Kamala Harris Announces 2020 Presidential Bid

Senator Kamala Harris of California announced Monday that she is running for President in 2020.

“This is a moment in time that I feel a sense of responsibility to stand up and fight for the best of who we are,” Harris said on Good Morning America, “and that fight will always include as one of the highest priorities: our national security.”

Harris decided to announce the news on ABC’s GMA, as well as on Twitter where she shared her first campaign video. The video outlines Harris’s emphasis on the values she plans to bring to the White House. In her words, those values are: truth, justice, decency, equality, freedom, and democracy.

“They’re all on the line now,” Harris explains in the video, “the future of our country depends on you and millions of others lifting or voices to fight for our American values.”

The senator’s main goal is to give those unheard a voice. She also is concerned, as she explained on GMA, her deep concern for keeping the American people and our way of life safe, mainly by putting the people before self interest. 

Harris found is most fitting to announce her candidacy on Martin Luther King Day. Her parents, of Indian and Jamaican ancestry, were deeply involved in the civil rights movement and grew up around that inspiring rhetoric her whole life. Dr. King was one of her biggest role models.

“It was about a belief that we are a country that was founded on noble ideals and we are the best of who we are when we achieve those ideas,” Harris told GMA.

Harris has a long history in politics. She started as a District Attorney in San Francisco from 2004 to 2010, and as the Attorney General in California from 2011 to 2017 before she was elected into the Senate in 2016.

Harris is one of other officials that have talked of running for the 2020 democratic ballot.