When Joe Biden called Kamala Harris on the morning of Sunday, July 21, she was in the kitchen of the vice president's residence, a turreted mansion on a hill in northwest Washington. Harris wore sweatpants and a hoodie from her alma mater, Howard University. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, was in Los Angeles, but the house was full of relatives. She had just finished making bacon and pancakes for her two granddaughters and sat down to work on a puzzle with them.
Biden called from isolation, both literal and political; he spent the previous night socially distanced at his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, recovering from COVID and acknowledging the reality that he has lost the confidence of the Democratic Party. Twenty-four days earlier, Biden's idiotic performance in a televised debate with Donald Trump sparked a frantic attempt to replace him at the top of the table. On the phone, Biden told Harris he was ending his re-election bid. Moreover, he said he would support her as a presidential candidate.
New Yorker Festival presents “On the Trail”
Campaign reporters share stories from the front lines of the historic presidential race. Get tickets »
Harris was grateful, although it was unclear whether Biden's support would be enough. Last year, one poll showed she had the lowest approval rating of any vice president since records began. At least a half-dozen other prominent Democrats — including Cabinet members and the governors of Michigan and Pennsylvania — were seen as potentially stronger contenders. During these uncertain weeks, as Biden considered whether to withdraw, strategists and pundits imagined the candidate being chosen through a primary-style contest — perhaps consisting of town halls and an open convention. One typical proposal warned that handing the nomination to Harris without a fight would “set her and the party up for failure.” But Harris was used to facing resistance. At an event in Washington last spring, she told the audience: “Sometimes people open doors for you and leave them open. Sometimes not. And then you have to break down the fucking door.
By the time Biden announced his withdrawal, a brawl was already underway on Sunday afternoon, largely invisible to the public. Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative who helped Harris secure the nomination, told me her team saw the value in moving quickly. “We weren't going to do the crap that other people were asking for,” he said. In his opinion, the open convention was a way to “bypass Kamala.”
After Biden's call, Harris called advisers to her home, and about a dozen people gathered around the table. She sat next to Tony West, her brother-in-law and unofficial consigliere, who was the third-ranking official in Obama's Justice Department. Over the next hours, her team launched an operation that was less an improvisation than the culmination of years spent gaining allies, including some forty-seven hundred delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Harris' staff have made greater efforts to plan and track her encounters across the country – photo ops, meet and greets and other opportunities for well-managed contact – with an eye towards asking for help in organizing the 2028 campaign. Now, on a radically reduced schedule, they opened spreadsheets and started making calls. Harris welcomed the biggest names: Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, top Democrats in the House and Senate, and the heads of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Latino Caucus and the Progressive Caucus. She spoke with leaders of major labor unions and supporters of abortion rights, environmental protection and gun safety. She also called potential opponents Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer and several others. Several asked her a version of the same question: “Do you think there should be a process?” Harris said she was open to it, but added bluntly that she was already soliciting donations from delegates. In other words, good luck with your town halls.
Not everyone immediately agreed to her candidacy. Obama issued a statement expressing confidence in “the process that will produce an outstanding candidate.” Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries praised Biden but said nothing about a successor. But across the country, activists favoring Harris coordinated. Mini Timmaraju, a convention delegate and president of the abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All, told me: “My phone was ringing with people saying, 'Women of color, we need to unite for Vice President Harris. If they don't consolidate around the vice president, we'll create trouble. Harris called Timmaraju from his table and asked her to pledge her support. “I was so excited that I thought, 'Yes! Hell yes“” – Timmaraju recalls. Then, realizing she had just yelled at the vice president, she added, “I'm sorry I yelled at you, ma'am.”
Do 10 P.M., the table was littered with half-eaten pizza and salad, and Harris called over a hundred people. Several Democrats who could challenge her, including Whitmer, Shapiro and Mark Kelly, the Arizona senator, have pledged their support. Aides estimated that they would receive commitments from most of the delegates to the Convention within forty-eight hours. Harris was on track to become the first Democratic candidate since Hubert Humphrey in 1968 to secure the nomination without winning the primary. As Sellers put it: “We finally had an open convention. It was quite simply the shortest open convention in the history of mankind.” Harris never had time to change her sweatpants.
The next morning, with one hundred and six days until the election, she had the support of a majority of Democrats in Congress, two major labor unions, and a growing number of state delegations. Some feared the choice was hasty. Mike Murphy, an anti-Trump Republican strategist, wrote on Twitter: “Good for Democrats to slow down and think about this.” Atlantic published an essay by Graeme Wood entitled “Democrats are making a huge mistake”. Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon told colleagues, “Frankly, I'm worried that it looks like Trump is likely to win.” But Harris's allies in Washington felt she was undervalued, as did many of them. “There is a whole universe of us in this city that no one has ever seen,” Timmaraju told me. “For so long, our interactions and engagements have simply not been considered relevant to political forecasters.” She added: “Look who organized and mobilized in twenty-four hours!”
David Axelrod, chief strategist for both of Obama's presidential campaigns, told me: “There was an argument that she would be strengthened by the contest, but she has demonstrated a mastery of domestic politics, which is one of the tests of a potential candidate. . People respond to competence, and this was a very competent action.” He compared it to a quick military attack. “She didn't receive the nomination,” he said. – She took it.
Within two days, Harris had registered over fifty thousand volunteers. On CNN, commentator Van Jones said, “You can have a whole career and not get fifty thousand volunteers.” The following Monday, the number reached three hundred and sixty thousand. A cascade of fundraising video calls took place, organized by demographic, starting with #WinWithBlackWomen. The one organized for white women – “Karens for Kamala”, as one of the organizers joked – broke the record for the largest Zoom in history. In Florida, in The Villages, a retirement community known as a pro-Trump bastion, Harris supporters held a parade that an organizer on site solemnly called “the Democratic candidate's largest golf cart trailer in nearly a decade.”
Harris' sudden emergence at the forefront of American politics raised the prospect that, as John F. Kennedy put it in 1961, “the torch had been passed to a new generation.” But it also evoked a less frequently quoted part of Kennedy's formulation – his description of Americans as “war-hardened, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.” Over the last eight years, Democrats, like the rest of the country, have seen too much turmoil – Trump, Charlottesville, COVIDGeorge Floyd, January 6, end of Roe – expect easy success.
Annette Gordon-Reed, a law professor and historian at Harvard, watched the enthusiasm grow and was reminded of the power of chance – the politically crucial alchemy of time, biography and context. She told me: “The electorate was perfectly prepared to accept someone who could be presented as the herald of something new, when many people felt stuck, as if our politics would henceforth be nothing but unbridled malice.”
But Harris treated the moment carefully. Unlike Obama, she didn't make a big speech about race; unlike Hillary Clinton, she didn't wear white, Seneca Falls style. Since Clinton ran in 2016, the number of women governors has doubled; There are approximately six hundred women currently serving in state legislatures. But Harris tread so carefully on issues of identity that at times one could lose sight of the fact that a woman descended from Jamaican and Indian immigrants and married to a Jewish man was considered a credible presidential candidate. “Harris doesn't emphasize it, but her appearance alone conveys a message,” Gordon-Reed said. “Something has changed in this country when a person like her can hold this position. This is inspiring to many people. Of course, for a large part of society this is disturbing. And we see where the alarm about having a black president has taken us.”
