The Democrats' leftward lurch doomed Kamala Harris

A bitter irony underlies Kamala Harris’ exit from the presidential campaign. She lost, in part, because she couldn’t forthrightly defend her record as a prosecutor. She couldn’t forthrightly defend that record because party activists deemed it insufficiently progressive. They portrayed her as complicit in the unjust incarceration and killing of black and Latino men.

Yet had Harris—especially as a black woman—been the crusading criminal-justice reformer that Democrats now want to see, she would likely never have been in a position to run for president in the first place. What doomed Harris wasn’t just the Democratic Party’s leftward shift on racial and criminal-justice issues. It was the party’s lack of sympathy for the very different political environment Harris faced just a few years ago, when women and black candidates faced intense pressure to show that they were tough on crime.

This is among the strangest twists of the 2020 presidential campaign. For good reason, Democrats have grown less tolerant of racism in the criminal justice system. Yet that very intolerance—combined with insufficient recognition of the particular burdens that black women candidates face—has helped push the only black woman running for president from the race.