Kamala Harris Drops Out of Presidential Race

California's junior senator, Kamala Harris, dropped out of the presidential race Tuesday after struggling for months to break out of the crowded Democratic field and define herself to a national audience.

Harris, whose fundraising challenges and internal campaign strife have been detailed in national coverage in recent days, wrote in a letter to supporters that she has "taken stock and looked at this from every angle," and come to what she called "one of the hardest decisions of my life."

"My campaign for president simply doesn't have the financial resources we need to continue," she said, before taking a thinly veiled swipe at former New York mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who entered the race last month and leapfrogged ahead of Harris in the polls this week.

"I'm not a billionaire. I can't fund my own campaign. And as the campaign has gone on, it's become harder and harder to raise the money we need to compete," Harris wrote.

“In good faith, I cannot tell you, my supporters and volunteers, that I have a path forward if I don’t believe I do," Harris added in a video message posted on Twitter.

But the fundraising challenges may have been symptoms of larger problems with Harris' campaign.

She started off strong with a January kickoff event in Oakland that drew tens of thousands of excited supporters, and saw a significant bump in the polls after a knockout performance in the first Democratic debate this summer. But that support faded as Harris struggled to find her footing among the progressive and moderate factions of the party on issues such as health care.

In October, in an attempt to kick-start her flagging campaign, Harris laid off staff members and redeployed staff to Iowa.

But the changes didn't help her languishing campaign in the polls, and in recent weeks campaign insiders aired disagreements among the top staffers.