Kamala Harris’s charmed political life is about to face its biggest test
Surprisingly, precisely zero people were surprised.
Harris, 54, is only two years into her freshman term as a U.S. senator. She represents one of the most dependably Democratic states in the nation. Previously she served as California’s attorney general for six years, and San Francisco’s district attorney for seven years before that.
Only two past presidents — Martin Van Buren and Bill Clinton — served as attorney general before ascending to the Oval Office. And there’s only one senator-turned-president in U.S. history who spent so little time in the world’s greatest deliberative body before launching a White House bid: Barack Obama.
The question is why. Looking back at how the “Kamala for commander in chief” buzz built over time is instructive. In part that’s because it reveals how much of a trailblazer she’s been in every stage of her career — and how that trailblazer status has, in turn, propelled her into the national spotlight.
“When Harris first ran for statewide office, the nation and, more specifically, the Democratic Party had begun to rethink the boundaries for minority and female candidates,” says Dan Schnur, a former spokesman for John McCain and recent director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. “Right after a primary in which voters chose between a minority candidate [Obama] and female candidate [Hillary Clinton], Harris emerged on the landscape of the biggest state in the country as both. Her demographic identity brought her a tremendous amount of attention at precisely the right moment in her party’s history.”
Yet this history also highlights the single biggest challenge facing Harris’s nascent campaign — the key factor that will determine if she catches fire or flames out. In a presidential slugfest, biography is a great starting point. But it can only take you so far. For years, the excitement surrounding Harris has overshadowed whatever political skills she’s displayed on the campaign trail. Now those skills will be put to the test.
“Sen. Harris thrives off of doubters and skeptics,” says California Democratic consultant Brian Brokaw, who ran Harris’s 2010 and 2014 campaigns for state attorney general. “When her back has been against the wall — I have seen this time and again — it’s like fuel to her. People who think of her as lacking substance — as being all style or symbolism — couldn’t be more off the mark. And they do so at their own peril.”
Harris has never had trouble attracting national attention. In 2005, shortly after becoming DA, she appeared in a Newsweek story called “A New Team in Town” about the “women in charge of [San Francisco’s] safety”; the feature was part of a cover package on “How Women Lead.”
The real turning point, however, came a few years later — and the Obama connection is key. The two had long been close. In 2007, Harris attended Obama’s presidential kickoff speech in Springfield, Ill.; that cycle, she wound up chairing his California campaign. Seeking to elevate Harris the way he’d been elevated nearly a decade earlier, the president later handpicked her to deliver a primetime address at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. CNN’s John Berman was so “disarmed by Harris’s popularity,” according to the Sacramento Bee, that “he had difficulty introducing her before an interview on the convention floor.”
“I lost my train of thought,” Berman told his viewers, “because so many people are here getting their picture taken with her.”
But amid all the mentioning, the presidency was the most persistent theme. In 2012, National Journal named Harris one of its “up-and-comers” to watch in the 2016 presidential race. A year later, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza captured the conventional wisdom.
Publicly, Harris wasn’t buying into it. The guessing game “drives me bananas,” she said at the time. “I’m only halfway through my first term as attorney general, and it’s a job I love.”
Everyone knows what happened next: Harris announced her Senate ambitions in 2015, then promptly locked up the big donors and big endorsements and steamrolled her only serious challenger, Orange County Rep. Loretta Sanchez, in both the Democratic primary and the top-two general-election runoff.
As usual, the immediate coverage focused as much on what Harris had just achieved as where she might go next — and since arriving in Washington, the freshman senator has methodically fulfilled those grand expectations, paving the way for this week’s announcement.
So what does Harris’s meteoric ascent augur for the campaign ahead?
In other words, Harris, like Obama, has been a pioneering figure every step of the way, breaking through barriers of sexism and racism that have long held back women of color — and the historic symbolism of those successive breakthroughs has fed on itself, fueling higher hopes and greater buzz. Meanwhile, the nuances of Harris’s actual agenda and achievements have often taken a backseat in the national conversation.
“In my career when I was district attorney in San Francisco, attorney general of California and even United States senator, in each position I was the first,” Harris told David Axelrod in 2017. “So… reporters would come up to me and ask this really original question, put a microphone in front of my face: ‘So what’s it’s like to be the first woman fill-in-the-blank.’”
“I realized when I first ran for office that people demand that you talk about yourself,” Harris added. “I would prefer to talk about what needs to get done.”
The Harris campaign sees this scrutiny as an opportunity to explain how the senator has used her platform as a prosecutor to go after banks, predatory lenders and other powerful institutions. This is someone “who’s put in the work,” says her press secretary, Ian Sams.
“Voters have seen [Harris] in these big hearings over the last year, and they have a baseline understanding that she is, for lack of better term, a badass,” Sams says. “That is where people are starting from. It’s our job to tell them more about her record and her past electoral successes.”
Yet the interesting thing to watch will be how Harris reacts as the scrutiny intensifies, first in a crowded Democratic primary contest and later, perhaps, in a fight against Trump.
“The next year or two will show us whether Harris can hit major-league pitching,” says Schnur. “She’s torn up the minor leagues here in California and been tremendously successful. But she would be the first to tell you that this is an entirely different level of competition.”
But campaigns are crucibles, and the most revealing moments are the ones that force a candidate from offense to defense. Despite what national pundits might assume, Harris hasn’t always coasted to victory in safely Democratic California. Yes, her Senate bid was something of a coronation; yes, her earlier reelection campaigns, statewide and in San Francisco, were cakewalks. But her initial bids for both district attorney (2003) and attorney general (2010) were hardly smooth sailing.
In the latter race, for attorney general, Harris was again the underdog; though Democratic overall, California has long gravitated toward more conservative candidates for law-enforcement posts.
“Kamala by no means fit the historical mold of California AGs — and by that I mean a lot of old white guys, many of whom had been Republicans,” explains Brokaw. “Progressive politicians told us she couldn’t win because they agreed too much with her politically. They thought the state wasn’t ready to elect someone like her as ‘top cop.’”
“She didn’t come out of nowhere,” says Sams. “She ran some tough races in California. She went through the wringer and learned to not take any votes for granted.”
Even so, Harris has rarely been pushed out of her prosecutorial comfort zone on the trail. As Brokaw puts it, “her training as a prosecutor” has made her “incredibly deliberate and detail-oriented, with every fact fully considered and every possible counterargument gamed out in advance.” The assaults she has endured in the past, from Brown to capital punishment, were ultimately hurdles she could see coming miles away.
The 2020 contest won’t be nearly as predictable.
“Harris has been a very talented campaigner,” adds Schnur. “But there is no preparation for running for president except running for president.”
The task ahead for Harris is proving that she’s the “next Barack Obama” in this sense too. If she succeeds, she could very well add “first woman president,” “first black woman president,” and “first Asian-American president” to her long list of firsts.
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