Harris to focus on early states

Kamala Harris to focus on early states this month

By CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO

Sen. Kamala Harris is putting her retail campaigning skills to the test.

Harris, the California Democrat whose presidential launch last month included raising $1.5 million in the first the day, drawing a crowd of 22,000 to her opening speech in her hometown of Oakland, and appearing for a ratings-busting town hall on CNN, announced Tuesday that she’ll visit all four early states later this month.

Harris’ travel over the final two weeks of February will first take her back to South Carolina, a state she’s aggressively targeting as part of what her campaign strategists have dubbed “the SEC primary meets the West Coast offense” — a reference both to the SEC college athletic conference and Harris’ focus on Nevada and her delegate-rich home state of California.

Harris will then make two-day swings through New Hampshire (Feb. 18-19) and Iowa (Feb. 23-24), where she appeared in the CNN town hall, before finishing up the early-state blitz in Nevada (Feb. 28-March 1). Her campaign did not release details about the stops.

Harris’ carefully planned rollout, which included an announcement on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” a brief speech to sorority sisters in South Carolina, the big Oakland rally and the CNN town hall, drew positive assessments from across the political spectrum — from President Donald Trump to David Axelrod, the former top adviser to President Barack Obama.

But the early-state stops will be Harris’ first opportunities as a presidential candidate to meet with voters in smaller settings — a crucial test that several of her 2020 Democratic opponents have already started in on. Within days of her New Year’s Eve soft launch, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) spoke to a crowd of more than 3,000 people in Iowa and drew more than 1,000 to a campaign event in Columbia, S.C. Warren will formally roll out her campaign in her home state of Massachusetts this weekend, then head to the first four early states, plus Georgia and California.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who joined the race last week, will be in Iowa on Friday and Saturday, before visiting South Carolina and then New Hampshire over the Presidents’ Day weekend. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), whose first early-state stops were in Iowa and New Hampshire, will also head to South Carolina.