San Francisco is reeling. This was where Kamala Harris, the US vice-president, cut her political teeth and rose up through the ranks — and has formed the basis of her political and financial support for the last three decades.
“There’s existential silence today,” said Gil Duran, who worked with Harris in the attorney-general’s office in Sacramento. “And all flavours of panic. People are realising this was a massive miscalculation of epic proportions.”
Duran, 48, does not see any political way forward for Harris. He said: “Has she come all this way just to lose at the most consequential moment in American history? Sadly the answer turned out to be yes.
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“That seems to me like the end of a political career, not the beginning of one. This looks like game over. It’s tragic, for her and the country.”
Harris has just finished the three-month sprint of her presidential campaign, the final step in a 35-year career of shrewd political moves this week — and a fall at the final hurdle. She called Donald Trump to concede the race as his electoral college count stood at 292 to her 224.
So what next for Harris, who has had a career of near misses, hair-line wins, hard work and perfect positioning, with the right support in the right places accelerating her rise through the ranks?
“Everybody is devastated,” said Mark Buell, 82, a Democrat donor from San Francisco who worked on Harris’s campaign team when she ran for the district attorney’s office in 2002.
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There is also disappointment among the golden state’s politicos that President Biden did not give Harris more time before the election, leaving her with just three months to introduce herself as a presidential candidate to the electorate.
Buell said: “I don’t see a spot [for her]… She’s been in the senate. If she was thinking of coming back to run for governor, the current lieutenant governor is heavily in that race now and has a certain advantage. Of course her name if she was interested, it might be an option. But I don’t know if she’d want it. It would be seen as a step down.”
The attention has now turned to Gavin Newsom, the governor of California. Buell added: “I could see the governor moving to become leader of the opposition. He comes to it naturally and he recognises that Trump will seek some kind of retribution from California because we are just the opposite of everything he stands for… He has the spotlight on him.”
Should Harris look toward succeeding Newsom as governor, Richie Greenberg, a Republican political commentator based in San Francisco, believes she would struggle to motivate her fundraising base in the city after her loss on the national stage.
He said: “She would have to begin her race within the year, maybe less. And people here didn’t consider anything else other than her winning the presidency. Those plans have been dashed. No one was even talking about alternatives.”
The people he has spoken to do not see a governor’s run as being viable. He added: “They’re all wondering if it was a mistake installing Harris as a replacement for Biden without her earning it and I don’t know if people are willing to part with the cash again. One person told me there’s no way they would fund that — it would divide the California party if she ran.”
The other alternative route for Harris is as a Democrat spokeswoman. “She may have some role in the national party,” he said. “At this point she’s going to have to sit back, lick her wounds and see what role she has.”
From the bottom rungs of her early legal career, Harris, 60, propelled herself from trial lawyer to district attorney (DA), the county’s chief prosecutor who makes criminal charging decisions, navigating her way through the choppy waters of California politics.
Her political career began at Howard University, Washington DC, which is where the presidential candidate was expected to watch the results roll in. It provided an elite education, steeped in progressive political history and deeply respectful of its origin one of the top performing historically black colleges in the country. Howard University was founded to educate African-Americans who were otherwise prohibited from universities. Harris pledged her commitment to Alpha Kappa Alpha, a century-old, highly regarded sorority. As for many, it was the source of her closest friendships, establishing a firm networking base.
If her politics were influenced by student life, it was the courtroom that honed them. After law school, she won a place on the clerkship programme at Alameda DA office in Oakland, California, the city she was born in, where she worked as a trial lawyer for the next decade. In court, Harris was “for the people”, prosecuting perpetrators of gang rape, child abuse and domestic violence. Darryl Stallworth, 59, who worked with her, said: “We were the soldiers in that office, putting on back-to-back murder cases, drug cases. It was high volume and it was intense.”
At 29, her course was changed. She met the California speaker Willie Brown, then 60, and they began dating. Then running to be mayor of San Francisco, Brown was one of the most powerful politicians in the state and existed at the centre of his own perfectly built political machine. “[Brown] is known in every neighbourhood, every party, every living room She definitely had some prominence because she was hanging out with Willie,” said Aaron Peskin, 60, who then worked at a non-profit organisation before becoming city supervisor. The relationship ended after a year but Harris continued to rise through the city’s social ranks. San Francisco is “very politically insular”, said Sharmin Bock, 62, who worked with Harris at the time. “You’re either in or you’re not in.”
Harris went to fundraisers, galas and fashion shows, becoming friends with millionaire real-estate tycoons, socialites and politicians, forming relationships that put her in Hillary Clinton and Newsom’s orbits. “Kamala got on the inside because she had friends,” said Summer Tompkins Walker, 57, the daughter of Clinton’s best friend, Susie Tompkins Buell. “She knew how.”
In 2002, aged 38, Harris decided to run for DA of San Francisco, a democratically elected political office determined by a local vote.
Much of her campaign team she met through San Francisco society. This included Susie Tompkins Buell’s husband, Mark Buell, a property developer and Democrat donor who offered to chair her finance committee after a falling-out with the incumbent DA, Terence Hallinan. Harris was the underdog but a fresh face, running on a moderate ticket, promising law, order and common sense. After starting at 6 per cent in the polls, in November 2003 she defeated Hallinan with 56 per cent of the vote. As DA of San Francisco for nine years, she says she increased Hallinan’s felony conviction rate from 51 to 71 per cent. When it came to her run for attorney-general (AG) of California in 2011, she started out again with longer odds, largely unrecognisable to the sprawling masses of Los Angeles, where the majority of votes were. Harris won by 0.85 per cent after her opponent made an irrecoverable gaffe, a near death experience in her political life.
“Things broke her way every step of the way,” said Duran. “It’s not like everyone loved her and she floated to the top. She had a special gift and she navigated but I don’t know how many people expected it to happen this quickly.”
Harris was known among peers and the electorate as a largely effective, uncontroversial AG, a role that oversees all civil cases involving the state and criminal cases on appeal. She gained name recognition nationally due to her negotiations with banks after the financial crash, winning a $20 billion settlement for homeowners. The deal also introduced her to Beau Biden, then AG of Delaware, and in turn his father, President Biden.
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Her voting record, however, was so abstinent many interpreted it as tactical. She did not take a view on a controversial ballot that lowered penalties for minor felonies; or on investigations into fatal police shootings; or on the legalisation of recreational cannabis. She backed the latter in 2018, two years after the public voted in favour of decriminalisation.
While AG, based in Sacramento, California, Harris was set up on a blind date in 2013 by a friend with Doug Emhoff, an entertainment lawyer who lived in Los Angeles. The two married in San Francisco the following year.
In 2015, the chess board moved again. Barbara Boxer, the senator for California, announced her retirement. Newsom, then lieutenant-governor of the state, made it clear he would not run but would wait for the governor seat to open. His eyes were on the White House. But it was Harris’s move into the Senate in 2017 that proved to be the right one. As senator, she struggled to find a signature cause and did not pass a long list of laws. But she made a name for herself in the Senate committee rooms and the clips of her as a forthright questioner were widely circulated online.
Only two years into the job, she made her first run for the Democratic presidential nomination. She withdrew before the primaries, citing a lack of funds but after a huge drop in the polls and an apparent inability to establish consistent positions on healthcare and the economy. This was the first time Harris had lost a political race but it positioned her well for what was to come next.
President Biden selected her as his running-mate. She was 20 years younger and the first black and south Asian woman to appear on a major party’s national ticket. She was made vice-president in 2020, with a remit to lead efforts on the US-Mexico border. She was criticised for lack of progress, taking six months to plan her first trip there, and presiding over a worsening situation. Instead she made abortion rights central to her roles.
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With the 2024 election looming, it looked as though Harris would be on the ticket, again as VP. After Biden’s disastrous debate against Trump in June, she continued to support him, never joining the calls for his resignation. When he eventually announced he was stepping aside, she manoeuvred quickly to lock down the support of the 1,976 party delegates she needed. She was crowned the Democrats’ presidential candidate only 95 days before the electorate went to the polling stations.
California has backed Harris for three decades of her career. But its brutal, small-world politics might accelerate forward beyond her, focusing on their next rising star, without a place for her in the same chambers she rose upwards and out from.
“People were so convinced Kamala would win and it didn’t work out across the country, she couldn’t sell it — or people weren’t buying it,” said Duran. “It is a great shame. To be on such a long path, fighting aggressively to position herself to get to where she arrived in 2024, only to lose? I don’t see that there’s a viable path in politics as an elected official.”
