Will it end differently this time?

Harris must now overcome the issues that hobbled her last presidential bid

- ALLAN WOODS

Kamala Harris has been handed the torch by Joe Biden and all-but anointed by the Democratic Party to run in November’s presidential election to prevent Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

But what if those who have lined up behind the vice-president have put too much faith in their leading candidate?

Harris struggled, after all, to even rise to the top of the Democratic field in 2019, when she sought the party’s presidential nomination, bailing out of the race when donors bailed on her candidacy.

Has anything changed in the ensuing years that make her better suited to take on the political juggernaut of Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement?

Back in January 2019 — much like now — Harris was touted as one of the party’s great hopes for the future. She was a first-term U.S. senator from California, the state’s former attorney general and a San Francisco district attorney before that.

Politico reported at the time on a poll taken days after her 2019 campaign launch putting her in third place behind Biden, the veteran former vice-president, and the hardleft Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Harris also performed well in the first debate among Democratic candidates, with a July 2019 survey recording a sharp increase in support that placed her solidly in the top tier of candidates.

But then she started to stumble, and her support fell.

There will now be frantic efforts in both Democratic and Republican camps to identify the underlying weaknesses of Harris’s first run at the presidency and either neutralize them or exploit them for political gain.

There has been some analysis into the reasons for her campaign’s crash, which led her to pull out of the race in December, after 11 months.

The New York Times published a devastating article in late November 2019 that revealed Harris’s campaign as poorly organized, unfocused, short of money and losing staff.