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Ever since her incisive committee questioning in 2017 turned Jeff Sessions into a live-TV advertisement for beta blockers, Democrats have had high hopes for Kamala Harris. As Miriam Pawel wrote in The Times, “she was crowned the perfect Democrat for 2020.”

But last week, The Times reported that her presidential campaign was in dire straits. Four days after that story was published, Ms. Harris announced that she was dropping out.

The debate: What went wrong? Here’s what people are saying.

‘A double standard’

“The way that the media have treated Senator Harris in this campaign has been something else,” Julián Castro told CBS shortly after her announcement. The former housing secretary said that Ms. Harris — the second black woman elected to the Senate, vying to become the first black woman to win a major party’s presidential nomination — had been held to a “double standard” that was “grossly unfair and unfortunate.”