Sizing up the candidates vying for the US presidency

Two years after Hillary Clinton fell short in her bid to become America’s first woman president, four of the seven declared candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination of 2020 are now women, all confident that Donald Trump is there for the taking.

Some 57 per cent of Americans disapprove of the President’s performance. The prolonged government shutdown is exacerbating the public’s sense that the Trump administration — policy, ideology and Twitter wars aside — simply doesn’t have what it takes to run the country. The diversity of races, religions, genders and experiences in the field of Democrats now jostling to replace Trump is already history-making. All the signs are there for what some Democrats are predicting will be the primary of the “women and the woke”.

When Trump defeated Clinton in 2016, the initial Democrat response was to say the party needed to reconnect with the white working class, the Mid-Western voters who defected to the Republicans. Not any more. Now Democrats are looking for a candidate who can turn Trump’s rhetoric, notably on race and gender, back on the White House. A candidate who will provoke Trump into an act of self-annihilation. On Monday, Senator Kamala Harris of California announced her candidacy — joining her fellow Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, and the two longshot men in the race: Julian Castro, a former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, and housing secretary under President Obama, and Richard Ojeda, a military veteran from West Virginia.

This week, Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, added his name to the contest. Buttigieg is another longshot but a fascinating political prospect: a former Rhodes Scholar who served a tour in Afghanistan with the Navy Reserve, openly gay, a successful small-city mayor and the first millennial to run for president.

Harris has not polled especially well among Democrats nationwide so far but in betting markets she is a strong favourite to win the nomination. The discrepancy suggests she has a lot of untapped potential, which her own party is yet to recognise.

At 54, she bridges the gap between the 70-plus generation of Senator Bernie Sanders and former vice-president Joe Biden, both of whom are possible candidates again this year, and fortysomethings like Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Beto O’Rourke, the former Texan congressman who lit up the 2018 mid-term elections.

Harris’s personal story is compelling. Her parents are immigrants — her father came from Jamaica and became a professor of economics at Stanford University, while her mother came from India. Harris is often imprecisely described as African-American. Her parents divorced when she was five and she spent some of her teenage years living in Canada with her mother.

But it was California where she made her life and her professional mark, first as a lawyer then as district attorney in San Francisco and eventually as the state’s attorney general, and now Senator. While Harris has sought to portray herself as a liberal, reforming prosecutor and attorney general, she has come under blistering fire for her record.

In The New York Times last week, Lara Bazelon, a law professor at the University of San Francisco, excoriated Harris: “Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms Harris opposed them or stayed silent. Most troubling, Ms Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.”

Professor Bazelon’s long list of charges against Harris could seriously damage her with the Democrat Left. Republicans, meanwhile, will likely tear into her liberal stance on immigration. Her supporters, though, see her as Obama Part Two. She is a natural campaigner, with a strong line to younger voters through her social media presence, including more than a million followers on Instagram.

She has a cutting sense of humour. On a TV chat show last spring, she was asked if she had to be stuck in an elevator with President Trump, Vice-President Mike Pence or then attorney general Jeff Sessions, which would it be? Her response was: “Does one of us have to come out alive?” She is also tough, having come up via the hard world of San Francisco politics.