Sen. Kamala Harris announced that she’s running for president Monday, jumping into a broad field of Democrats competing for the chance to take on President Trump and testing whether an increasingly liberal Democratic Party can unite behind a former prosecutor.
The first-term California senator, who’s reached national prominence over the last two years for her tough questioning of Trump’s appointees and her prosecutorial case against the administration, painted her run as a battle to protect national values.
“The future of our country depends on you and millions of others lifting our voices to fight for our American values,” Harris, 54, declared in a video announcing her campaign.
Her long-anticipated announcement came on Twitter and Good Morning America on the morning of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a symbolic move highlighting her history-making status as only the second African-American woman elected to the U.S. Senate.
“Voters have never seen a candidate quite like Kamala Harris before,” said Nathan Ballard, a San Francisco strategist who’s known Harris for decades but isn’t associated with her campaign. “They’re so fed up with Trump that they want to reach for the very opposite to him — and that’s Kamala.”
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Harris’ kickoff campaign rally will be in her hometown of Oakland on Sunday. Her first campaign swing will include an appearance on “The Daily Show” with Trevor Noah on Thursday, an event in South Carolina on Friday, and a town hall on CNN in Iowa next Monday.
A Harris presidential bid has long been in the works, and she’s been mentioned as a 2020 contender since even before her 2016 Senate victory. Her campaign headquarters is expected to be based in Baltimore, with another office in Oakland, and her staff will include campaign manager Juan Rodriguez, who led her Senate bid, and campaign chair Maya Harris, her sister and a former senior policy advisor to Hillary Clinton.
A former San Francisco District Attorney and California Attorney General, Harris has fashioned her legal experience into a key part of her political identity — her campaign slogan is “For the People,” a prosecutor’s traditional introduction in court. But that record also contains pitfalls in a Democratic primary: Some liberals are already questioning how progressive her policies were during her years in law enforcement, pointing to instances where her office opposed efforts to overturn potentially wrongful convictions and other decisions she made.
“There is a lot about what I did as a prosecutor that I’m proud of, including a recognition that there are fundamental flaws with this criminal justice system,” Harris said at a news conference Monday.
She’s the first California Democrat to run for the White House since former Gov. Jerry Brown made an insurgent bid in 1992. But she likely won’t be the last to join this campaign: Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and East Bay congressman Eric Swalwell, who spent MLK Day at the reverend’s former Atlanta church, are also considering bids.
Already in the race are Harris’ fellow Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, as well as Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro, and Maryland congressman John Delaney. Other potential contenders include former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke.
Early polls have found Harris in single-digits in the race nationally, and many Democrats outside of California don’t have much of an opinion on her.
“There’s a lot of agreement on policy across the Democratic field, so the challenge for Senator Harris is to carve out a unique message that allows her to break through when there are other names that’ve been on the national scene a lot longer,” said Ben LaBolt, a San Francisco strategist who was Obama’s campaign spokesman and isn’t working for any 2020 candidate.
Harris’ path to the nomination would depend on building a similar coalition to that of former President Barack Obama, who was carried to office by uniting liberal, nonwhite and young Democrats. Her supporters are hoping she can hold her own in the early Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary before doing especially well in South Carolina, with its strong contingent of black voters, and Nevada, which has many Latinos and close ties with California.
The California primary will be held just after those early states vote on March 3 — on the same day as a handful of other large states — giving Harris an opportunity to score big in her home base.
Harris was born in Oakland and grew up in Berkeley, the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica. Her parents met as graduate students at UC Berkeley and divorced when she was a young child, and she was raised mostly by her mother Shyamala, a physician. Her dad was an economics professor at Stanford.
“My parents were very active in the Civil Rights Movement, and that’s the language I grew up hearing,” Harris said on Good Morning America. “It was about a belief that we are a country that was founded on noble ideals, and we are the best of who we are when we fight to achieve those ideals.”
JUST IN: @KamalaHarris on announcing she will be running for president in 2020: "I feel a responsibility to stand up and fight for who we are." https://t.co/qUX1sERxxZ pic.twitter.com/NcSHFTRIny
— Good Morning America (@GMA) January 21, 2019
After moving to Montreal for high school, Harris went to Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C., where she ran her first political campaign, winning a race for freshman class representative. She also interned for California Sen. Alan Cranston, who occupied the same Senate seat she holds today.
She got her law degree at UC Hastings and worked as a prosecutor in Alameda County and San Francisco, trying murder and other felony cases. She won a bruising race for San Francisco district attorney in 2003, defeating Terence Hallinan, her old boss, and went on to be elected state attorney general in 2010.
In state political circles, Harris gained a reputation for tiptoeing around contentious issues. One exception: her 2004 decision as San Francisco DA not to bring the death penalty against a man accused of fatally shooting a police officer, which earned her the ire of police unions and most of the state’s elected officials. She also made waves by rejecting a settlement offer with big banks in a national case over abusive mortgage practices, eventually winning more money for state homeowners in 2012.
“She was trying to create some justice in a system that is fundamentally flawed,” said Lateefah Simon, a longtime friend of Harris’ who worked with her in the DA’s office and currently serves on the BART board. “I don’t know anybody tougher than that woman. It’s not just that she’s black and female and Indian and a lawyer, but she’s a warrior.”
In 2016, Harris ran for the U.S. Senate seat of retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer, defeating fellow Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez in the state’s first top-of-the-ticket race featuring two candidates of the same party. It was clear that Trump was on his way to the White House when she came onstage for her victory speech at a Los Angeles nightclub, and she gave an early preview of her new political tone, repeating the word “fight” 33 times in eight minutes.
I'm running for president. Let's do this together. Join us: https://t.co/9KwgFlgZHA pic.twitter.com/otf2ez7t1p
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) January 21, 2019
Over the last two years in the Senate, Harris has cast herself at the head of California’s resistance to Trump. Her prosecutorial experience has come in handy in hearings where she’s grilled Trump officials — including Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh — in exchanges that often went viral online. She’s regaled liberal audiences with stories about calling former Homeland Security secretary and chief of staff John Kelly at home during the administration’s ban on immigrants from several Muslim-majority countries.
Harris has introduced legislation that would launch a new tax credit for working families, help undocumented immigrants get attorneys, reform the cash bail system and improve conditions for women in federal prisons, among other measures. But in a Republican-controlled Senate, none of Harris’ major bills have gotten very far.
She’s also invested heavily in expanding her reach on social media, using Facebook ads to grow her list of supporters — a tool that could be important in an expensive presidential race where small-dollar donors will be key.
In trips around the country in recent months — including to key early caucus and primary states such as Iowa and South Carolina — Harris has road-tested a message of embracing diversity and progressive values.
“This is a moment to fight for the best of who we are,” Harris told rapt fans in Iowa City last October. “We are better than this.”
