What Kamala Harris' failed Iowa Caucus campaign tells us about her 2024 presidential run

DES MOINES - In November 2019, then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris marched in time with a drum line surrounded by eager supporters, all smiles and laughter, as she prepared to deliver a speech to thousands of Iowa Democrats at a major party fundraiser in Iowa's capital city.

The buoyant scene belied the turmoil that roiled her presidential campaign, ultimately forcing her to abruptly exit the Democratic primary race just weeks later.

Now, five years later, Harris is poised to accept the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nomination amid a new wave of enthusiasm and energy after President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid and endorsed her candidacy.

Just as they were in 2019, Democrats are again desperate to defeat Republican Donald Trump.

But this time, Harris enters the race with a massive war chest, an experienced campaign operation and a one-on-one race where she can easily present a sharp contrast with the Republican nominee.

Democrats and political scientists who observed and worked on Harris’ failed Iowa Caucus campaign in 2019 said she faces an vastly different political landscape in 2024, free from many of the pitfalls that plagued her previous run.

But Republicans remain convinced of Harris’ fallibility, spending the earliest days of her campaign painting her as a far-left California liberal who has failed as vice president to adequately address the influx of illegal immigration at the southern border.

Harris "is the most incompetent and far-left vice president in history," Trump told supporters at a North Carolina rally.

Can this time be different for Kamala Harris as she seeks the White House?

In Iowa, Kamala Harris was sometimes cautious, equivocating

Several Iowans who watched Harris campaign in the state during her 2020 bid said she was too cautious and unwilling to commit to a position, often prompting her to equivocate on key issues.

“She’s careful in what she wants to say, and I think sometimes avoids direct responses with her positions,” said Rachel Paine Caufield, who co-chairs Drake University’s political science department. “As she’s kind of clarifying where she wants to land on some of these issues, there can be some points in her give and take with voters that appear vague or unanswered.”

Paine Caufield said she attended a visit Harris made to Drake in 2023 to talk about abortion rights and thought she performed better. But, she noted, it was an event where Harris didn’t take questions from the audience.

“I can’t say definitively that she’s outgrown it or evolved to be more confident in her own positions,” she said. “But on the issues that she is passionate about, I think she’s very clear and direct and seems to genuinely enjoy the ability to articulate a position.”

State Rep. Sean Bagniewski, D-Des Moines, who chaired the Polk County Democrats during the 2020 caucus cycle and saw all the candidates up close, said Harris began as a more guarded campaigner.

“Before, you could watch her in a room and saying things to make sure that even if 80 or 90% of people understood and agreed with you, you didn’t want to say one thing that 1% might not agree with on Twitter or on social media or someplace else,” he said.

“She doesn’t have that same caution anymore. She’s speaking more broadly. She’s speaking more confidently. She’s speaking like the leader that she is.”

Deidre DeJear, who served as Harris’ Iowa campaign chair in 2019, said the campaign spent a lot of time figuring out how to translate Harris’ biography into a successful run for president. Now, DeJear said she’s noticed Harris has grown more comfortable in her role as vice president.

“We always knew she was a public servant, but now she’s kind of, as the kids say, she’s got her swag,” DeJear said. “She knows beyond a shadow of a doubt what her role is.”

Iowans say they saw and appreciate Harris' warmth, genuineness

Still, Harris’ supporters say she brought an empathy, warmth and genuine ability to connect with people individually to her 2019 campaign that will continue to serve her well in 2024.

Sue Dvorsky, a former chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, said that’s what prompted her and her husband, former state Sen. Bob Dvorsky, to endorse Harris in 2019.

“What drew us to her is she is genuinely joyful,” she said. “She is genuinely, deeply human and responsive. She’s as much fun as she looks like.”

DeJear said she first met Harris in 2018, when DeJear was running in a competitive primary for secretary of state.

DeJear traveled to California to attend a philanthropic event with Harris and asked for 10 or 15 minutes of her time. They ended up speaking for 45 minutes, but Harris didn’t start by asking about DeJear’s campaign.

When DeJear got ready to pull out her iPad and give a presentation on why Harris should get involved in her race, “she politely just touched my hand to motion that I did not need to go through that with her.”

“She asked me how I was doing,” DeJear said. “And that was my most genuine connection towards her.”

Since then, DeJear said, she’s seen Harris show that same concern in private for constituents and staff.

“That goes the distance when we’re asking someone to be president of the United States,” she said.

More: Democrats' VP chatter turns to swing state governors. Which could turn their state blue?

Harris inherits Biden’s campaign infrastructure, cash

By the fall of 2019, Harris’ poll numbers had plummeted to the low single digits, casting her out of the top tier of candidates. And her campaign was facing dire circumstances as it laid off staff and slashed spending, with internal debates often spilling over into public media reports.

Harris refocused her dwindling resources and intensity on the Hawkeye State, telling a colleague she was “(expletive) moving to Iowa” in her bid to reenergize the flagging effort.

Postmortems of her campaign directed some of the blame on Harris’ internal operation, viewed as lacking solid leadership and a firm strategy.

“It is unacceptable that with less than 90 days until Iowa we still do not have a real plan to win,” one staffer wrote in a resignation letter that became public.

This time around, Harris is not tasked with building out a campaign from scratch, but rather will inherit Biden’s formidable presidential campaign infrastructure.

“Not only is she starting with pros that have won before, she’s starting with all that money too,” said Iowa Democratic strategist Pete D’Alessandro, who helped lead U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. “And, to her credit, they built on it right away.”

Harris has already said she’ll keep Biden campaign officials Jen O’Malley Dillon as campaign chair and Julie Chavez Rodriguez as campaign manager, and most senior staff is expected to stay as well, CNN reported.

According to a memo issued by O’Malley Dillon, Harris will inherit more than 250 campaign offices across the country, staffed by more than 1,300 people in battleground states.

The campaign also reported raising $126 million in the three days after Biden exited the race. That includes $81 million in the first 24 hours, which the campaign touted as the largest one-day fundraising haul for any candidate ever.

Paine Caufield said Harris ramped up her Iowa staffing in the summer of 2019, which quickly began to cost her money as salary bills mounted.

“I think that was one of her big weaknesses in Iowa, was she was spending a lot of money, burning through money without a really well-honed campaign strategy behind her and her campaign,” Paine Caufield said. “And now she has this super professionalized campaign staff that can help her navigate.”

Bagniewski said it will benefit Harris to have not just Biden’s campaign organization, but his full-throated endorsement.

“There’s a value in having your own campaign team that grew up with you and that you put together yourself,” he said. “But, frankly, with a hundred and however many days it is left, there’s not enough time to build your own operation. So the best thing is to augment what you have.”

D’Alessandro said Harris’ team also seems to have become more disciplined about staying on message and keeping any infighting from leaking to the media, as was endemic during her caucus run, when reports of internal campaign squabbles ratcheted up through the fall.

“A lot of times, especially as an operative, when you're reading about the infighting, the bigger problem is that (the media) got the story,” D’Alessandro said, calling it a “distraction” for the campaign.

“It doesn't seem to be a problem (now),” he said. “Matter of fact, if anything, the discipline of the last month, when pretty much it seemed like everybody in the world knew what was happening and you didn't hear a peep out of the vice president's team — that's actually pretty impressive.”

You think Kamala Harris fell out of a coconut tree? This is not the same context as 2019

D’Alessandro said that even if Harris is exactly the same person and politician that she was in 2019, the context of today’s presidential campaign puts everything about her into a totally different perspective for voters.

“Sometimes, it's just matchups,” he said. “She's not running against Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden. She's not running against those folks this time. It's Trump, possibly Kennedy, and her.”

Dvorsky said Harris struggled to break out of an “astonishing array” of candidates in 2019.

“That was a rock 'em, sock 'em field,” Dvorsky said. “And there were a lot of them. And I think she just didn’t get out in time. She didn’t get a message out in time that combined her vision with her biography.”

D’Alessandro said many Democrats like him, who preferred a more progressive candidate in a primary campaign, are still eager to rally around Harris now.

“She's closer to what we believe than Donald Trump is,” he said. “And that makes all the difference in the world in a binary choice.”

More: From coconut trees to 'brat summer,' Kamala Harris' campaign is embracing the memes

The race is also no longer about intraparty discussions on issues such as “Medicare for all” and the Green New Deal that focused on nuanced policy differences between nearly two-dozen contenders. In a race between Harris and Trump, the candidates’ differences on the issues are clearer cut.

Polling shows the top issues for voters this year look to be immigration, the economy and abortion.

“If the election becomes about the economy and the border, it's already baked into the cake,” D’Alessandro said. “People have their views. Those views haven't moved in a year, two years. And the Democrats will be in trouble.”

But he said Harris is a much better ambassador on the issue of abortion, and she’s far more capable of talking about the future of the country.

“If those become what people are thinking about when they go into vote, those swing voters — then there's a victory in November,” he said.

More: Where Harris stands on Israel, abortion, climate change, education and the economy

Kamala Harris’ role as prosecutor may play better after Donald Trump’s felony convictions

Harris has already signaled that in this race, she’ll lean into her background as a prosecutor.

“I took on perpetrators of all kinds — predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said this last week while campaigning. “So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump's type.”

It’s a message that didn’t always resonate with Democratic primary voters in 2020, as the party’s left wing urged candidates to embrace criminal justice reforms.

This year, running against Trump, who has been convicted on 34 felony charges and faces multiple criminal cases, the message will likely resonate differently, Democrats said.

“Her biggest strength is that she’s a prosecutor,” Bagniewski said.

Paine Caufield said Harris’ background as a prosecutor will serve her “exceptionally well” this year.

“I think she stumbled a little bit in Iowa when the events of the day and the opinions of young progressive Democrats leaned against her prosecutorial experience, and I think she didn’t quite know how to navigate that,” she said. “I think she has a much stronger ability to navigate that in the current environment.”

More: Prosecutor vs. convicted felon: How Democrats believe Harris’ background changes the election

'We can win’ mentality can dramatically change a campaign

D’Alessandro said one of the biggest advantages of Harris’ current campaign is the hope and optimism that are buzzing through Democratic circles.

“There is such a difference on a campaign every day, day to day, with all those other things being equal, when you're looking at it and saying, ‘We can win this thing. We can win,’” he said. “The energy that alone brings changes the entire effect of a campaign.”

He suspects the opposite was true for Harris in the fall of 2019, when she was battling sagging poll numbers, tumbling fundraising and staff cuts.

“It wasn't, ‘We can win.’ It was, I'm guessing, ‘Hey, we can survive Iowa,’” D’Alessandro said. “And that's a tough thing to do in a campaign. And let me tell you, there ain't gonna be a poll between now and November that says she can't win. And that's going to keep the campaign here and everywhere else really energized on a day-to-day basis.”

He said having Harris at the top of the ticket changes the game for Democrats.

Iowa’s delegation to the Democratic National Convention unanimously endorsed Harris as the party’s new nominee for president. Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart said the state party has seen “a substantial number of people” reach out to volunteer.

Nationally, the campaign said it has added more than 100,000 volunteers to its rolls since Biden endorsed Harris, a sign of new enthusiasm, officials said.

“We've got that guy on base in the ninth, and you have the ability to hit the walk-off,” D’Alessandro said. “It’s back.”

Brianne Pfannenstiel is the chief politics reporter for the Des Moines Register. She is also covering the 2024 presidential race for USA TODAY as a senior national campaign correspondent. Reach her at [email protected] or 515-284-8244. Follow her on Twitter at @brianneDMR.

Stephen Gruber-Miller covers the Iowa Statehouse and politics for the Register. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or by phone at 515-284-8169. Follow him on Twitter at @sgrubermiller.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Harris' 2020 Iowa Caucus campaign failed. What's different this time.