One day in early June, Kamala Harris, the junior senator from California, tapped the glass of the bakery case at a Blue Bottle coffee shop on a non-iconic block in Beverly Hills. No one seemed to know who she was—another polished professional woman, grabbing an afternoon coffee—which was fine by her. She had chosen the spot, presumably for the anonymity. A few minutes later, her body woman delivered her a cookie: caramel chocolate chip, covered in a light snowfall of flaky salt. As Harris broke off small pieces and popped them in her mouth, we talked about her early life, rummaging through the layers for identifying details. The child of immigrant academics who divorced when she was young—her mother, a cancer researcher, came from India, and her father, an economist, from Jamaica—Harris grew up between Oakland and the Berkeley flats, but also spent time in college towns in the Midwest and a few years in Montreal, where her mother was teaching. “A very vivid memory of my childhood was the Mayflower truck,” she told me. “We moved a lot.” She speaks some French. She loves to cook and enjoys dancing, puns. She tells her own story uneasily. “It’s like extracting stuff from me,” she apologized. “I’m not good at talking about myself.”
In the past two years, Harris has been visible to the American public mostly through viral clips of her performances on the Senate Judiciary Committee: stumping Judge Brett Kavanaugh, grilling Attorney General William Barr. A former prosecutor, she deploys an interrogation style that is impatient and knowing, almost amused. The eyebrows go up, a faint smirk plays around the lips: you might as well fess up. “Someone likened her to the mom that knows exactly what’s going on and you’re all in trouble,” Jim Stearns, a political consultant in San Francisco, who has worked with Harris, told me. Pinned by her gaze, the representatives of the Trump Administration are almost pitiable. The former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, pleaded with her to slow down—“I’m not able to be rushed this fast. It makes me nervous!”—as she levelled questions at him about his contacts with Russian nationals during the 2016 campaign. After Barr testified, the hosts of “Pod Save America” joked that the other senators should give all their questions to Harris. From the safety of TV, Trump has begun calling her “nasty,” practically an anointment.
By the time she was forty, Harris—who got her start as a sex-crimes prosecutor in Alameda County—had been elected district attorney of San Francisco, the first woman and the first person of color to hold that position. In 2011, she became attorney general of California—again, first and first. She won her Senate seat in the election that gave Donald Trump the Presidency. Now she is a leading contender in the Democratic effort to unseat him, the only black woman in a field that, with six female candidates, is distinguished by an unprecedented number of women. “My Shot,” from the musical “Hamilton,” often plays at her events.
Harris, who is fifty-four, has a billboard smile, and brown eyes that soften easily but just as readily turn skeptical. President Obama once called her “by far the best-looking attorney general in the country.” (His point, it would seem, was that most of the rest of them were old white men, but it sounded sexist, and he apologized.) Early on, when it became clear that Harris’s political trajectory was likely to take her beyond California, some in the media started referring to her as “the female Obama.” Weren’t both of them accomplished, telegenic, and biracial, with names they had to teach people to pronounce? (She is “Comma-la.”) She and Obama were close—she was among the first to endorse him in California—and he was the transcendent political figure of the new millennium. Harris wanted no part of it. “One thing that above all else drives her crazy is getting reduced to a demographic stereotype,” Sean Clegg, a longtime adviser, says. “She was a prosecutor. They didn’t have the same life experience. She told us, ‘Don’t define me based on something a man did.’ ” Recently, when a reporter asked her about carrying on Obama’s legacy, she said, “I have my own legacy.”
As a black, female law-and-order Democrat, Harris creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. Some liberals, while professing a strong desire to see a woman of color in the White House, fear that California’s former “top cop” won’t fulfill sweeping progressive goals. To them, she seems like a defender of the status quo posing as a reformer. Others are less bothered by her past as a prosecutor—after all, Democrats often struggle to cultivate “toughness”—but believe that the best person to stop Trump’s reëlection is another white man in his eighth decade. To this way of thinking, which contends that the prospect of a liberal black woman President may present too much of a challenge for mainstream America, Harris would make an advantageous Veep. But when, in May, matchmakers in the Congressional Black Caucus speculated about the possibility of a Biden-Harris ticket, she had a snappy retort. “Joe Biden would be a great running mate,” she said.
It was a striking comment for a candidate who was polling at eight per cent (to Biden’s thirty-nine). Harris, however, has demonstrated an ability to defeat incumbents and heirs apparent—who are also white and male—in spite of skepticism about her viability. “When we think about standards we apply to women and candidates of color, we talk about ‘If you don’t meet these, I’m dismissing you,’ ” Mirya Holman, a political scientist at Tulane University who studies gender in elections, told me. “The edges are very waffly for white men.”
I asked Harris whether she thought Americans had different criteria for Presidential candidates depending on gender. This is, after all, the election cycle in which another female candidate, Senator Amy Klobuchar, was described in the Times as being so hangry that she ate a salad with a comb, then ordered a staffer to clean it. “I’m not carefully enough watching—and I probably should—how men are being treated compared to me. I’ve had this experience so many times that I don’t let it distract me,” Harris said. “Here’s the thing: every office I’ve run for I was the first to win. First person of color. First woman. First woman of color. Every time.” (Carol Moseley Braun, a Democrat from Illinois, was the first black woman elected to the Senate, in 1992; Harris is the second, and also the first South Asian senator.)
Early in the primaries, polls can be misleading; audience size is often a better predictor of voters’ interest. (See: Trump.) Harris has shown that she can rivet a crowd. Some twenty thousand people turned out for her first rally, in Oakland, and in late May she drew one of the largest television audiences of the early election season with an assured performance at an MSNBC town hall. She has issued proposals on a host of liberal issues, from protecting abortion rights to reforming gun laws and closing the teacher-pay gap, and announced her support for the Green New Deal, universal health care, and citizenship for Dreamers. But in the first phase of the primary she remained illegible—not the revolutionary, not the wonk; not the fresh-faced millennial or the safe bet. In speeches, she talked about her “3 A.M. agenda,” an insomniac’s almanac of money, health, and safety worries that she hoped Americans would find relevant. To the extent that she had crafted a persona, it was a contradictory one, evading categorization. “She’s the easy-to-listen-to, poorly defined identity candidate,” Samuel Popkin, a political scientist and pollster, told me—a progressive centrist, tacking this way and that.
By the time we met, the first Democratic debate was only three weeks away, and Harris urgently needed to define herself and her platform. Her most serious competitors had managed to make their campaigns feel like the valorous culmination of a life’s work. (Failing to do so, as Beto O’Rourke had, meant fund-raising death.) Harris’s life’s work, however, was proving difficult to digest. What set her apart—her experience at the highest levels of law enforcement—was also complicating. She seemed uncertain about how to create a coherent story of her past, but impatient with the stories that others were offering.
Perhaps, given all the “firsts” she represents, resisting definition had been strategically necessary in her earlier career—better to blend, unobjectionably, like the instrumental version of a pop song. But, in a Presidential primary, the audience demands an electrifying vocal. Five months into the campaign, Harris knew that she hadn’t yet found it. “The challenge is, I think, people rightly want to have a sense of who somebody is,” she told me. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it recently, ’cause I know I need to frame it.”
Harris, in 2019, was supposed to be a senator working alongside the first female President of the United States, not yet a candidate herself. Campaigning in the spring, she sometimes seemed startled, like an understudy who’s just found out that the leading lady broke her foot. Her stump speech, delivered seamlessly, was nonetheless forgettable. As she enumerated the disasters of the economy, the environment, and the Administration, she punctuated the list with a mundane applause line: “Let’s speak truth.” At an intimate fund-raiser in West Los Angeles, I listened to her ramble on when asked a straightforward question about immigration reform, causing consternation in an otherwise friendly room. But she applied herself to the task of candidacy with A-student intensity. After our coffee in Beverly Hills, she was scheduled for back-to-back events and then a red-eye to D.C. “In high school, when I was getting distracted by other things, my mother would say, ‘Don’t do anything half-assed,’ ” Harris told me.
During her Senate campaign, Harris’s penchant for high-end travel made her staff cringe. These days, she carries a small Goyard tote and sits in coach. In April, on a flight to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, connecting through Chicago, Harris found her way to the middle of the plane and sat in an exit row. As it happened, the Reverend Jesse Jackson had a seat nearby, and he switched to sit next to her. She ate a piece of takeout salmon—with a fork, not a comb. In transit, people stopped her at airport gates, in corridors, outside the ladies’ room. She always had a minute to hear from them, nodding thoughtfully, head slightly cocked, while her body woman collected an e-mail address for follow-up.
The next morning, Harris was scheduled to appear at a houseparty in Des Moines. En route, she stopped at a coffee shop near Drake University, an “impromptu” visit to a place pre-stocked with law students. “Oh! Hi!” she said, walking through the front door. “Surprise—or not,” she added, seeming embarrassed by the contrivance. She approached a group of students. “Contract law!” she said, glancing at the thick book on the table in front of them. “I had this awful professor, just awful—made you feel small. But so much about contract law is just human behavior.” A woman presented a piebald English bulldog, the Drake mascot, and Harris gamely crouched on the floor, scratching his belly, till the handler excused him, saying, “He smells food.”