After President Joe Biden dropped out of the election on Sunday, he endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to be the Democratic nominee, a position she sought last election cycle. However, if her 2024 campaign is anything like her 2020 campaign, it will be a catastrophe.

Harris announced her bid for president in January 2019 and tied Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) all-time 24-hour fundraising record. She then held a campaign kickoff event with a crowd of 20,000 people, which was even larger than former President Barack Obama’s campaign launch in 2007. In the beginning, it looked like her campaign had momentum.

She secured numerous high-profile endorsements, including from Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), but her first major controversy occurred when she immediately believed the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax and called it “an attempted modern-day lynching.”

Soon after, at the first Democratic Party primary debate, Harris’s well-perceived performance doubled her support among primary voters, resulting in a stream of donations and more endorsements. At the second debate, however, Harris took heat from then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for putting thousands of people into jail for marijuana violations despite admitting that she had used marijuana in the past. This moment was the beginning of the end for the Harris campaign.

Her poll numbers slipped, she gave a lackluster performance at the third debate, and she had to change her campaign strategy to focus on early primary states in September. 

At the fourth debate, Harris’s presence was mostly forgettable. By the end of October, her campaign had to start laying off staff members and cutting the salaries of those who remained as fundraising and polling numbers were looking dismal.

Harris saw a flicker of hope after doing well at the fifth debate, but little changed, and she was forced to suspend her campaign just over a month later before any primaries were held. This means that, despite being the presumptive nominee this year, Harris has never won a single vote in a presidential primary.

The New York Times published a story about how her campaign unraveled, writing that it had been a disaster for some time. One staff member said, “This is my third presidential campaign and I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly.”

Other campaign staffers said that “Harris and her closest advisers made flawed decisions about which states to focus on, issues to emphasize and opponents to target, all the while refusing to make difficult personnel choices to impose order on an unwieldy campaign.”

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In other words, it was a gigantic mess. Nevertheless, Harris has an uncanny ability to fail upward, which is how she has managed to rise from being San Francisco’s district attorney to being a presumptive presidential nominee without any notable successes. That is unfortunate for the country.

It remains to be seen whether Harris will poll higher or lower than Biden once voters come to terms with her being the nominee. Either way, this is a whole different game than it was just a week ago.