By Ryan Bland News Reporter
Senator Kamala Harris was a rising member of the Democratic Party. Harris has a long history of public service: she has served as a District Attorney of San Francisco and Attorney General of California before being elected to the US Senate in 2016. Despite being a member of the minority party in the Senate, Harris garnered attention for her tough questioning of President Trump’s cabinet nominees and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings.
Because of Harris’s rise within the Democratic Party, there was talk of her running for the Democratic nomination for President. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2019, Harris announced that she was officially running for the nomination. She built a convincing case that, as a woman of color and a prosecutor, there was no one better to face Trump in the general election.
Harris’s campaign got off to a fast start. She was placed was placed in the top tier of candidates vying for the Democratic nomination and received endorsements from notable individuals. Her verbal attack on former Vice President Joe Biden on the issue of busing was a shining moment that caused her numbers in the polls to rise and her candidacy to look as strong as ever.
However, Harris began to fall from the limelight. Despite her experience as a prosecutor, she was never able to perform as well in subsequent debates as she had in the first debate, and she began to fall from the top tier of candidates down to the second tier. On December 3, Harris’s campaign came to a halt and she dropped out of the race due to the internal problems and financing issues that plagued the senator’s campaign.
Yet some less qualified candidates have remained in the race, despite a notable lack of support, namely billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg. Harris’s downfall was partially because of her lack of funding, while self-funding billionaires do not encounter this issue. According to PBS News Hour, Bloomberg will spend $150 million of his $54.7 billion fortune on his 2020 presidential run; meanwhile, Steyer has put $47.5 million into his campaign for the nomination.
Bloomberg and Steyer have drawn severe criticism from other candidates in the 2020 election because of their ability to finance their own campaigns. While most candidates have asked for donations and use their funds wisely, these candidates have seemingly bottomless pockets. On the TV talk show The View, Senator Amy Klobuchar said, “You just can’t simply allow wealthy people come in and buy elections,” in response to the billionaires’ candidacies.
In fact, these candidates remind Democrats more of Trump, who also is a billionaire, than of the values of their party. The Democratic Party must ask itself: are we willing to let a candidate with less political experience to outlast experienced, qualified candidates simply because they are billionaires?
Kamala Harris ran out of funds. Who knows who could be next; depending on how the political landscape shifts over the upcoming months, it could be Amy Klobuchar or Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or even Joe Biden, who is currently leading in the polls, that runs out of finances to continue his or her campaign. However, it is clear that Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg will not have that issue.
The Democrats must take a stance that does not reward self-funding so that billionaires cannot take control of the primary race and instead take a stance that creates a political system that favors policy and experience over fortune.