Before Sen. Bernie Sanders announced he was entering the race, Sen. Kamala Harris was dubbed the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. And she made the most of her short time in the top spot.
The California senator succeeded in establishing herself as a formidable candidate after only two years as a national figure. She’s now in the top tier of candidates along with Sanders, an independent from Vermont, and former Vice President Joe Biden, assuming he decides to run. It’s heady company for Harris, 54, who was district attorney of San Francisco from 2004-2011 and the California attorney general from 2011-2017, when she became a U.S. senator.
Her swift rise brings to mind former President Barack Obama, who won a Senate seat in 2004 and the presidency four years later. Harris dislikes being cast as the “female Obama,” but the notion has stuck, thanks partly to Obama himself. At a San Francisco fundraiser in 2013, he said she was “the best-looking attorney general in the country.”
Harris wouldn’t have soared without key ingredients that make Democrats take a candidate seriously in 2019. She’s African-American and a woman. Her political views are mostly far left of center. She’s ambitious and impatient. “There may be no other candidate who better embodies how the modern Democratic party has changed over the last few decades in identity and ideology,” according to Perry Bacon Jr. of the website FiveThirtyEight.
The novice senator might plausibly capture the nomination in the early contests in 2020, culminating in the California primary. It has been moved forward to Super Tuesday, March 3, possibly boosting Harris’s chances.
The Obama model hovers over the Harris campaign. She doesn’t need to match his 2008 success in the early states and probably couldn’t if she tried. But she must do well in Iowa and New Hampshire. Both states are heavily white, but that’s an immutable fact of political life. After Obama won Iowa, African-Americans rushed to line up with him. They’d been holding back, waiting for evidence that he appealed to white voters and had a real shot at being the Democratic nominee. Now, blacks and women are holding back on Harris.
“If she does not do well in Iowa and New Hampshire, then Cory Booker will take South Carolina and Kamala will do less well in California,” says David Brady, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Black voters will likely be a majority in South Carolina’s primary, as they were in 2016. Thus Booker, the senator from New Jersey who is black, could upset Harris there and make California harder to win. If Harris loses California, her candidacy is dead.
For now, being in the top tier has advantages for Harris. She gets far more media coverage, and in her case, the coverage ranges from favorable to adulatory. When she went clothes shopping in Columbia, S.C., recently, reporters helped her select outfits. That won’t happen with Booker, even if he’s looking for a new wardrobe.
Her rivals at this early stage in the campaign are beset by more significant challenges. Their campaigns faced sharper scrutiny immediately. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is struggling to escape the tarnish of her past efforts to identify as a Native American. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has an authenticity problem, adopting whatever progressive position is popular at the time, having once been a centrist member of the House of Representatives. The entrance of Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar into the race prompted an article in Politico about how bad a boss she’s been to her Senate staff, and she rejects favored left-wing ideas such as free college tuition and Medicare for All. A story about Booker referred to him as “an unmarried vegan.” But perhaps that’s an asset.
At least for the moment, Harris stands out as more of a political heavyweight than the others. Her campaign reflects this. In January, she announced her candidacy at a massive rally in her hometown of Oakland, Calif. Campaign aides estimated the crowd at 20,000, while the press treated the crowd size as more significant than her speech. As a result, it was also more memorable.
Her next big event was a town hall meeting staged by CNN in Des Moines, Iowa. It drew a record TV audience. It was, however, marred by a mishap when the candidate endorsed Medicare for All, including the mandatory end of private health insurance. She’s had to backtrack from that policy ever since.
In Washington, D.C., Harris is an imposing figure at Senate Judiciary Committee hearings with Republican witnesses. Using her skills as a former prosecutor, she’s aggressive, rude, and sometimes mean. Her specialty is interrupting, an old tactic revived by Democrats to rattle witnesses, and it works.
She also sought to set what appeared to be a perjury trap for Judge Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. It didn’t work. For Harris, the drama of the televised hearings offered a moment for her to emerge as an essential player, and she seized it. For grassroots Democrats, it was their first extended glimpse of Harris. They must have been thrilled by her show of strength and prosecutorial style. She left a strong impression. Booker, who sat next to Harris, left an unfavorable impact, and Klobuchar, a few seats away, left practically none at all.
In her new book, The Truths We Hold, Harris portrays the hearings as historic, and she’s still furious over Kavanaugh’s ascent to the high court. “I worry about the ways his partisanship and temperament will infect the court,” she writes. “I worry about what it will do to the court itself to have a man credibly accused of sexual assault among its justices.”
Harris learned her political combativeness at home. Her parents were immigrants, her father from Jamaica, her mother from India. Both received doctorates at the University of California, Berkeley. Her father taught economics at Stanford, while her mother was a cancer researcher at Berkeley. Both were liberals, active in the civil rights movement and left-wing causes.
Though half-Indian, Harris was raised in the African-American community, attending a black church. For college, she crossed the country to Howard University, the elite historically black institution in Washington, D.C. She returned home to California, attending law school at Berkeley.
She became a career prosecutor in 1990, a relatively obscure one until she started dating Willie Brown, then the state Assembly speaker, in 1994. Brown appointed Harris to two positions, one on the California Medical Assistance Commission and the other on the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board. She earned a combined $169,000 for both.
Shortly after Brown’s election as San Francisco mayor in 1996, she moved on. Brown says he helped Harris in her first race for San Francisco DA. “I have also helped the careers of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a host of other politicians,” he wrote in a San Francisco Chronicle column. “The difference is that Harris is the only one who, after I helped her, sent word that I would be indicted if I ‘so much as jaywalked’ while she was DA.”
Her fling with Brown shouldn’t affect her campaign since it’s more than two decades old, and in politics, that’s ancient history these days. Her problems are mostly with the hard left that take exception to her hard-nosed approach as a prosecutor. Republicans don’t like her, but they recognize she turned out to be a tougher attorney general than expected. The truth is she’s not a bleeding heart politician.
There are gaps in her liberalism. She’s proposed a significant tax cut for the middle class and poor. It provides for a refundable $6,000 tax credit for those making less than $100,000 a year. She doesn’t play games with identity politics. She refers to herself as an “American.” She opposes the death penalty, but as AG, she appealed a judge’s decision declaring it unconstitutional. In San Francisco, she increased the conviction rate and won stiffer sentences by demanding jail time rather than probation for crimes such as robbery and home burglary.
The Democratic left, parts of it anyway, has gone crazy over her performance as a prosecutor. In January, a law professor insisted in the New York Times that Harris shouldn’t claim to have been a “progressive prosecutor.” Word spread quickly of her transgressions, such as shunning advice to “embrace criminal justice reforms.”
At the Des Moines town hall, the second question came from a young man who insisted she’d contradicted her vow to “make criminal justice less punitive and racist.” Among the failures he listed were these: “You’ve adopted the tough on crime mentality. You’ve defended the California death penalty. Your office opposed the release of non-violent prisoners and violated the constitutional rights of various drug defenders.”
Her response lasted more than five minutes, but it wasn’t a defense. She appeared to capitulate to her accusers. She cited reforms such as helping those leaving jail and re-entering society and releasing statistics on the death rates of defendants in custody. And she reiterated, “I’m opposed to the death penalty, I’ve always been opposed to the death penalty, and that’s not going to change.”
There’s a final problem for Harris, which is that expectations are high. She was elevated to front-runner status when it didn’t amount to much. The field of candidates was incomplete. Biden, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, and an unknown number of others have not entered the race and may never do so. Polls didn’t distinguish between real and possible candidates, but she still came in third behind Biden and Sanders. That didn’t make her a powerhouse.
Bill Whalen, a Hoover researcher and one of California’s brightest political analysts, thinks Harris is overrated. “She’s not had a lot of shining moments in California,” he says. “She’s just not that well known.” Nor is she Obama-like. Their histories are different. “One marches for justice,” Whalen said. “The other arrests people.”
So where does Harris fit in, with the first Democratic debate four months away? She’s not as old as Biden, 76, and Sanders, 77. Nor is she as perishable as the younger no-names who are running for president via giant egos. Compared to the other female candidates, she has greater potential to be a leader.
Put all that together, and Kamala Harris has a pretty good chance of being the Democratic nominee for president.
Fred Barnes was a founder and executive editor of the Weekly Standard.
