If you showed up at Sisters Chapel at Atlanta\u2019s Spelman College last Friday hoping to divine some sort of 2020-themed meaning from Kamala Harris\u2019s address, you were amply rewarded. The potential presidential aspirant planned to ruminate on four words from the school\u2019s hymn \u2014 \u201cundaunted by the fight\u201d \u2014 she told the audience at the historically black women\u2019s college, proceeding to outline why she believes \u201cwe are at an inflection point in the history of our country;\u201d why she thinks \u201cif something is worth fighting for, it is a fight worth having;\u201d how \u201cin this moment, a big fight worth having is a fight for the best of who we are as Americans;\u201d and, finally, why \u201cbeing undaunted by the fight means identifying the fight worth having, and \u2014 this is important \u2014 not asking permission to solve it.\u201d When the first-term California senator initially decided to run for district attorney in San Francisco, she said, \u201cYou can imagine what I was told. It\u2019s what you will be told many times in your life: \u2018It\u2019s not your turn, it\u2019s not your time, there is nobody like you who has done that before, it\u2019s going to be a lot of work.\u2019 God forbid we want to work hard. And I didn\u2019t listen, and part of my advice to you is: You don\u2019t listen, either. You do not listen when people tell you that. In fact, I like to say, I eat \u2018No\u2019 for breakfast. And so, I decided to run.\u201d<\/p>\n
The most revealing piece of her swing through the state, however, was not Harris\u2019s hinting about her political future. Rather, it was the emphasis she placed on another message laced throughout her comments, nowhere more explicitly than when she explained, \u201cMy mother used to tell me, \u2018Kamala, you may be the first to do many things. Make sure you are not the last.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s because Harris, who is 54 and the only African-American woman currently in the Senate (and the second, ever), has in recent years \u2014 but especially now \u2014 quietly prioritized supporting a sprawling group of young people of color running for office. They\u2019re often first-time candidates, and they\u2019re often women. The effort has included joint appearances, but also hours of behind-the-scenes advice and political groundwork for a wide range of newcomers. It\u2019s no unusual thing for an influential politician to help other candidates, but in Harris\u2019s case it\u2019s an especially long-running and personal practice that she doesn\u2019t go out of her way to publicize. It\u2019s something for which, she told me after her speech, \u201cI do feel a responsibility. It\u2019s about paying it forward: other people did it for me, and it\u2019s kind of like, this is what you do. It\u2019s not whimsical. It\u2019s \u2014 literally, I feel \u2014 a duty.\u201d<\/p>\n
The result is a burgeoning coast-to-coast network of Harris endorsees who, in many cases, feel serious loyalty to the senator considering a run for nationwide office next year. One Democratic fundraiser who is fully supportive of a Harris 2020 campaign said he\u2019d heard other fans speak of the group as an obvious political asset. But building this kind of network isn\u2019t a strategy at all, Harris insists (\u201cPeople are cynical,\u201d she said, eyebrow arched). Those who have been close to her for years agree: one told me Harris has privately spoken about the importance of her mentoring and endorsing work at least since her early days as district attorney, almost 15 years ago. She\u2019s the longtime mentor, for example, of London Breed, who is now San Francisco\u2019s mayor. \u201cThere\u2019s a saying in the community where I grew up: Each one, pull one,\u2019\u201d Harris said. \u201cThe idea being that \u2014 you know, it\u2019s self-explanatory. Each one, pull one. You get there, and you pull others up with you.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is, in some ways, not a surprising activity for Harris, whose own rise in politics inspired further participation as soon as it started: when she began running for district attorney, in 2002, she spoke with her friend Andrea Dew Steele about how she needed to create handouts describing her campaign for voters. Steele agreed, and the pair drew some up. Steele then turned around and founded Emerge America, which, 16 years later, is now an influential organization that recruits and trains women candidates across the country.<\/p>\n
When it\u2019s helpful, Harris shows up for candidates, or endorses them publicly. Her Georgia trip included stops on behalf of gubernatorial hopeful Stacey Abrams, who would be the first black woman elected governor in any state, and congressional candidate Lucy McBath, who rose to prominence as an activist after her son, Jordan Davis, was killed in 2012. When we spoke, Harris had recently returned east from a campaign swing with Deidre DeJear, the nominee for secretary of state aiming to become Iowa\u2019s first ever black statewide official. Soon after, she was in Florida with Andrew Gillum, who would be that state\u2019s first African-American governor. Those candidates all have wide mainstream support from national figures in the party.<\/p>\n
But in the last two years, Harris has endorsed Baltimore state\u2019s attorney Marilyn Mosby for reelection, Tony Thurmond to be California\u2019s state superintendent of public instruction, and Rob Richardson to be Ohio\u2019s state treasurer, too. At times, her support lands in the midst of messy primaries, gaining her significant gratitude from the candidates while exposing her to a measure of political risk: in Wisconsin\u2019s gubernatorial race, she backed underdog Mahlon Mitchell, the head of a firefighters union, against the party\u2019s favored contenders. He lost his primary. In Maryland, she threw her weight behind former NAACP chief Ben Jealous, who was running for governor, while he was locked in his own contentious contest with other Democrats. He won his primary.<\/p>\n
The bulk of any of these processes, however, happens behind closed doors. When Harris heard about Jahana Hayes, a Connecticut teacher running for Congress this year, the two connected over the phone multiple times, and then sat down to meet in Washington. \u201cShe was offering me advice just when I was kind of nervous in the beginning, about: \u2018Do I have a message that people want to hear?\u2019 And she said yes,\u201d said Hayes, who stepped into \u2014 and then won \u2014 a competitive primary against the state party\u2019s pick, a local legislator.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had gotten other endorsements from other people and other groups, but this one meant so much to me because there are only a handful of people who understand, who\u2019ve done it,\u201d said Hayes, who will be the first black Democrat elected to Congress from Connecticut if she wins next week.<\/p>\n
When she sits down with candidates and aspiring politicians, Harris explained, some of the advice she offers is practical, and some is more about talking through what it\u2019s like to run. \u201cIt ranges from a conversation about, \u2018You can do this, don\u2019t be deterred,\u2019 [to,] \u2018Get out there and tell your truth and be confident in it,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cAnother part of it is just the cold, hard reality of what it means to run for office, and that conversation is: \u2018Pick a good campaign team.\u2019 That conversation is: \u2018If you are like me\u2019 \u2014 and almost every woman I\u2019ve met who runs for office is the same way, where we were raised the same way, to be independent, and part of that was that you\u2019re not to ask anyone for money \u2014 and then you run for office, all of a sudden you gotta ask everyone for money. You\u2019ve got this little psychological thing that really creates a problem in a way that doesn\u2019t necessarily impact men. To, you know, advice about how to just talk to the people in the party who need to be talked with, to claim your stake.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the case of Angela Alsobrooks, the pair connected only after Alsobrooks was elected to be the state\u2019s attorney for Prince George\u2019s County in Maryland, in 2010. At the time, Harris was a district attorney running to be California\u2019s attorney general. Alsobrooks, then campaigning to be the first female and first black woman state\u2019s attorney in her county, read about Harris in Essence<\/em> Magazine, then picked up her book, and started talking about her on the campaign trail as a model, noting her reentry and recidivism program. Harris caught wind of what Alsobrooks was doing, and made sure to be one of the first people to call her after she won, inviting her to San Francisco to learn more about the aforementioned program.<\/p>\n Six years later, Alsobrooks joined Harris for the final week of her California senatorial campaign, speaking on her behalf at churches. About a year after that, Alsobrooks said, she told Harris she was considering running for county executive. Harris met her at a local restaurant and spent two hours mapping out the shape of Alsobrooks\u2019s campaign with her, walking through her positions on issue after issue.<\/p>\n In 2018, Harris is making sure she\u2019s not the last. This year, she said, \u201cthere are a lot of [candidates] who are women, who are women of color, who are people of color. I mean, people who have not traditionally [represented the] stereotype [of] who holds these offices.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd that\u2019s the key, I guess,\u201d continued the person who may soon embark on an attempt to become the first African-American woman in the Oval Office. \u201cStereotypes about who holds which positions.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you showed up at Sisters Chapel at Atlanta\u2019s Spelman College last Friday hoping to divine some sort of 2020-themed meaning from Kamala Harris\u2019s address, you were amply rewarded. The potential presidential aspirant planned to ruminate on four words from the school\u2019s hymn \u2014 \u201cundaunted by the fight\u201d \u2014 she told the audience at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":3244,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[2466,1886,1178,2467,2468,2447,2470,2469],"class_list":["post-3243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-stories","tag-kamala-harris","tag-maryland","tag-senator","tag-skepticism","tag-trailblazers","tag-unity","tag-virginia","tag-washington"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n