff members and allies, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations and assessments involving the candidate.”
Who’s to blame?
“Many of her own advisers are now pointing a finger directly at Ms. Harris,” the Times reported. “In interviews several of them criticized her for going on the offensive against rivals, only to retreat, and for not firmly choosing a side in the party’s ideological feud between liberals and moderates.”
Nor is it helping that her sister, Maya Harris, is the campaign chairwoman. She “goes unchallenged,” unsurprisingly, and replacing manager Rodriguez would likely cause even more resignations. “It’s unclear,” the Times reported, “who’s in charge of the campaign.”
Bad Poll Numbers
All that might be the reason Harris collapsed in the polls after she leveled Biden in that second debate. She insinuated that Biden was a racist because he got along famously with such Southern stalwarts as Georgia’s Herman Talmadge and Mississippi’s James O. Eastland.
The officious if not imperious remonstration did not, contrary to media reports, get her close to Biden. One poll showed her closing to within 2 points of the consistent frontrunner, but the RCP national average still had Biden at 26 percent against Harris’ 15.2.
She’s done nothing but drop like a rock ever since. After reaching a high of 20-percent support in the Quinnipiac poll after the debate in late June, she had slipped back to single digits by August 1.
Her RCP average today? 3.8 percent.
Nor has the Harris campaign’s focus on winning Iowa done much good. Efforts there, where Pete Buttigieg leads the Democrat field, have yielded an RCP average of 3.3 percent. In New Hampshire, where voters go the polls on February 11, the news is no better: 2.7 percent.
Bottom line? Voters don’t support Harris, and it appears from the report in the Times that her campaign staff members don’t either.
Likelihood is, Harris will either abandon her quest when Buttigieg or another candidate leaves her in the dust in Iowa, or even before that as disarray in and defections from her campaign forces her to end it.
Photo of Sen. Kamala Harris: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a longtime contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
