Kamala Harris is surging in early 2020 primary election polls after her performance during the first Democratic National Committee debate series in Miami.
The first-term senator for California, 54, was languishing in fifth place before 20 candidates vying for the right to challenge President Trump next year walked out onto the debate stage last week, according to public opinion research. But after her provocative confrontation with Joe Biden over his opposition to busing, a policy aimed at encouraging integration after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, and his positive recollections of working with segregationists in the Senate during the 1970s, a CNN poll released Monday ranks her second behind the former vice president, leapfrogging over rivals Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren.
The former California state attorney general and San Francisco district attorney leveraged her performance in the debate into a $2 million fundraising haul, buttressed in part by “That little girl was me” merchandise promoting her story about the toll Biden’s stance against busing took on her as a biracial child growing up in Oakland, California. Her campaign for the White House has also picked up a slew of endorsements since Miami.
Harris hasn’t attracted this magnitude of glowing press coverage since she announced her presidential bid in January on the steps of Oakland City Hall before 20,000 people, the largest audience convened for a 2020 announcement, raising $12 million during the first quarter of the year. Yet in the intervening months, the Howard University and University of California, Hastings law school graduate has been outshone on the trail by contenders such as Warren, a Massachusetts senator who’s similarly built momentum on the back of town halls and legislative proposal roll-outs.
Harris hasn’t been entirely absent from the spotlight, Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh, of Boston’s Dewey Square Group, argued, citing the California Democrat’s questioning of Attorney General William Barr during a May Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. She grilled Barr on his failure to examine the underlying evidence of special counsel Robert Mueller’s federal Russia investigation report, before calling for his resignation. She additionally touted her prosecutorial chops last month during an impassioned speech at the South Carolina Democratic Party convention in Columbia, laying out her case against Trump.
Nevertheless, Harris’ “challenge” is consistency as she seeks to earn voters’ trust, Marsh said. Voters want a reliable candidate because it translates to how the hopeful will operate if they win the nomination and are elected to the White House, she explained.
Vic Fingerhut, a longtime Democratic adviser, concurred, but said the ebbs and flows were not solely principal-driven but affected by media decisions about what, and what not, to cover.
“I don’t think any of these people think they can rest for one day, they’re in a very competitive field, and they’re fighting for attention from an electorate that is really not paying a lot of attention to them at the moment,” Fingerhut told the Washington Examiner. “The media rather than the parties are making the major decisions on the candidates.”
Harris’ personal biography figures to be an increasingly important part of her campaign. Born in Oakland in 1964 to an Indian breast cancer scientist, who later died from colon cancer, and a Jamaican-born Stanford University economics professor, the senator routinely tells voters she “was raised by parents who spent full time marching and shouting about this thing called justice and fighting for equality.” Kamala Harris and her younger sister Maya Harris, 52, a former Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign alumna who currently serves as chairwoman to the senator’s 2020 efforts, were mostly raised by their mother after their parents’ divorce.
Harris enrolled in first grade in 1970 at Thousand Oaks, a school located about a 40-minute bus ride away in Berkeley Hills, a more affluent area compared to her Berkeley Flats neighborhood. It was Thousand Oaks’ third year of integration, transitioning from 2.5% black in 1963 to 40.2% black in 1969, according to the New York Times.
The experience was formative for Harris, who referenced Brown v. Board of Education at the time of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s politically charged confirmation hearings.
“I wouldn’t be part of Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings had Chief Justice Warren not been on the Supreme Court to lead the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board,” Harris tweeted in 2018. “Had someone else been there, I may not have become a U.S. Senator. I know the impact one Justice can have.”
Harris will next campaign in Iowa, spending three days in the Hawkeye State over the Fourth of July holiday.
