The same month Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hit the road for Bernie Sanders in 2019, Kamala Harris was shutting down her campaign. Harris’s early departure from the trail stunned many observers.
As one of her senior campaign staffers said, “If you ask Democratic voters to describe their ideal presidential candidate, they’d basically describe Kamala.” Her campaign was confident that Democrats were eager, as this staffer put it, for “a young, Black woman who is tough and can take the fight to Donald Trump and is going to be the face of America.”
Harris promised to synthesize the most appealing attributes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. She bridged the Democratic Party’s yearning for representation of women and people of color in the Oval Office, with its need for a leader who had substantial experience in government. She was also a fighter. Harris had thrown some memorable elbows in court as a prosecutor and in Senate hearing rooms. She was someone who could both fire people’s hearts and land a haymaker on the opposition.
Harris can lay claim to a remarkable number of firsts. The daughter of a Tamil Indian mother and a Jamaican father, she is the first Black person, the first South Asian person, and the first woman to be vice president of the United States. Even before ascending to that post, she was the first Black and first Asian-American senator from California. Harris was also the first woman or person of color to serve as California’s attorney general or as San Francisco’s district attorney. She is a pioneer many times over.
Harris and those close to her say that experience blazing a trail through the ranks of American life informed her work and left her with a dedication to ensure others would have an easier time following in her footsteps. A White House official described Harris to us as being focused on “opportunity, and justice, and access.”
“That’s the foundation of who she is,” the official said. “She’s the daughter of folks who were in the civil rights movement, she comes from a perspective and a vantage point of fighting for those who can’t fight for themselves.”
In light of that legacy, it’s staggering how little trust her record of electoral accomplishment has earned her as a potential standard-bearer for Democrats. Biden’s selection of Harris as his running mate seemed to set her up as his natural successor. However, soon after Biden took office, a consensus began to emerge that—despite his age—he would have to run for a second term. The fear was Kamala Harris could not win a race against Donald Trump, or perhaps against any Republican at all, and there was no other obvious heir. Democrat after Democrat who we interviewed in the run-up to 2024—including members of Biden and Harris’s own teams—ascribed to this conventional wisdom.
“Kamala is not ready for prime time,” one senior White House staffer said, adding, “She ain’t made for this.”
But why, despite all her accomplishments, did Harris’s party have so little confidence in her? And where will that leave the Democratic Party when Joe Biden inevitably exits the White House?
Many of the doubts were rooted in her stunning campaign collapse.
Before she was a candidate in crisis, Harris was a child of the movement.
She grew up in West Berkeley in the flatlands between the Cal campus and the Bay, ensconced in one of the most enduringly progressive districts of the country. Her mother Shyamala was a pioneering biologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and her father Donald was a professor of economics at Stanford. The couple met in graduate school as civil rights activists. In her memoir, The Truths We Hold, Harris described spending most Thursday nights with her mother and sister at The Rainbow Sign, a center of Black activism where Nina Simone sang and James Baldwin read. Famously, as part of Berkeley’s effort to integrate its school system, Harris regularly rode a bus across the color line to an elementary school in a leafier, whiter part of town.
A politician emerging from that milieu might easily become an anti-establishment leftist. Indeed, her local congressman, elected when Harris was seven years old, had done just that.
Ron Dellums represented Harris’s East Bay district in Congress throughout her adolescence and teenage years and into her adulthood. Dellums had grown up in Oakland. Some of the early organizing for his campaigns took place at The Rainbow Sign in Berkeley. In 1970, Dellums became the first socialist elected to Congress in at least twenty years after he was recruited to run by anti-war activists. He would serve in the House until 1998, followed later by a stint as the mayor of Oakland. Towards the end of his life, in 2012, Dellums sat for a multipart oral history interview that was published by the House of Representatives’ historian. In that conversation, Dellums described his radical politics as a natural reflection of his upbringing.
“I happened to come from a place where every movement of the sixties emerged in close proximity and in great simultaneity,” Dellums said. “Some places, it was primarily the civil rights movement. But in Oakland, Berkeley, Bay Area—every movement. The civil rights movement, the nationalist movement, the [Black] Panther movement, the feminist movement, the gay liberation movement, the environmental movement, the peace movement, all of it.”
He wrote in his memoir that he arrived in Washington in 1971 trailed by a perception popularized by Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s first vice president, that he was an “Afro-topped, bell-bottomed radical” from the “commie-pinko left-wing community of ‘Berzerkeley.’ ” Dellums, the first Black man to represent a majority white district in the House, didn’t run away from that characterization. He wholeheartedly embraced radical politics.
As the first democratic socialist in Congress since Vito Marcantonio, a New York representative and labor activist who was pushed out in 1951 amid the rising anti-communist sentiment of the “Red Scare,” Dellums was a forerunner to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “the Squad.” His experience in the House also showed how the new left might gain power. During his time on Capitol Hill, Dellums managed to confront the waning segregationist wing of the Democratic party in the House, win the confidence of his fellow members, and rise to the chairmanship of the Armed Services Committee.
Dellums also racked up meaningful progressive wins. As a freshman member in the Congressional Black Caucus, Dellums attended a meeting of Polaroid workers protesting the use of their products in South Africa’s apartheid passes. Taken with their cause, Dellums wrote the first bill targeting the South African regime with sanctions. He introduced the bill in the early ’70s, drawing only one co-sponsor. But he kept reintroducing versions of it, shifting its focus to banning US investment in South Africa, and gradually building support.
In 1986, both houses of Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act—a compromise sanctions measure—which became law over President Reagan’s veto. The South African leader Nelson Mandela would later thank Dellums for the constancy of his efforts to put political pressure on the apartheid regime. Mandela, who was held as a political prisoner for decades, saw Dellums as a crucial ally. In his oral history, Dellums described Mandela grasping him by both arms and declaring: “You gave us hope. You kept us alive.”
“The reason why I introduced the disinvestment bill,” Dellums said in the oral history interview, “was because I’m a very firm believer that there are only two factors over which any of us have control … your fidelity, your faithfulness to what you believe in, and your willingness to show up every day for the fight. With those as the guiding principles, I kept introducing the disinvestment bill even though people said, ‘There’s no way this is going to happen. This is outside the realm of reality. It’s way too radical.’ ”
Dellums, here, is discussing what’s now known as the “Overton Window.” That political model suggests there is a range of policies that are considered socially acceptable in a given moment and that politicians are bound by that range. Dellums felt that engagement at the margins drives change. Fighting for policies to the left of the mainstream would help open the window and broaden what might be considered acceptable. Building political momentum towards a preferred outcome, in other words, is not a matter of adopting broadly popular positions, or being personally popular, but of sticking with what you believe in and pushing the whole debate in the right direction.
“People often think that the center of American politics is a real place, that it’s a static place, that some way you could discover the center of American politics,” Dellums said, in comments that seem aimed at politicians like Harris. “My view is that there’s no such place—that the center is contingent upon who shows up for the fight.”
If Harris’s longtime congressman, perhaps the most influential progressive ever to hold federal office, had any impact on her, there’s little evidence of it. As far as we could discover, she has only spoken about Ron Dellums publicly once, sending a tweet of condolence on the day of his death in 2018.
Though they emerged from the same milieu and both claimed the mantle of “progressivism,” Dellums’s approach could not be more different than Harris’s. The gulf between them is a stark illustration of how Generation X strayed from the revolutionary politics of their parents’ generation and how, under the Democrats of the 2000s, the definition of “progressive” became muddied as moderates and centrists wrapped themselves in the term; it provided an inviting refuge from the perhaps more accurate description “liberal,” which had been under withering assault from both the right and left for decades.
While Dellums abhorred moderation, Harris kept reaching for the illusory center. She seemed to dismiss every substantive choice as a false one that a politician need only transcend. And even though she hailed from one of the most distinctively progressive regions of the country, by simultaneously trying to stake out the middle ground and a progressive brand, she risked becoming a woman from nowhere, or worse still, letting her adversaries define her in clearer, more straightforward terms.
On the way into the California Attorney General’s office in Sacramento, there’s a lengthy corridor lined with framed portraits of all the previous occupants of the position, one after another.
“It’s just a giant long wall of really old white guys,” said Nick Pacilio, who spent four years as a staff member for Kamala Harris when she held the post. “With no exception, every single attorney general had been an old white man, until her. Reporters couldn’t even fit in their ledes how different she was from her predecessors.”
Harris has a tendency to dial in on statistics and intricate details that aides attribute to her unique background. After breaking down so many barriers herself, a White House official interviewed for this book said Harris often describes herself as “walking in the room for others” who can’t be there.
“She is standing in the gap for so many,” the official said of Harris. “So, yeah, she is going to get down in the weeds. She wants to make sure she has all the data so she can stand up for the people who aren’t in the room.”
That wonky approach means Harris doesn’t embrace the labels like “progressive” and “moderate” that often wrap around political debates. The White House official said that adopting a simple brand is not Harris’s “style” and, instead, she prefers to be judged on her policies and priorities.
“She knows exactly who she is and the work that she focuses on tells that story,” the official said of Harris. “She doesn’t need to overqualify herself in that way because of her record.”
Harris’s effort to transcend traditional political terms has been apparent since the early days of her career. In 2008, the website for her San Francisco district attorney campaign, which has since been deleted, explicitly noted Harris was trying to strike a middle way between the dominant modes for discussing criminal justice. It painted Harris as both a reformer and an aggressive guardian of law and order who boasted of her record locking up criminals.
“Her pledge is to move beyond the false choice of being ‘tough’ or ‘weak’ on crime,” the site said. “Kamala Harris is smart on crime … and it’s working.”
A technocratic sleight of hand, the phrase “smart on crime” suggested that the growing divide between criminal justice reformers and Democrats scarred by race-baiting attacks that painted them as weak on crime could be overcome by a savvy politician.
Yet, on criminal justice and other issues, that effort to be “smart” also meant avoiding the fundamental questions about crime and how to order society.
“Most of the conversations throughout the years with her have never really focused on ‘progressive’ or ‘moderate,’ ” one longtime adviser told us when asked how Harris viewed her brand. In Harris’s world, according to this adviser, those terms would only be used to describe different advocacy groups. Harris opted for an approach that was more “pragmatic” and viewed the landscape in terms of issues and goals rather than ideology.
“She’ll often say in a briefing with her team, ‘What is the value statement we are all in agreement about?’ ” the adviser continued, paraphrasing Harris. “And it’s an exercise for all of us to be like, ‘Okay, we believe there should be … economic security for families.’ Then working backwards from that, you can build in different policies.”
Focusing on individual values and issues rather than choosing to align herself more broadly as a progressive or a centrist also meant that Harris was rejecting the vocabulary the Democratic voter base had been using to define their loyalties and choices for years.
In the decades before Harris’s campaign, a number of Democratic politicians had made a specialty of so-called “triangulation.” The technique involved situating themselves roughly equidistant from the left and right wings—i.e., approximately in the middle of the Overton Window—on a given subject, garnering partial credit for adopting a version of each side’s ideas and insulating the politician from either side’s attacks. The most famous practitioner of this art was Bill Clinton.
Harris’s effort to adopt an approach that was separate from the two poles of the party seemed to be a form of triangulation, and it worked during her rise in California politics. She also had the good sense to align herself with a core institution in Golden State politics: Bearstar Strategies.
Bearstar is a fixture in the lives of West Coast Democrats. It was founded under the name SCN Public Relations in 1997 by three executives named Ace Smith, Sean Clegg, and Dan Newman. Newman was a veteran spokesman and message minder for Democratic candidates. Smith and Clegg met while running Barbara Boxer’s campaign for Senate in 1992, the so-called “Year of the Woman.”
In 2019, the firm changed its name to SCRB Strategies. The company settled on its current moniker Bearstar, an allusion to the California state flag that features a grizzly bear walking under a lone red star, in March 2021.
Bearstar’s client list has featured some of the most powerful figures in the Golden State including Governor Gavin Newsom, former governor Jerry Brown, former Los Angeles mayors Antonio Villaraigosa and Eric Garcetti, Boxer, former San Francisco mayor Ed Lee, and Alex Padilla, the man who replaced Harris as California’s junior senator when she became vice president.
“If you weren’t working with them, you were not gonna win,” Pacilio said of Bearstar’s influence in the state. “It was everyone—it was everyone in politics they picked, and that’s how Democratic politics worked,” he added. Other consultants we spoke to who work in California pushed back on this notion and raised the question of whether Bearstar was simply adept at attaching itself to winning campaigns.
Pacilio described Bearstar as part of a largely white “good old boys club mentality” that dominated California politics, and, he said, Harris “had to be in the center of [that mindset] for her entire career.”
Though Harris had found a way to work within this boys club while she held city and statewide positions, she worked hard to ensure the next generation that came after her would experience a different landscape. In the run-up to her presidential campaign, multiple sources said Harris pushed her consultants, most likely including her team at Bearstar, to diversify their leadership.
“Kamala is, and I say this with reverence, she pushes for diversity in every conversation,” said one consultant who worked with her. “She cared less about how much money I was raising for her and more about what I was doing to create a good inclusive workspace.”
In 2017, shortly after Harris’s victory in her Senate race and while her planning for a presidential campaign was already underway, Bearstar brought in Juan Rodriguez as the first new partner since the firm’s formation. Rodriguez had worked as Harris’s senior adviser in the California Attorney General’s Office. The next year, Bearstar added labor leader Laphonza Butler to the partnership as well. With Harris on the rise, California’s old boys club culture was breaking, or at least bending.
As her White House bid came together, Bearstar was not Harris’s sole adviser. A candidate’s family must always figure in any politician’s career—either as advocates or props. However, Kamala’s sister Maya Harris, Maya’s husband Tony West, and Maya’s daughter Meena Harris have all taken far more involved roles in her campaigns, formally and informally, than a typical candidate’s relatives. Maya, as chairman, occupied the top post on Harris’s campaign from the official launch in January 2019. (Maya Harris did not respond to extensive requests for comment on this book.) The family faction would ultimately clash with Bearstar in spectacular ways.
Some staffers felt the tug-of-war between the Harris family and Bearstar pulled the team apart.
“Pretty quickly, the campaign got splintered off into factions. It was two warring camps and then everyone was trying their best to find a spot in the middle,” one campaign aide said.
Others felt the tensions between Bearstar and the family were overstated. A source familiar with the matter pointed out that the relationship between Bearstar and Harris’s family members stretched back “a really long time,” and they had worked together on a number of Harris’s winning campaigns.
“They [Bearstar] were involved in Senate races and AG races, and family comes in and out of everything,” this person said. “It was not like this was the first time they had worked together.”
However, the source also acknowledged some staff felt there were tensions and chose to air their concerns to reporters. The resulting coverage had a corrosive effect on the team as they read the negative headlines and speculated about who was responsible for the leaks.
Competition between Bearstar and Maya was ongoing, but it always had a clear winner. The top Harris aide who described the dynamic as “two warring camps” said Rodriguez, a junior partner in the firm serving as the campaign manager, “got bowled over a ton by Maya Harris.”
Rodriguez worked to assert himself. According to a senior staffer, the divisions eventually manifested themselves geographically. Maya Harris and Rodriguez had offices on opposite sides of campaign headquarters. As Harris’s poll numbers sagged, Maya and Rodriguez separately called staffers in for audit interviews to assess the state of the campaign.
“It was the most awkward day of my life,” the senior staffer said. “People were literally having a thirty-minute audit meeting with Juan about how the campaign was going,” they added, “and then they were walking across the hall into the same meeting with Maya.… I remember Juan popping into my office to find out how the meeting with Maya went.”
Most campaigns, of course, have disagreements among their leadership, and they eventually get sorted out—or someone gets fired. Neither of these things happened on Harris’s team.
The tensions between Maya Harris and Rodriguez seemed uniquely unresolvable. Kamala, the thinking went, could hardly dismiss her own cherished sister, and removing Rodriguez probably would have led to the equally unthinkable resignations of the whole Bearstar team, essential allies for a California politician. With the candidate remaining neutral, the rest of the staff was forced to choose a side.
Others pointed out that the main tension wasn’t the family versus Bearstar, but between the campaign’s aspirations and the financial realities of the race. Campaigns—like all businesses—run on cash. Managing the balance between fundraising, spending, and momentum is a delicate calculus that is essential in a presidential race. On Harris’s team, the source said, senior staff had not kept careful track of their resource allocations.
Another Harris backer made a similar point, suggesting her campaign was “too big too early” with an unnecessarily sprawling national footprint and insufficient focus on South Carolina.
“The focus early on in the campaign was obviously Iowa.… Her campaign also invested in a bunch of places really early on. I mean, she had the office in California, she had a Washington office.”
Still, according to the source, it was money management that was the key issue. Rifts between top advisers were only part of a larger toxic climate. In a resignation letter that, of course, leaked publicly in late 2019, the campaign’s state operations manager Kelly Mehlenbacher wrote: “Campaigns have highs and lows, mistakes and miscalculations, lessons learned and adjustments made. But, because we have refused to confront our mistakes, foster an environment of critical thinking and honest feedback, or trust the expertise of talented staff, we find ourselves making the same unforced errors over and over.”
This portrayal of Harris’s leadership struggles is drawn from extensive conversations with staff who worked with her in San Francisco, the Senate, during her campaign, and in the Biden administration. It’s natural to ask whether the critical elements of the account are simply a manifestation of the racism and sexism that she has spent her career overcoming. However, the stories of mismanagement shared by our sources on Harris’s various teams were substantive, nuanced, and consistent. And they came from sources who signed up to work for her and, at least at one point, wanted her to succeed. It’s impossible to dismiss all of their critiques as entirely the result of prejudice.
Other veterans of Harris’s White House bid didn’t criticize how it was run. They just kept quiet. In a brief phone call, Bearstar partner Ace Smith said simply, “I don’t talk about that campaign.”
Despite the turbulence behind the scenes, at her campaign launch event, Harris drew a crowd of 20,000 Californians outside Oakland City Hall. The location embodied some of the tensions swirling around the campaign. It was literally the site of battles between the institutional Democratic Party and the activist left.
The beautiful Beaux Arts building that serves as the seat of government in Oakland overlooks a plaza that was ground zero for the Occupy Wall Street protests which rocked that city in 2011. Those demonstrations were some of the biggest in the country and—under a Democratic mayor—provoked one of the most violent responses from law enforcement.
Harris, who had been California’s top prosecutor at the time, had her office picketed by Occupiers who deemed her a “sell-out” for not doing more to punish banks for the foreclosure crisis. Now, she was surrounded by American flags, standing where those demonstrations were beaten, making a progressive pitch and declaring that “our economy today is not working for working people” and vowing to be a champion for the “battle ahead.”
“We are here knowing that we are at an inflection point in the history of our world. We are at an inflection point in the history of our nation,” Harris said. “We are here because the American Dream and our American democracy are under attack and on the line like never before. We are here at this moment in time because we must answer a fundamental question. Who are we? Who are we as Americans?”
These were questions Harris never seemed quite able to answer about herself.
In 2003, the website for her successful run at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office attributed Harris’s politics to her upbringing in the progressive movement.
“I grew up during the often-contentious civil rights movement of the sixties—my parents carted me to protest marches in Berkeley and Oakland and instilled in me a strong sense of justice,” she wrote. “I chose to become a prosecutor because I wanted to ensure that justice is done on both sides of the law—which requires that crime victims and defendants are both accorded the rights they deserve.”
Yet, as she touted progressive bona fides, Harris steadfastly continued her career-long refusal to engage with policy debates on the terms that were increasingly defining politics within the Democratic Party.
In her memoir, Harris declared herself a “progressive prosecutor.” But her definition of the phrase—“someone who used the power of the office with a sense of fairness, perspective, and experience, someone who was clear about the need to hold serious criminals accountable and who understood that the best way to create safe communities was to prevent crime in the first place”—sounded conventional, and not discernibly progressive.
After Harris launched her presidential campaign, critics from her left mounted a withering assault on her actual record in office in op-ed pages and through news articles. They noted that she had pushed for harsher sentences for drug offenses, fought to uphold patently wrongful convictions, championed legislation to punish the parents of habitually truant children, appealed a ruling that the death penalty was unconstitutional, and resisted systemic reforms.
Harris had not chosen a broad brand for herself, and her opponents on the left were more than happy to give her one. They called her, quite simply, “a cop.”
At the Oakland City Hall launch event, Harris laid out her vision “to be president of the people, by the people, and for all people.” Contrasting herself with President Trump, she highlighted her commitments to unity and fighting for ordinary people, and she pledged to support popular progressive initiatives like government-provided single-payer health insurance.
“America’s story has always been written by people who can see what can be unburdened by what has been. That is our story,” Harris told the excited crowd.
The audience punctuated each applause line by waving bright yellow banners decorated with the slogan: “Kamala Harris for the People.”
“So, let’s do this!” Harris exclaimed, and laughed in delight. The crowd roared its approval. “And let’s do it together! And let’s start now! And I thank you, and God bless you, and God bless the United States of America!” Harris concluded.
Harris began to make her way off the stage, shaking hands, as The Roots’s mixtape version of the song “My Shot” from the Broadway musical Hamilton played over the loudspeakers. “I’m not throwing away my shot,” the hook insisted, over and over.
But despite the rousing start, the Kamala 2020 campaign soon floundered. The campaign slogan itself was evidence of the deeper problem. As a phrase, “for the people” sounded like a clarion call to classic progressives, the radicals of Berkeley’s People’s Park and Oakland’s Occupy movements. However, Harris’s “for the people” was rooted in her work as a prosecutor, a vocation that earned her skepticism and anger from the left.
In her memoir, Harris wrote that she used the phrase to introduce herself in Alameda County Superior Court when she worked as a line prosecutor. Those appearances began with her declaring, “Kamala Harris, for the people.” To her, it was a reminder that, in court, the prosecution acted for society at large, not just the victim of the alleged crime. She relished the universality of the idea and wrote that it was her “compass.”
She recounted one speech where she told a group of newly recruited young prosecutors, “Let’s be clear. You represent the people. So I expect you to get to know exactly who the people are.”
“ ‘For the people’ means for them,” Harris said. “All of them.”
As she rose through California and the US Senate, Harris had a particular focus on standing up for women, children, and the poor. A White House official told us the slogan was a clear reflection of Harris’s core values.
“At the end of the day she’s a fighter and she’s been fighting for people in her entire career,” the official said. “There was no mistake in making her campaign slogan ‘for the people,’ because that’s who she’s always represented.”
But in hoping to represent all people rather than aligning herself with one of the major brands that defined Democratic politics, Harris had forgotten the lessons Dellums had articulated. By focusing too much on what a broad swath of the public wanted, she now failed to articulate her own positions on key issues. Her core values may have been clear to Harris and her team, but as she ran for president, her policy positions and rationale were far less precise.
On health care, over a year before she launched her presidential campaign, Harris added her name to Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for All” bill. For a mainstream Democratic candidate, it was a daring move and an attention-getter. Harris was staking out a position substantially to the left of where Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton situated their own health care policies. Sanders’s Medicare for All plan—a cornerstone of his presidential campaigns—would enroll the whole country automatically in the single-payer insurance scheme and forbid private insurance policies that offered similar coverage, almost entirely displacing the system of private, largely employer-provided insurance that America has had since World War II. This one move meant Harris was running to the left of the institutional Democratic Party.
Within days of Harris’s opening speech, reporters sought to put the spotlight on her bold policy. Pressed in a town hall appearance in Des Moines about whether people who like their private insurance plans would get to keep them—the same question that vexed Obama as he pursued more modest public health care expansions—Harris initially dug in her heels.
“The idea is everyone gets access to medical care,” she said, “and you don’t have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork, all of the delay that may require.… Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.”
Republicans pounced, hoping to capitalize on voters’ uneasiness about changes to an already precarious health care regime. Harris soon recalibrated her position. Rather than talking about how Medicare for All would eliminate the injustice and ruinous costs of the private insurance system, she pulled her punches, emphasizing the fact that Medicare for All actually preserved a role for private insurers. They would, she promised, be allowed to offer supplemental coverage for certain treatments and procedures. For the rest of her campaign, it was difficult to discern a clear position on health care at all.
Harris’s ending position on health care—a version of Medicare for All that paradoxically retained a sizable role for private insurers—might well have been the outcome of strategic triangulation. But her manner of arriving there lacked the grace that Bill Clinton or Barack Obama brought to the maneuver. It more nearly resembled a far less exalted political trick: the flip-flop.
“Walking back from it, that hurt us,” a staffer on the digital team said of Medicare for All. “That hurt our fundraising numbers. That hurt us with Democratic activists, and that’s a problem. The last thing you ever want to be seen as is wishy-washy or flip-floppy.”
Harris came to the first debate of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary in late June 2019 loaded for bear but unsure about the hunt.
Biden had blundered several days before by bragging about his working relationships with segregationists in the early years of his long Senate career. Harris publicly needled Biden on the remark for days, and at the debate, she launched the withering attack. While the other candidates were engaged in a back-and-forth on police reform, Harris cut in.
“As the only Black person on this stage, I would like to speak on the issue of race,” Harris declared, as the crowd applauded.
Then Harris directed her attention towards Biden. She paired his comment about the segregationists in the old Senate with his past record of opposing court-ordered busing for school integration in the 1970s. While Harris granted Biden that she believed he was not “a racist,” she called his behavior “hurtful” and stressed that the pain was personal.
“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me,” Harris said.
The line was a showstopper, and it worked to stupendous effect. The confrontation instantly became the defining moment of the debate and dominated coverage afterward. At campaign headquarters, the digital team immediately saw the fundraising numbers spike.
“It was an explosion,” said a staffer on the digital team. “Everything we did for like a week turned to gold. It was just like we couldn’t do any wrong for fundraising. Our ads took off; our email program took off. And it was after a dry spell.… sixty-three thousand people donated within twenty-four hours, fifty-eight percent were first-time donors, [and the] average contribution was thirty dollars.”
Harris, in other words, garnered $1.9 million from small-dollar donors in a single day after the debate, and over $1 million of that haul was from people giving her money for the first time. The momentum was real.
“What I recall was, either the day after or two days after, everybody’s fucking excited; the campaign’s got life again,” a senior staffer said. “We were raising a shit-ton of money.”
Her masterstroke on the debate stage rejuvenated Harris’s operation, brought her legions of new fans, and appeared to offer her a chance to make inroads with Black voters—a crucial voting bloc for Biden. Federally mandated busing had not been a live political issue for decades, but it roared back to relevance and instantly focused the primary’s simmering tensions about race around a genuine question of policy. But the boost did not last. Once again, Harris failed to maintain her compelling, bold stance.
A scrambling Biden staff had made a raft of phone calls to reporters on the Harris campaign beat to ensure she was asked her precise position on busing. When the question came, the senior staffer said, Harris didn’t “have an answer for it.”
“I would say it’s a pretty important piece. If you attack someone for their position—” Biden’s campaign manager Greg Schultz began to say when asked about this post-debate counterattack in a 2023 interview, before stopping himself short. “I don’t want to relitigate. She’s vice president. She’s great. She’s loyal to [Biden]. But, if you attack somebody for a policy position, it’s fair for you to ask, ‘What’s your policy position?’ ”
The questions to Harris about busing dogged her for several days.
On debate night, she had signaled support for federal mandates, saying to Biden that there had been a “failure of states to integrate public schools in America” in the 1970s. By the following week, she had retreated, saying at a picnic in Des Moines that local school districts should consider busing to achieve more diverse schools, but that she wouldn’t necessarily support federal mandates if local authorities decided they preferred de facto segregation in their schools after all. A day later, Harris tacked again, telling reporters in Indianola that, while she would have supported federally mandated busing in circumstances like those that existed in the ’70s, she wouldn’t support it in contemporary America.
“Thankfully, that’s not where we are today,” Harris said. As she had at the debate, she called on Biden to apologize for having been wrong decades ago, but at the same time, she unmistakably aligned herself with his current position.
As with the Medicare for All debacle, Harris seemed to be trying to straddle the left flank and middle ground, but she ended up nowhere. But this moment would be remembered by her campaign as the beginning of the end.
“That’s the focal point of where it all falls apart,” a senior staffer said about her shifting stances on the busing issue.
The debate moment had propelled Harris to the head of the pack.
“She rose to the top of the polls, I remember some poll that had her in first place with like 30 percent,” the senior staffer said. “People were ready to fucking go. It was the only real movement of the whole race. Otherwise, the race never moved.”
The heat Harris generated at the late June debate evaporated as she waffled on the very issue that had ignited her campaign. That stalled momentum also applied to the all-important fundraising numbers.
“We had an explosive couple of days and then it just disappeared,” the staffer said. “To the point that in August we couldn’t scrape together two nickels.”
In a few short months, Harris went from a front-runner to a complete bust.
The ineffectiveness of Harris’s campaign, which she suspended in December 2019, and the alienation felt by some of her staff didn’t stop her national ascent. Instead of finding a significant constituency on the ground, she ultimately found one among the leaders of the Democratic party. The following August, Joe Biden—who had promised to pick a woman as his running mate—anointed her.
While Harris’s campaign was unquestionably successful in the sense that it elevated her to the second-highest office in the land, those closest to it were left with deep-seated doubts about her ability to lead. As Democrats fretted over whether Harris could serve as a successful successor to Biden, some of the staffers who had worked most closely with her were among the most afraid.
“It was rotten from the start,” one top aide on the 2020 campaign said. “A lot of us, at least folks that I was friends with on the campaign, all realized that: ‘Yeah, this person should not be president of the United States.’ ”
As she ran for office, Harris had trouble managing money and competing personalities. But perhaps more importantly, she suffered from a lack of overall purpose.
Harris struggled to decide what she was offering voters beyond her compelling persona.
“That’s a lot of the reason people support her,” a senior staffer said of Harris’s backstory. “But you’ve got to back that up with: ‘What are you going to do?’ ”
Ultimately, at a moment when the Democratic Party was wracked by a genuine debate over its policy course, Harris had not picked a direction.