Kamala Harris Deserved Better. She Still Shouldn't Have Been the Democratic Nominee

The Diversity Alibi

You can criticize a religion without being bigoted.

You can criticize a Democratic candidate without being a secret conservative.

You can criticize a woman without it being about her gender.

You can criticize a Black candidate without it being about race.

I already held myself to that same standard on Israel in a piece I wrote last week. People from Israel and Palestine, as well as from both the American left and right, praised it and called it brave.

I don’t think it was brave. I think it was honest, objective, and long overdue.

Today, it’s someone closer to home.

The other examples are easy. They cost nothing.

Here’s the one that isn’t easy.

Can you criticize a specific candidate’s qualifications for the highest office in the country, if they underperformed in the largest elections of her career, without that criticism being read as an attack on diversity itself?

I think you can.

I think you have to be able to.

Otherwise, diversity stops meaning the best qualified people from everywhere and starts meaning there are certain people you’re simply not allowed to question.

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Okay back to why, Kamala Harris should not have been the nominee…

If you’re on the right, you probably assumed this already and are wondering what took me so long.

If you’re still holding onto 2024 with both hands, this is going to sting… read the whole post anyway.

If you walked away as a swing voter and never came back, you already felt this.

You just didn’t have the receipts yet.

The Rule We Already Agree On

Let’s be clear about what this isn’t.

A room with more women in it fixes a lot of what a testosterone-driven one breaks. Making sure the best and brightest people of color get a real path into leadership isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s overdue.

None of that is the question today. The question is narrower: does the resume of Kamala Harris meet that bar? Not “should a woman have this job.” Not “should a person of color have this job.” Whether this specific person’s record supports the job she was given.

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The Record

Start with the resume, not the rhetoric.

2010: Harris runs for California Attorney General and wins by 0.8 points in a state that hadn’t elected a Republican governor in eight years. It was close enough that her opponent led on election night and didn’t concede for three weeks.

Her Senate race two years later, in fairness, wasn’t like that. In 2016 she won a genuine landslide, 61.6% to 38.4%, in the first Senate race in California history where no Republican even made the general election ballot. It’s also not evidence of anything: a fellow Democrat, a state where Republicans couldn’t field one. Set it aside.

2020: Harris launches a presidential campaign with 20,000 people at a rally in Oakland, one of the biggest openings in the field. Within seven months she’s polling in the single digits. By December, before a single vote has been cast in Iowa, she drops out. This is the race that tells you the most, because the outcome wasn’t about which letter was next to her name. It was Democratic primary voters, given every chance, choosing not to.

2024: after Joe Biden’s exit from the race, Harris runs and loses both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

Three elections. A one-point squeaker, a primary collapse before the first ballot was cast, and a general election loss.

That is the record being described, by her own party, as her having “earned” the nomination.

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The Committee Seat

Here’s a detail people don’t talk about enough.

In January 2018, just under a year into her Senate term, Harris was added to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The reason there was an opening is worth sitting with: Al Franken had just resigned over multiple sexual misconduct allegations, and Harris was one of the Democrats who publicly called for him to go.

A freshman senator, barely a year in, gets handed a seat on the Senate’s most powerful oversight committee, and gets it, I’d argue, because the party needed to be seen replacing a man accused of harassing women with a woman. It’s a good look. It’s also, if you say it out loud, a promotion that had nothing to do with anything she’d actually done on the committee, because she wasn’t on it yet.

Getting rid of a predator and handing his seat to a woman is a genuinely good instinct. But if you’re a leader with any self-respect, the last thing you want is a job you didn’t earn, sitting in a room where everyone can do the math on how you got there.

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The Excuses

None of this happens by accident. It happens because there’s a permission structure that makes it feel wrong to say out loud. Let’s go through the excuses.

“She earned it.” Walk through the record above again. That’s not a record that earns a promotion. It’s a record that, for anyone without her specific biography, ends a career.

“You’re saying this because she’s a woman, or because she’s not white.” No. I’m saying it because the record says it. If a white man had this exact resume and became the nominee anyway without a competitive primary, I would write this same piece about him. The problem was never her existing. The problem is a party that decided her existing was reason enough.

“Someone had to check the box, and that’s fine.” This one deserves an honest answer, because it’s the only excuse that isn’t dishonest to begin with. And the answer is: no, it’s not fine, not because representation doesn’t matter, but because “checking a box” is a description of tokenism, and tokenism is an insult dressed up as an honor. It tells the person in the seat, and everyone watching, that the seat was never really about them. It was about what they could be pointed at to prove.

“The DNC didn’t have another option.” This is the excuse doing the most work right now. After the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, and Biden’s debate collapse before it, the party had weeks before the convention. Within days, the conversation shifted from “who went wrong” to “there isn’t time to run anyone else.” Some of that was real, but not for the reason people think: the roughly $91 million war chest was registered with the FEC jointly under Biden’s and Harris’s names, meaning she was the only Democrat who could inherit it without a legal fight and a month’s delay. Not a conspiracy, just how the paperwork was filed. It also meant nobody had to convince the party she was the best option. The filing dramatically narrowed the party’s practical options before delegates ever voted. A party that can build an entire primary calendar around 115 days, when comparable democracies do it in sixty or ninety, is not a party that ran out of time. It’s a party that ran out of will.

The mechanics prove it better than any argument could. Qualifying to challenge her required 300 delegate signatures, no more than 50 from any single state, filed within days of Biden’s exit. Not one Democrat tried. Not a swing-state governor, not a senator, nobody. The bar wasn’t impossibly high. It just wasn’t worth being the person who split the party’s one approved story.

The Test

Here’s the test. Same one I’d run on anyone, either party.

Name one policy Harris is actually known for. Not a portfolio she was handed. Not a committee she sat on. One thing voters could point to and say, that’s hers, that’s what she built. Her signature assignment as Vice President was the “root causes” strategy, diplomatic outreach to the Northern Triangle, not border security itself. Even the nonpartisan fact-checkers who corrected the record on that point noted the same thing: it’s hard to say what the assignment actually achieved. That’s not me being unfair to her. That’s the fact-check being unkind to her record. What I still don’t know is why the people defending her right now can’t name a single thing she built, and would rather question the motives of the person asking than answer the question itself.

Leadership has never been the safe answer.

That’s been the party’s own line for a hundred years, every time Republicans painted dissent as disloyalty: questioning your own side is the most patriotic thing you can do, not the least. If that’s still true, this isn’t complicated. It was never fair to Harris to run her this way, not because she’s unqualified, her own record makes that case without my help, but because dressing up an installation as a movement, and calling anyone who notices a bigot, isn’t feminism. It’s a magic trick, and the party is betting you won’t look at the hands.

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The Rerun

This would just be history if the mechanism had been retired. It hasn’t been.

On July 24, 2026, the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee voted on which state goes first in the 2028 primary calendar. South Carolina won it, 26 votes to Nevada’s 19 and New Hampshire’s 4, a recommendation that still needs full DNC approval in August. Multiple outlets covering the vote flagged the same thing out loud: this hands a built-in advantage to Kamala Harris specifically, should she run again.

South Carolina isn’t a swing state. What it has is Jim Clyburn, 86 years old, whose endorsement is credited with turning Biden’s 2020 campaign around almost overnight and clearing the rest of that field within 48 hours. Clyburn is also the man reported to have pushed Biden toward picking Harris as his running mate in 2020, and toward anointing her without a primary in 2024.

Andrew Yang, who ran against Harris in that 2020 primary and watched her drop out before a single vote was counted, called this exactly what it looks like days after the vote: Harris is already telling people in California she’s running again, and South Carolina going first hands Clyburn the same leverage a year before anyone else has even entered the race. His read on the party’s pattern was blunt: it doesn’t learn, it protects the choice it already made and runs it back.

Either she doesn’t run, or she runs and loses anyway. The one outcome I don’t see anywhere on the board is a real, contested primary that she wins on the merits.

So here’s the prediction, and I’d genuinely like to be wrong about it. Either she doesn’t run, because even the machine can see that asking voters to forgive a squeaker, a collapse, and a loss a third time is further than this permission structure can stretch. Or she runs, gets handed the same insider-favored path one more time, and loses anyway, to a primary field that finally shows up, or to a Republican who only has to point at the receipts. The one outcome I don’t see anywhere on the board: a real, contested primary that she wins on the merits. Democratic voters already had that option once. They said no before Iowa even opened.

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The Diversity Alibi

The DNC didn’t fail Kamala Harris by running her. It failed her by never once trusting her to win on the merits, then handing her a spot so no one would ever have to find out if she could have.

That’s not a compliment to her, and it won’t be a compliment to whatever the party tells you in 2028 about why she can or can’t run. The excuse will sound different. The mechanism described above won’t be.

If your favorite candidate’s biggest supporters can tell you everything she represented and nothing she actually did, that’s not a coincidence. That’s the alibi working exactly as designed.

And the next time a party hands you a name and calls objecting to it bigotry, ask yourself who benefits more from your staying quiet: the candidate, or the people who never wanted you looking too closely at how she got there in the first place.

None of this is an argument against running a woman, or a person of color, for president. It’s an argument against running this one, this way, again. There’s a real difference between a party finally ready to nominate someone who happens to be a woman, and a party choosing a woman specifically because she’s willing to take a losing hand and smile for the cameras anyway. The first is progress. The second just means the party found one more person willing to be used.

This is a democracy. The voters’ will doesn’t check anyone’s feelings before it renders a verdict, and it’s already rendered this one twice, once in a primary, once in a general. If the party runs her a third time anyway, that isn’t a message about her. It’s a message about who the party actually answers to: not the people who vote, but the people who fund it, plus a candidate willing enough to go along with it that she’ll take the nomination knowing three things everyone in the room already knows. She’s not the strongest option. She’s not the most electable option. And she cannot win.

She deserves better than being the answer to a question the party was too afraid to ask honestly. So do the rest of us.

If this made you uncomfortable, good. I did my job. Yeah don't forget to subscribe and respect the post. Share it with some of the vehemently disagrees. Having the uncomfortable conversations is how we take back our democracy!

🎤 💧 - R❌ AN SMITH