Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris Says She Is Running for President in 2020By Reid J. Epstein and Ken Thomas
Updated Jan. 21, 2019
WASHINGTON—California Sen. Kamala Harris said Monday she will seek the Democratic nomination for president, launching a campaign to become the nation’s first woman and second African-American to win the White House.
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Ms. Harris, who served as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general before being elected to the Senate in 2016, made her announcement in a Martin Luther King Jr. Day interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and in a video distributed to supporters.
“I am running for president of the United States and I’m very excited about it,” Ms. Harris said. “I love my country and this is a moment in time where I feel a sense of responsibility to fight for who we are.”
The 54-year-old will highlight her career as a prosecutor with the campaign slogan “For the People.” She joins a Democratic field that includes two of her Senate colleagues, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, along with former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro and former Maryland Rep. John Delaney.
The field could grow in the coming weeks with the potential entries of Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Cory Booker of New Jersey, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, former Vice President Joe Biden and others.
Speaking Monday at Washington’s Howard University, where she received an undergraduate degree, Ms. Harris said she was prepared to fight.
“Right now we have an administration that has waged a full-on assault against American institutions and American ideals,” she said. “It is going to be about speaking truth, especially when there is so much that is contrary to truth. It is going to be about regaining the trust of Americans.”
Michael Ahrens, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said the senator was “arguably the least vetted Democrat running for president,” called her unqualified and out-of-touch and said she had produced a “radically liberal voting record” during her two years in the Senate.
Ms. Harris touted her career as a prosecutor and said that as president she would aim to “keep people safe.” Yet during her announcement interview she faced questions about whether her résumé reflects a candidate more aligned with law enforcement than with minority communities.
Ms. Harris said the nation’s law-enforcement and criminal-justice systems have included “systemic racism” that she will work to change.
“It is a false choice to suggest that communities don’t want law enforcement,” she said. “Most communities do. They don’t want excessive force, they don’t want racial profiling, but nobody should.”
Asked during the news conference if she regretted any of her decisions as a prosecutor, Ms. Harris cited cases in which her office wasn’t able to charge alleged child molesters due to lack of evidence, and instances in which deputy prosecutors hadn’t consulted her on decisions, though she added that she took full responsibility for those matters.
“But I will also say that there is a lot about what I did as a prosecutor that I’m proud of, including a recognition that there are fundamental flaws in the criminal justice system and that this criminal justice system needs to be reformed,” she said.
The Harris campaign plans to rely on her status as the potential first black woman president. African-American voters carry enormous clout in Democratic presidential primaries, having boosted Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to the last two contested nominations. Her aides also see California’s moving its primary from the end of the nominating calendar to near the beginning as a boon for her candidacy.
Aides noted that her campaign’s colors—red and yellow—are borrowed from the 1972 campaign of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to seek the presidency.
Ms. Harris’s first public event as a presidential candidate is scheduled for Friday in South Carolina, where she will address a gala held by her college sorority. She plans to travel to Iowa next week.
Ms. Harris’s campaign platform includes a monthly tax credit of as much as $500 for families earning less than $100,000 a year, reducing maternal mortality rates and bail overhauls to reduce the federal prison population. She has been a staunch opponent of the Trump administration’s immigration policy and was in June the first senator to call for the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen after the DHS began separating migrant children from their families at the border.
Ms. Harris telegraphed her presidential ambitions as soon as she arrived in Washington. She hired top staffers from the Hillary Clinton campaign to work in her Senate office and became one of the party’s most active figures on social media.
In her two years in Washington, Ms. Harris has established a reputation within the party as a hard-nosed interrogator from her perch as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, including her questioning last year of Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing to become a Supreme Court justice.
Ms. Harris recently completed an abbreviated tour for her autobiography, “The Truths We Hold.” The book includes a passage about her work as attorney general in negotiating a multibillion-dollar settlement with five major banks for their role in the foreclosure crisis after the economic downturn a decade ago.
Ms. Harris begins her presidential campaign at a financial disadvantage to Senate colleagues already in the race. Her latest campaign-finance report, which covers a period ending Sept. 30, showed her with $1.7 million in cash on hand. Ms. Gillibrand and Ms. Warren each had more than $10 million in their latest reports.
The daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother, Ms. Harris was born in Oakland and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area but spent her teenage years in Montreal after her parents’ divorce.
She was elected San Francisco district attorney in 2003 and California attorney general in 2010 before winning her Senate race in 2016 following the retirement of former Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer.
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