Harris puts California at center of politics. Will that help or hurt her?

Kamala Harris clasping her hands as she speaks from a lectern, American flags out of focus in the background

Columnist

Aug. 25, 2024 3 AM PT

When Kamala Harris was formally installed as the Democratic presidential nominee, her home-state delegation had the best seats in the house, right up front.

Visions of the Golden State and a parade of its personalities filled the convention’s four-day program, and passes to California’s after-parties — featuring appearances by John Legend, the Killers and Oakland’s Tony! Toni! Toné — were among the hottest tickets in Chicago.

Suddenly, California is at the center of politics, in a way the most important and populous state in the nation hasn’t been since former Gov. Ronald Reagan was in the White House.

A California Democrat sits atop the party’s presidential ticket for the first time in history, thanks in good part to the machinations of another California Democrat who helped elbow the incumbent — and nominee-in-waiting — aside.

“California is having a moment,” said Don Sipple, a political strategist who helped elect several of the state’s governors, because of “the woman who opened the door and the woman who walked through it.”

(Though, it should be noted, the door-opening woman, Nancy Pelosi, and Harris have never been close. The former House speaker publicly spoke of an “open process” to replace President Biden before endorsing his vice president as the best alternative after Biden gave up his reelection bid.)

With heightened attention comes greater scrutiny, and with that added scrutiny comes a fight to define California — and, by extension, Harris — for the rest of America.

The outcome could very well determine who wins in November.

Is California a sun-kissed incubator of innovation and opportunity that continues to beckon doers and dreamers from the world over, as it has for well over 150 years?

Or is it an overburdened and overstretched collection of struggling communities that fail to provide even the basics — safety, clean shelter, sustaining livelihoods — for a shamefully large portion of its population?

Yes and yes.

“There is plenty of evidence” to support both views, said Jack Pitney, a former Republican operative and professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. He paraphrased Walt Whitman.

“California is large. It contains multitudes,” Pitney said. “It is possible for two things to be true at once.”

Red and blue America. Prosperous and failing California. Two ways of seeing the same thing.

Bill Carrick, longtime political advisor to the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, scoffed at the notion that Harris’ home state will hang like a millstone around the vice president’s neck.

“Ultimately, a presidential campaign is about picking someone who you think will make your life better,” said Carrick, who has worked extensively in national politics. It’s not, he said, about a candidate’s return address.

Sure, Carrick went on, “there are some ideological Republicans who are devoted to Trump” and who eagerly lap up the California-as-hellhole narrative — but “we’re not going to get them anyway.”

Most voters, or at least those who are open to supporting Harris, know very little about the vice president. That, Carrick said, gives her an opportunity to introduce herself — and her home state — on her own terms, “as opposed to the Republican cartoon characterization.”

Maybe so.

Trump and his fellow Republicans, abetted by Fox News and other sympathetic media, will make a case that California is a case study in what goes wrong when Democrats are put in charge. They will hold up Harris, a statewide officeholder for more than a dozen years, as the prime example of its destructive ruling class.

That vastly overstates her power and influence, first as attorney general and then for a relatively brief stint as one of California’s two U.S. senators. But that detail will surely be lost in the fog of campaign warfare.

Harris is, however, an exemplar of her home state in one significant way.

There’s no doubting she reflects the politics and makeup of modern California, just as the two presidents the state yielded, Reagan and Richard M. Nixon, embodied the California of their day and age.

The two men rose to power at a time when California was mostly white and reliably Republican, with a broad and deep conservative streak. By the time Harris arrived in Sacramento after being elected attorney general in 2010, the state was solidly Democratic, increasingly liberal and had more Black and brown than white residents. Not least, there were also significantly more opportunities for a woman in politics.

In that way, Harris and Reagan serve as perfect bookends to the state they represented.

Given the changes of the last 30-plus years, it’s surprising California Democrats haven’t already managed to put one of their own in the White House, said Jim Newton, a biographer and state historian.

“We think of it as such an exceptionally blue place,” he said, “and it’s produced so many national Democratic leaders.”

Among them, the legendarily powerful Rep. Phillip Burton, Pelosi (who succeeded Burton’s widow in representing San Francisco in Congress), and Feinstein. But until Biden chose Harris as his running mate, no California Democrat had come remotely near the White House, though several tried.

Of course, Harris wouldn’t have this shot at the presidency but for a unique set of circumstances. If Biden hadn’t performed so terribly in that June debate, if Democrats hadn’t panicked afterward, if Pelosi and other party leaders hadn’t maneuvered to shove the president aside, the vice president could very well have been out of a job come January.

That still might happen. But give Harris her due for getting where she is. After 20 years in politics, she stands within hailing distance of the White House and making further history from a geographic standpoint.

In politics, as so often in life, timing is everything.