A year ago, almost nobody would have guessed that Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) would drop out of the Democratic presidential race before the Iowa caucus. Like Marco Rubio and Scott Walker in 2016, Harris had the potential to be a consensus candidate: someone who could satisfy the demands of a fractured base and win the general election while pointing the way toward a brighter future for the party.
But while consensus candidates like Harris work in theory, in practice they often fail to build a base and tend to crash when hard times hit. CONT.
David Byler, Washington Post