Kamala Harris Enters of 2020 in Presidential Race

Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California joined the 2020 presidential competition Monday, thrusting a girl of immigrants from Jamaica and India to the Democratic race two decades later she arrived at the Senate.

Harris is planning to base her presidential campaign in Baltimore, with another office in Oakland, Calif. . It’ll be directed by Juan Rodriguez, who was the director of her 2016 Senate campaign and was also a senior advisor to California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s effort.

Kamala Harris Enters of 2020 in Presidential Race

In addition, Ms. Harris will maintain her initial campaign event on Friday in South Carolina, where black voters would be the dominant force in the Democratic primary, rather than start off by visiting Iowa and New Hampshire, the two predominantly white states that hold their nomination contests first. She will hold a kickoff rally Sunday at Oakland, Calif., her hometown, and a town hall in Iowa later next week.

“The center of my campaign is that the people,” Ms. Harris said at an afternoon news conference at Howard University, the historically black college she attended the 1980s. And I believe what folks want is leadership which sees them through the complexity of the own lives and pays equal attention to your own needs. Let’s not place people in a box.”

She’s come under scrutiny in liberals for several “tough-on-crime” positions she took as a prosecutor in California, for example defending the use of the death penalty as recently as 2015 and establishing a measure that sought to punish parents for truant kids.

“The future of our nation depends upon you and countless others lifting our voices to fight for our values,” she said in the movie. “That’s why I’m running for president of the USA.”

However, on Monday, Harris’s message was largely among unity. During a news conference at Howard University hours following her announcement, she said the core problem of her campaign is “the folks,” as opposed to some of the vast array of issues which other Democratic candidates say drew them to conduct.

“Nobody is living their life through the lens of one issue. I think what folks want is, they want leadership that sees them through the complexity of each of our lives and pays equal attention to their own needs,” Harris stated. And since they make their decisions, let’s be sure we give them credit for being smarter than that.”

Ms. Harris’s campaign is going to be located in Baltimore with another office in Oakland. Among the staff members, she announced Monday was Maya Harris, her sister, who had been a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and will serve as Ms. Harris’s campaign chair.

The campaign also proved a symbol that reads “Kamala Harris For The People” in blue and red letters across a yellowish background. It had been thought as yet another nod to Ms. Chisholm, who used a similar color scheme for her presidential campaign in 1972.