Just a few months into her time in the Senate, Harris and her consultants were already looking at polling that showed that her best chance to build support in a presidential run was on the left, that if she was in a race with Sanders and Biden, she could pull more of Sanders’s voters than Biden’s.

Sign onto his bill first to get the credit for taking a bold stand, Harris thought, and make the announcement as a surprise at the end of August in a church back home in Oakland. Aides realized afterward that she had so thin a grasp of the policy that she’d said she was backing “Medicaid for All” in the church. Almost as soon as she finished, she was stressing about now being signed on to ending private insurance, kicking off a two-year-long hokeypokey that would help end her campaign.

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 111)