Kamala Harris’s Hundred-Day Campaign

When Joe Biden called Kamala Harris on the morning of Sunday, July 21st, she was in the kitchen at the Vice-President’s residence, a turreted mansion on a hill in Northwest Washington. Harris was wearing sweatpants and a hoodie from her alma mater, Howard University. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, was in Los Angeles, but the house was bustling with relatives. She had just finished making bacon and pancakes for two grandnieces before sitting down with them to work on a jigsaw puzzle.

Biden was calling from isolation, both literal and political; he had spent the previous night socially distanced at his vacation house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, recovering from COVID and absorbing the reality that he had lost the confidence of the Democratic Party. Twenty-four days earlier, Biden’s addled performance in a televised debate with Donald Trump had sparked a frantic effort to replace him at the top of the ticket. On the phone, Biden told Harris that he was ending his bid for reëlection. More to the point, he said that he would be endorsing her as the Presidential nominee.

Harris was grateful—though it wasn’t clear that Biden’s support would suffice. Last year, one poll found that she had the lowest approval rating of any Vice-President since its records began. At least half a dozen other prominent Democrats—including Cabinet members and the governors of Michigan and Pennsylvania—were seen as potentially stronger contenders. During the uncertain weeks when Biden was deliberating over whether to drop out, strategists and pundits had imagined selecting a candidate through some kind of primarylike contest—composed, perhaps, of town halls and an open convention. One typical proposal warned that handing Harris the nomination without a fight would “set her and the Party up to fail.” But Harris was accustomed to facing resistance. At an event in D.C. last spring, she told the audience, “Sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open. Sometimes they won’t. And then you need to kick that fucking door down.”

By the time Biden announced his withdrawal, that Sunday afternoon, a scramble was already under way, largely out of public view. Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative who helped Harris secure the nomination, told me that her team saw value in moving swiftly. “We weren’t going to do this bullshit that other people were asking for,” he said. In his view, an open convention was a way to “skip over Kamala.”

After Biden’s call, Harris had summoned aides to her house, and a dozen or so people gathered around a table. She sat beside Tony West, her brother-in-law and unofficial consigliere, who had served as the third-ranking official in Obama’s Justice Department. In the hours that followed, her team undertook an operation that was less an improvisation than a culmination of years spent cultivating allies, including some forty-seven hundred delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, in 2022, Harris’s staff had been taking greater pains to plan and track her encounters around the country—photo lines, meet and greets, and other occasions of well-managed access—with an eye toward soliciting help to mount a campaign in 2028. Now, on a radically truncated schedule, they opened spreadsheets and started making calls. Harris took the biggest names: Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, the top Democrats in the House and Senate, and the heads of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, and the Progressive Caucus. She talked to the leaders of major unions and to advocates for abortion rights, the environment, and gun safety. She also called potential opponents—Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, and a handful of others. Several asked her a version of the same question: “Do you think there should be some kind of process?” Harris said that she was open to it but added, pointedly, that she was already seeking pledges from delegates. In other words, good luck with your town halls.

Not everyone signed on to her candidacy right away. Obama released a statement voicing confidence in “a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.” The former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and the House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries praised Biden—while conspicuously saying nothing about a successor. But, around the country, activists who favored Harris were coördinating. Mini Timmaraju, a delegate to the Convention and the head of the abortion-rights group Reproductive Freedom for All, told me, “My phone was ringing off the hook from people, like, ‘Women of color, we’ve got to stand together for Vice-President Harris. If they don’t consolidate around the Vice-President, we’re going to create trouble.’ ” Harris called Timmaraju from her table to ask her to pledge support. “I was so excited, I was, like, ‘Yes! Hell yes,’ ” Timmaraju recalled. Then, realizing that she had just shouted at the Vice-President, she added, “I’m sorry I yelled at you, Ma’am.”

By 10 P.M., the table was littered with half-eaten pizza and salad, and Harris had called more than a hundred people. Several Democrats who might have challenged her, including Whitmer, Shapiro, and Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona, had promised their support. Aides estimated that they’d have pledges from a majority of Convention delegates within forty-eight hours. Harris was on track to be the first Democratic nominee since Hubert Humphrey, back in 1968, to secure the nomination without winning a primary. As Sellers put it, “We ended up having an open convention. It was just the shortest open convention in the history of mankind.” Harris never had time to change out of her sweats.

By the following morning, with a hundred and six days until the election, she had endorsements from a majority of Democrats in Congress, two large unions, and a growing number of state delegations. Some worried that the choice was hasty. Mike Murphy, an anti-Trump Republican strategist, tweeted, “Dems would be well advised to slow down and think this through.” The Atlantic ran an essay by Graeme Wood titled “Democrats Are Making a Huge Mistake.” The Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon told colleagues, “To be totally honest here, my worry is that it seems like Trump is likely to win.” But Harris’s allies in Washington believed that she was being underestimated, just as many of them had been. “There’s a whole universe of us in this town that nobody saw,” Timmaraju told me. “For so long, our interactions and engagements just weren’t considered relevant for political prognosticators.” She added, “Look who organized and mobilized within twenty-four hours!”

David Axelrod, who was the chief strategist for both of Obama’s Presidential campaigns, told me, “There was an argument that she would be strengthened by a competition, but she showed a mastery of the internal politics, which is one test of a potential candidate. People respond to competence, and that was a very competent operation.” He compared it to a rapid military strike. “She didn’t get handed this nomination,” he said. “She took it.”

In two days, Harris signed up more than fifty thousand volunteers. On CNN, the commentator Van Jones said, “You can do your whole career and not get fifty thousand volunteers.” By the following Monday, the number had reached three hundred and sixty thousand. There was a cascade of fund-raising video calls, organized by demographic, starting with #WinWithBlackWomen. The one arranged for white women—“Karens for Kamala,” as one organizer joked—broke the record for history’s biggest Zoom. In Florida, at the Villages, a retirement community known as a pro-Trump stronghold, Harris supporters staged a parade that an organizer on the scene solemnly called the “largest golf cart caravan for a Democratic candidate in nearly a decade.”

Harris’s sudden arrival at the forefront of American politics summoned the prospect that, as John F. Kennedy put it in 1961, the “torch has been passed to a new generation.” But it also evoked a less often cited part of Kennedy’s formulation—his description of Americans as “tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.” In the past eight years, Democrats, like the rest of the country, have witnessed too much tumult—Trump, Charlottesville, COVID, George Floyd, January 6th, the end of Roe—to expect easy success.

Annette Gordon-Reed, a Harvard law professor and historian, watched the surge of enthusiasm and was reminded of the power of contingency—the politically crucial alchemy of timing, biography, and context. She told me, “The electorate was perfectly positioned to accept an individual who could be portrayed as a harbinger of the new when lots of people were feeling stuck, as if our politics would be nothing but unbridled nastiness from now on.”

Yet Harris treated the moment gingerly. Unlike Obama, she did not give a big speech on race; unlike Hillary Clinton, she didn’t dress in the white of Seneca Falls. Since Clinton ran in 2016, the number of female governors has doubled; some six hundred more women now sit in state legislatures. Harris, though, trod so carefully on matters 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 being regarded as a plausible candidate for the Presidency. “Harris doesn’t emphasize it, but her appearance alone carries the message,” Gordon-Reed said. “Something has changed in this country when a person like her can be in this position. That is inspiring to many people. Of course, to a substantial segment of the population, it is alarming. And we see where the alarm about having had a Black President has taken us.”