Could Kamala Harris revive the fractured Democratic party for the 2020 election?

In early July, Kamala Harris, California’s new senator, visited Chowchilla state prison, often called the largest women’s prison in the world.

Harris, the second black woman in history to be elected to the US Senate, toured the facility and sat down with incarcerated women to hear their stories. She later called the women “extraordinary”, and praised their optimism in finding a new life after prison. But the moment that she dwelled on most was a visit to the silkscreening room, where inmates were cutting rectangles of fabric and pushing paint through the material. The imprisoned women were manufacturing American flags.

Later, in front out of an audience of criminal justice reform advocates in Washington DC, Harris would share that story. She gestured out the window to the American flags flying above the nation’s capital, some of which, she suggested, may have been made in Chowchilla.

“Isn’t it part of who we are in America that we believe in second chances?” she asked.

Six months into the presidency of Donald Trump, Republicans are flailing amid efforts to erase health insurance for tens of millions of Americans. Democrats are already looking eagerly forward to the 2020 presidential race – and a new candidate to lead them.

However, the Democratic party, too, is riven with disagreement. Does its salvation lie in maintaining a centrist position, or taking strong shift left, toward Bernie Sanders’s unapologetic embrace of universal healthcare, a higher minimum wage, and tuition-free college? The party faces frustration from voters who feel it is too beholden to corporate interests.

Harris is seeing increasing presidential buzz, making headlines for her tough questioning of the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, during a Senate hearing, and then reportedly wowing big Democratic donors at an event in the Hamptons this month.

In an America of emboldened racism, where the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan recently held a rally in a college town and was confronted with more than a thousand furious counter-protesters, the Democratic party is also still negotiating its own racial politics. The party is caught between those who are moving to woo back white working-class voters who defected to Trump, and those who argue that it would be a smarter investment to focus on mobilizing African American voters, whose reported turnout dropped in 2016.

There’s a long list of potential 2020 contenders, many of them, including Harris, making the obligatory claims that they are focused on their current jobs and not…

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