She seems almost universally touted as a 2020 candidate, and yet the only three things I ever hear about her are that she's a minority, she's young, and she's progressive. Seeing as there are plenty of other prospective young candidates and plenty of progressive candidates--most 2020 candidates could be called progressive--her only uniquely qualifying attribute seems to be the identity politics argument that she's black, Asian, and a woman, so she has the broadest appeal.
She doesn't have the national profile of Bernie or Warren; she doesn't have the experience of Cuomo or Gillibrand; she doesn't have the demographic appeal that dems might need after losing the Rust Belt of Brown or Franken, can someone explain what her appeal is as a candidate in a field with any of the likely competitors?
Edit: Changed title from "What is Kamala Harris' qualification to be president"
I’m confused about the nature of the question. Are you asking about what people here on this forum personally like about Kamala Harris, or about why people rate her highly on “most likely to win the nomination” lists? The former is about our own personal opinion of who should be president, while the latter is about what we think will happen with regular voters.
As for why she’s high on my list of people likely to win the nomination….
Well, I *don’t* rank as being as likely to be nominated as, say, Warren or Sanders or Gillibrand. But more likely than Brown and Franken? Yes, but that’s purely because of probability of running in the first place. Harris is on my top ten list of people most likely to run, whereas Brown and Franken aren’t.
At this early stage, there isn’t much to go on (since few are taking the O’Malley path of visiting an early primary state every other week), but Harris is speaking at the first 2020 “cattle call” next month (the CAP “Ideas Conference”), and she hired Hillary Clinton’s Iowa spokeswoman to be her communications director. That isn’t much, but it’s more of an indication of presidential ambition than we’ve gotten from Brown and Franken. Franken’s even given a Shermanesque denial of interest (though it’s too early to read that as the final word, and he’ll surely be asked about it again several times next month when his book comes out, so maybe we should revise predictions at that time).
But there are other candidates who’d also be in my “top ten most likely to run” list, like Cuomo and O’Malley, who I’d also rank as less likely to actually win the nomination than Harris. And yes, the main reason is that she’s black. Or rather, like Obama, she’s black and also (unlike, say, Al Sharpton) a conventional politician, who isn’t just running as the black identity politics candidate. The black vote is big in Democratic primaries, it often (but not always) block votes for one candidate, and black candidates always do at least somewhat better with black voters than they do with white voters. So I’ve got to take her seriously as a potential primary winner. No, that itself won’t be enough, but it gives her one advantage that merits putting her high on the list at a time when we don’t have much to go on.
