Is Kamala Harris a bad candidate?

What we know -- and what went wrong.

The biggest unknown in the now very-likely race between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is what sort of candidate she will be — and what quality of campaign she will run.

Luckily for us, we have some recent data/evidence to draw on: Harris’ 2020 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

While not definitive — things change in four years! — it does provide us with a window into how she is likely to run over the next four months. And, candidly, if past is prologue, Democrats need to slow their roll on touting her as the Trump antidote.

Things actually started well for Harris as a presidential candidate. In the first six months of 2019, she was consistently running 2nd or 3rd — behind only then VP Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

At the end of June 2019, the candidates debated. There were so many that they had to split into two nights. Harris was part of the second night with the rest of the top tier in the race (including Biden). And she was, without question, the standout star.

Writing for CNN, I named her the big winner of the night:

The California Senator gave the strongest performance not just of Thursday night’s debate but of either nights’ debate. She was calm, poised, knowledgeable and, yes, presidential. She had the biggest moment of the night when she cut through a series of shouting voices to insist that the American public wanted to hear how the candidates were going to put food on their table, not witness a food fight. She clearly had that line ready going into the debate but that doesn’t change the fact that she delivered it at the perfect time and without missing a beat. Her deeply personal recollection of her own experiences with race in California – and her scolding of Joe Biden for his support of anti-busing legislation was hugely powerful.

Here’s that moment:

Harris seemed to be off to the races. Post-debate polling showed her challenging Biden for the lead. Everything seemed to be lining up for her.

And then, well, not much. Five months later, she was out of the race — dropping in December 2019 before a single vote had been cast.

This polling chart, via 538, shows that Harris went downhill steadily following a brief bump in the first debate.

“I've taken stock, and I've looked at this from every angle, and over the last few days, I have come to one of the hardest decisions of my life," Harris said in announcing her decision to drop out. “As the campaign has gone on, it has become harder and harder to raise the money we need to compete.”

So, what happened in between her star turn at the first debate and the end? As always in campaigns, it’s never one thing. But, there were a few obvious issues.

1. The Policy: Harris’ campaign was always built more around personality than policy — in direct contrast to, say, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who ran a policy-first (and policy only) campaign. That got Harris into trouble once she came under the heavier scrutiny that accompanies rising poll numbers. The biggest issue was that she couldn’t seem to get out of her own way on healthcare. At first Harris said she favored eliminating private health insurance entirely. But then she rolled out a plan that included private health companies in it. Which, huh?

2. The Staff: Harris kept a very tight inner circle with her sister, Maya, playing a key role. Whispers of staff unrest were present even when she was flying high in the polls but once things started to go south the campaign seemed in open revolt against itself. “This is my third presidential campaign and I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly,” a senior aide wrote in a public resignation letter obtained by the New York Times. The dysfunction was largely blamed on Maya Harris, who served as the campaign chair and who, obviously, couldn’t be fired or demoted. But I tend to think that’s a cop-out. Kamala Harris put her sister in that position. She is the buck-stopper.

3. The Strategy: This goes hand in hand with the staff issues but one of the consistent problems with Harris’ campaign was that no one seemed to be to know exactly what it should be and where she should compete hardest. Was she an Obama-like inspirational figure and ceiling breaker? Or was she the tough-on-crime prosecutor? A liberal? A moderate? Somewhere in between? And where would she lay her marker down as a must-win state? Iowa? New Hampshire? Somewhere else? The Times, in a post-mortem on the campaign, nicely summed up the lack of a theory of the case:

   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

4. The Candidate: Harris has real natural ability as a candidate — as shown by her performance in the first Democratic debate back in 2019. But she was an uneven candidate, at best. Her highs were high, sure. But her lows were very low. And, as her campaign started to struggle as summer turned to fall, Harris grew more and more insular and more and more defensive about the campaign she was running. While I don’t think she was as bad a candidate as the after-action reports suggest, she was clearly not consistent enough on the campaign trail to sustain success.

Now, as I said above, that was four years ago. Stuff changes! (Four years ago I was working for CNN and thinking I would be there my entire professional life!)

But, questions will linger about that 2020 campaign unless and until Harris shows she has learned from her mistakes and worked on her weaknesses.

The next month will be a critical testing ground. None of this is easy. But the best candidates are able to honestly analyze what went wrong and make sure they don’t make the same mistake twice.