With nearly two years to go, almost anything in the realm of the 2020 presidential election could change from now until Election Day. The one thing that won't, however, is math.

Any Democrat seeking to unseat President Trump will have to achieve at least one of the following: mobilize the base to achieve Obama-level turnout and enthuse the Left, or successfully splinter off ideological agnostics and the suburbs that defected from the GOP in the midterm elections.

Candidates like Julian Castro or Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., will probably focus on the former, while Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, or Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., would emphasize the latter. But most candidates will likely require a blend of both to beat Trump.

This is where Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., will have a problem.

To much left-wing fanfare, she's running. By historical standards, she's a weak presidential contender, if only for her lack of experience on the national stage, but given our current president's resume, two years as a grandstanding senator hardly disqualifies her from the job.

Harris fits the intersectional bill of the Left to a T: half-black, half-Indian, a woman, and as an added bonus, fairly young and attractive. She carries herself well and although her national record would be considered extremely weak tea in a normal election cycle, compared to failed Senate candidate and former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke and even President Trump, she's practically a political veteran. Harris passes the likeability test that killed Democrats in 2016, beating Hillary Clinton in that contest multiple times over. If she stops trying to out-cool her competitors as Beto and Warren have embarrassed themselves doing, she could amass popularity based on personal appeal alone.

But Harris has billed herself as a left-wing candidate. Her presence on the national stage has been marked by fervent opposition to Trump and leaning into the identity politics heralded by the Democrats' more extreme base. That's where her entire career prior to entering the national arena becomes a problem.

Although Harris has positioned herself on the national stage as the paragon of leftism, her tenures as district attorney and California attorney general were more evocative of Jeff Sessions than Bernie Sanders. Harris was an active proponent of civil asset forfeiture in California, fighting a state bill which would have curbed the questionable practice, and as early as 2015, she sponsored a bill to empower prosecutors to seize assets from people prior to criminal proceedings.

Harris' past of passivity on the death penalty and "hard on crime" approach has already spent years under careful examination by the hardcore Bernie base, but the lazier agents of the Left have remained largely ignorant of her policing. In a hypothetical universe, Trump, who somehow signed the most significant prison reform bill of a generation into law, could use serious missteps in her past, such as a California Superior Court ruling against Harris, finding that she had violated defendants' rights by hiding potential exculpatory evidence from them.

The socialist wing of the party has already decided Harris is a cop. The moniker may be extreme, but it raises the legitimate issue of a former prosecutor running for a Democratic nomination post-Black Lives Matter. As Dave Weigel at the Washington Post notes, her invocation of "For the people," a motto she used to use in the courtroom, now in her campaign announcement shows that she's not shying away from her prosecutorial past. But that hasn't halted the growing refrain among the Left: Kamala is a cop.



Kamala Harris is presenting herself as a criminal justice reformer. But in her career as a prosecutor, she supported increased criminalization of sex work, took no action in key police abuse cases and defended a troubled prison system. https://t.co/4YrF74ienF — The Appeal (@theappeal) January 20, 2019



Harris can afford to lose soccer moms and barbecue dads, but if her tough on crime past costs her the base? Well, Trump may very well live to see another term.