Kamala Harris’s announcement speech in Oakland, her hometown, was both a signal of her enormous potential and a living portrait of what the 2020 Democratic electorate is supposed to look like. It was also, in hindsight, the launch of a national field experiment in how to squander a vast reservoir of political goodwill. I walked to Oakland City Hall in January with a couple of friends who lived nearby, one a Republican and one a Democrat, to hang back in the crowd and watch the speech with her supporters, away from the press pen and Harris’s experienced team of political operatives. The audience, reported at 20,000 people, was full of pink pussy hats and “Nasty Woman” T-shirts, suggesting her campaign could be a natural home for onetime Hillary Clinton supporters and educated white liberals eager to reprise the fight against Donald Trump. It was a good place to start from in a soon-to-be-crowded Democratic primary.The audience, though, was younger and more diverse than any early-stage Clinton rally, packed with African American women of all ages, the celebrated engine of the Democratic vote.

It was obvious that women of color would be key to the Harris campaign, a theme you’d have to be blind to miss. Throughout that day, and during the campaign, her identity was the message. At her launch the campaign offered two versions of its “For the People” signage: one in conventional red, white, and blue, and another in purple, yellow, and red, a thoughtful homage to Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman to run for president in 1972. Harris’s campaign stressed then, and every day after, that being a black woman would make her the obvious choice for primary voters in South Carolina and beyond, where African Americans comprise much more of the electorate than in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Before Harris took the stage in jam-packed Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, the house speakers bumped songs from a playlist that checked every box of a “Yas Queen” candidacy, fueled by girl power and a kind of cultural hipness that escaped the old white people also in the race. The crowd bopped to Chance the Rapper, A Tribe Called Quest, Tina Turner, a cut from the Hamilton soundtrack, and two power anthems often heard at Clinton rallies: “Run the World (Girls)” by Beyoncé and “Girl on Fire” by Alicia Keys. Despite having made a new home for herself in Brentwood, the celebrity-occupied Los Angeles neighborhood several hundred miles to the south, Harris maintained a home field advantage in Oakland, packing the downtown with a crowd so huge and energized it felt like a general election rally in October. Her speech was aired live in its entirety by CNN and MSNBC, the kind of earned media exposure that fuels winning campaigns in the age of Trump.

“Our United States of America is not about us versus them. It’s about we the people!” Harris said. “And in this moment, we must all speak truth about what’s happening. Seek truth, speak truth, and fight for the truth. So let’s speak some truth. Shall we?” Her remarks were less truth-speaking than a predictable grab bag of center-left policies she would champion as president: Medicare for All, universal pre-K, election security, immigration reform, a middle-class tax cut, ending mass incarceration, fighting racism and sexism. The crowd was into it. The press praised it. There was a long way to go, but it felt like a good start. After all, could Joe Biden pull a crowd this big? But Harris left out something vital, a missing ingredient that would come to define her candidacy and the sputtering campaigns of too many Democrats running for president: a message. Why Kamala Harris? What was the story of her campaign? Why was she the best person to take on Donald Trump? Harris struggled to articulate a clear rationale for her candidacy. That’s why she collapsed and ultimately dropped out on Tuesday. Was she here to speak the truth? To prosecute Trump? To be for the people? To post Instagrams of herself cooking dinner? The Onion answered those questions with its spoof headline after Harris announced her departure: “Kamala Harris Supporter Insists Her Inspiring Message of Something or Other Will Always Live On.”

An unfortunate byproduct of Twitter’s chokehold on elite discourse is that it forces otherwise smart people to focus so deeply on niche arguments and savvy takes that we often forget things that used to be rather obvious in politics. Among them: Winning campaigns have a message. It’s not a complicated or sexy piece of analysis, but the four Democratic front-runners—Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg—have all defined for voters and the media why they are running for president and what separates them from other choices on the ballot. Regardless of ideology or background, they can answer the question in a tidy and easy-to-understand fashion. No other Democrat besides Andrew Yang has done so. The front-runners have organizing principles. They get attention without relying on “moments.” They can raise money. Their policies, personality, talents, and biography all gel together in a way that makes sense. Their ability to explain why they are each running for president gives them a permanent safe harbor— an ability to change the subject, to go on offense, to ignore the utter smallness of Twitter, and to beat into the brains of voters an uncomplicated framework that they can carry with them to the caucus precinct or ballot box come Election Day.

Harris failed to do any of these things. Much like her slogan—“For the People!”—Harris came off as standing for everything and hence nothing. Her shifting positions on Medicare for All, abolishing private insurance, federally mandated busing, and elements of the Green New Deal reinforced the percolating idea that she was too calculating and too political—like Clinton before her—with no principled core beyond winning the next election. Her ideological squishiness offended Sanders ideologues, who roasted her for changing positions on a Sanders-crafted Medicare for All bill that she rushed to endorse in 2017. Her stumbles gave comfort to Warren supporters, who smartly understood that Harris and Warren voters are actually pretty similar: college-educated women who like the idea of a woman running for president. Harris staffers and surrogates, preoccupied with the permanent soul suck of Twitter and elite opinion, spent time complaining about sexism and publicly fighting with reporters, blaming the media for “erasing” Harris even after she had tumbled to low single digits on her own merits. Warren’s campaign never engages in those fights: Its candidate has a message that prevents them from getting sucked into internet quicksand and squabbles over left-wing purity tests. On many days it felt like Harris’s first and only audience was the political press and self-appointed Twitter pundits, not voters. Few people would say the same about Biden, Sanders, Warren, or Buttigieg, who are squarely focused on Iowa along with their own media strategies. Their poll numbers reflect it.

If a set of finely honed political instincts fueled Harris’s success in California and rise to the Senate, it rarely surfaced on the presidential campaign trail. She was caught flat-footed repeatedly, most memorably in the July debate, when Tulsi Gabbard tore apart her tough-on-crime record as a prosecutor in cold-blooded fashion, citing the “over 1,500” marijuana convictions Harris presided over when she was a California prosecutor. Harris fumbled to mount a response as the moderators talked over her. Her campaign had celebrated an earlier debate showdown with Biden, when Harris went after Biden’s past opposition to busing as a means of integrating public schools. Harris had a “moment”—always fetishized by debate observers—that gave her a sugar-high bump in the polls and allowed her campaign to print and sell commemorative T-shirts. But Harris, too, backed herself into supporting the controversial policy of federally mandated busing. She also found herself going negative on a Democratic front-runner still adored by African American voters, coming close to calling him a racist in a Democratic presidential debate. She soon backed away from criticizing Biden so directly and played nice with him in the following debate. Small moments were also instructive: After news broke in January that actor Jussie Smollett was assaulted in Chicago, Harris rushed to Twitter to call it “an attempted modern-day lynching,” a fine response for liberal Twitter but a less-than-sober-minded claim coming from a lawyer and former attorney general. When it emerged that Smollett had allegedly staged his own attack in a bid for social media sympathy and a better salary, Harris was weirdly unprepared. Asked about the development before rolling television cameras, she paused and stumbled for a full 20 seconds, looking around for a staffer, before saying that “the facts are still unfolding and, um, I’m very, uh, concerned.”

If Harris did have a message, it was that she was a historic candidate, an African American woman who could relate to black voters in the South in a way that white candidates could not. Though Harris dismissed the hazy idea of identity politics in an interview with me last year—she said that evaluating candidates based on their race “undervalues the intelligence of the American people”—running as an African American woman became an obvious demographic play in the primary. Her campaign pulled back the curtain on process stories about her Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters and the women of color working on top levels of her campaign. It highlighted her efforts to win over black voters in rural parts of South Carolina rarely visited by politicians. Her campaign located itself in the African American hub of Baltimore, despite Harris having no real connection to the city. In early-primary states, Harris made a habit of showing up at cattle calls with high school drum lines, marching and dancing alongside them.

Pundits loved the image from the outset, simplistically and rather condescendingly suggesting Harris could win over black voters even though there was no polling evidence to back up the idea, based solely on the fact that she was a black woman. Poll after poll in South Carolina showed her losing African American voters to three white candidates: Biden, Sanders, and even Warren. Harris staffers who pushed the idea, and the writers who swallowed it, failed to consider that “identity” is a complicated and evolving concept in the cauldron of the Democratic primary. As I wrote late last year after a conversation with Lynn Vavreck, co-author of the book Identity Crisis, the role of identity in a Democratic primary is not really about the race or gender of a candidate. It’s about how a candidate’s message and persona are reflected in the eyes of voters at any given moment. This cycle, the eyes of Democratic voters are focused squarely on Trump and who can defeat him. If Harris decided to run on making history, it was a bad bet. Throughout the primary, voters have told pollsters and reporters that they have concerns about nominating a woman to go up against Trump. Black voters have said, too, that they already made history by electing Barack Obama, and that nominating another African American is of secondary importance to beating Trump.

Still, Harris had a chance to overcome those concerns. Warren, another woman, improved her electability numbers over the course of the campaign, largely because she had a clearly defined point of view. Harris never did, and as she tacked to the middle over the summer, she was never able to illustrate why she was better positioned than Biden to take up the fight against Trump. In the early fall, as the air went out of the balloon, the Harris campaign’s fallback argument was that she could make up ground with black voters down south. But without a message underpinning her campaign in the first place, voters of all races were barely giving her an ear. Harris spent the rest of the cycle careening from moment to moment, her husband, Doug Emhoff, posting supportive selfies throughout, hoping that something would stick. At one point the Harris campaign lamely tried to push the idea of banning President Trump from Twitter, making it the centerpiece of its message for a full week. Harris even brought up the issue during one of the debates, demanding her rivals join her in calling on Jack Dorsey to kick the president off Twitter. When liberal pundits mocked the uselessness of the idea—on Twitter, of course—Harris staffers responded—on Twitter, of course—by accusing their fellow Democrats of racism. It was not a healthy time.

In September, bleeding money and sinking in the polls, Harris proclaimed she would move to Iowa, a desperate gambit that acknowledged Iowa’s primacy over South Carolina, the state Harris had spent so much time and energy hyping up. But Harris never actually made the move, again calling into question her strategy, and even her competence. I watched her speak in the drizzling rain during the Polk County Democrats Steak Fry in Iowa later that month, and after she was done, I saw her backstage smiling and rallying her soaked and tired volunteers, taking photos and—I imagine—telling them to keep up the fight. I turned to a middle-aged couple from Des Moines sitting in lawn chairs a few feet away, sipping craft beers from the beer tent. I asked if they had heard Harris was moving to their state. “Yeah,” the man told me with a raised eyebrow. “She’s toast.” Losing campaigns can take on the smell of death quickly, and in Harris’s case, it was apparent months ago.

The finger-pointing began even before Harris called it quits on Tuesday. A massive pre-mortem appeared in the New York Times over Thanksgiving weekend, citing interviews with 50 current and former staffers who seemed to place blame on everyone but the T-shirt vendors. Maya Harris, the candidate’s sister and campaign chairwoman, was accused of micromanaging and feuding with consultants over messaging. Campaign manager Juan Rodriguez was lashed for mismanaging the campaign’s finances. Her San Francisco-based consulting team was blamed for trying to graft a California political strategy onto a national campaign. Staffers also blamed the communications team for devoting too much energy to Twitter spats invisible to the public at large, antagonizing reporters rather than managing their fragile egos. But as with any campaign, the fault lies with the candidate, for not making hard calls and failing to give the campaign a North Star to push it forward and above the drama. No staffer is to blame. No family member is to blame. The media isn’t to blame. Twitter isn’t to blame. Biden and Buttigieg and Warren and Sanders aren’t to blame, and neither are their supporters. The only person responsible for erasing Kamala Harris is Kamala Harris, for the too-often-overlooked reason that she failed to explain to Democrats why she deserved to be president of the United States.