Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) announced on Tuesday that she is suspending her presidential campaign.
“I’ve taken stock and looked at this from every angle, and over the last few days have come to one of the hardest decisions of my life,” Harris wrote on Medium. “My campaign for presidency simply doesn’t have the financial resources we need to continue.”
“I’m not a billionaire. I can’t fund my own campaign,” continues Harris. “As the campaign has gone, it’s become harder and harder to raise the money we need to compete.”
Before the announcement, Harris had pulled out of a high-profile donor event early Tuesday morning, according to CNBC. Shortly after, she began informing her campaign staff that she would be withdrawing from the race for financial reasons, according to NPR.
The decision to withdraw from the race comes amidst reports of poor leadership and discipline at the Harris campaign. As Politico reported last month, the power dynamic between two senior staffers — Juan Rodridguez, the campaign manager, and Maya Harris, the campaign chairwoman and younger sister to Kamala Harris — was especially problematic.
The turmoil resulted in Kelly Mehlenbacher, the Iowa operations director for Harris, opting to resign shortly after the campaign decided to focus all of its efforts on Iowa, as The Daily Wire previously reported.
Although Harris implies in her announcement that she may have been a more viable candidate with more financial support, many people first noticed that Harris was a flawed candidate after she failed to adequately respond to attacks on her record by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) at the July presidential debate, despite having prepared for the topic to arise, according to The New York Times.
As The Daily Wire previously reported, Gabbard took a sledgehammer to Harris:
GABBARD: But I’m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.
She blocked evidence — she blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California.
The exchange helped make Gabbard the most-searched candidate of the night on Google. After the debate, Harris fired back at Gabbard by calling herself a “top-tier candidate.”
“This is going to sound immodest, but I’m obviously a top-tier candidate, and so I did expect that I would be on the stage and take hits tonight because there are a lot of people that are trying to make the stage for the next debate,” Gabbard told CNN’s Anderson Cooper after the debate, according to The Hill. “Especially when people are at zero or 1 percent or whatever she might be at, and so I did expect that I might take hits tonight.”
The next Democratic debate will be held in Los Angeles in mid-December, and will thus far feature six candidates: Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Tom Steyer, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, according to Politico. The news agency also notes that Gabbard and Andrew Yang are on the “precipice” of making it, and both only require one additional qualifying poll.