On Thursday, speaking in Reno, Nevada, Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) confidently asked a crowd if America was ready for her campaign. But the answer some of the crowd gave her wasn’t quite what she expected.
Some members in the audience shouted, “No!”
Harris prompted the response after saying, “I’m at the stage of the campaign where I’m kinda like, you know, ‘I’m just gonna engage in real talk; I don’t want to waste your time with anything else. Let’s just have some real talk. So, real talk. In this election, in this election, in the last couple, I mean couple of months, certainly few weeks there’s this whole conversation that has been coming up about electability focused on our campaign. Is America ready for that?”
After the unexpected answer, Harris argued, “Well, yes they are.”
Kamala Harris asks crowd if America is ready for her presidency.
Crowd shouts: "No!"pic.twitter.com/SZrqlq7fQN
— Michael Ahrens (@michael_ahrens) October 3, 2019
Harris has been having trouble jump-starting her campaign ever since Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) attacked her at the second Democratic presidential debate at the end of July, sending Harris plunging in the polls immediately afterward. At that debate on July 31, Gabbard turned to Harris and said:
I want to bring the conversation back to the broken criminal justice system that is disproportionately negatively impacting black and brown people all across this country today. Now Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president.
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 Nation reported on August 20:
While Harris experienced a major polling bump following her break-out first debate, during which she confronted former Vice President Joe Biden on busing, she’s been slipping ever since the second debate in July. In the latest poll from CNN and SSRS released on Tuesday, she’s down to 5 percent support, a 12-point drop from a post-debate June poll that had her at 17 percent support.
Harris has had a couple of problematic incidents since that debate; in mid-August an elderly woman living in a nursing home blasted Harris during a campaign stop at the Bickford Senior Living Center in Muscatine, Iowa. The woman asked, “Can I ask you a question? I understand that you are advocating health care for everyone.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Harris responded. The woman asked, “Who’s going to pay for it?” Harris answered, “Well, we’re going to pay for it. Because right now, let me tell you something, we’re all paying for health care for everyone–”
The woman countered, “No, we’re not. No, we’re not … Leave our health care system alone. We don’t want you to mess with it.”
In early September, during an outdoor town hall in Londonderry, New Hampshire, a man asked 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) about what she plans to do in order “to diminish the mentally retarded actions” of President Trump.
As the audience cheered and applauded, Harris laughed and replied: “Well said. Well said. I plan to win this election, I’ll tell you that.”
Harris later apologized.
To make matters worse for Harris, in late September, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who had had a relationship with Harris in the past, criticized Harris and her presidential campaign for ignoring her home state of California in favor of campaigning in early primary states. He stated, “It is a difficult task for her because she has not concentrated at all on California. Whoever is managing her campaign, in my opinion, will not do it the way that it should have been done.”