Backstage, Kamala Harris pulled aside Jahana Hayes. She’d give the congresswoman her local press boost and photo op, but first, the vice president needed to talk about why she was popping into Connecticut of all places during the final month of her 2022 midterm campaigning: Hayes wasn’t raising enough money.
Pick it up, Harris told her. National Democrats wouldn’t stick with Hayes if she didn’t help herself.
Long before she became the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris had started quietly nurturing a network of next-generation politicians – almost all women of color, many with backgrounds in the law, many who didn’t know who else was in the group. Often, that has been through check-in calls offering encouragement and advice, many of these women told CNN, though sometimes Harris will interrogate them on the specifics of campaign strategy or push them on how they’re dealing with labor or other constituencies.
She was on a running text thread with Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley. She counseled longtime friend and former aide Laphonza Butler through the frenetic weekend last fall that ended with Butler’s appointment to the Senate. She hosted a collection of Black congresswomen for a dinner at the Naval Observatory, the vice president’s residence.
Tears can flow. Major life-changing decisions get made. Harris always asks about their kids. And along the way, these relationships have become core for Harris herself – as a mission for a politician who takes seriously her mother’s admonition to be the first but not the last. They’re also a comfort for a vice president who remembers well her own loneliness as she worked her way up and serve as a base of support for a politician who until July had seen much of the Democratic establishment turn on her.
“She checks in on people that nobody else pays attention to,” said Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a first-term congresswoman from Texas who teared up last month recalling the first time the two met – in a photo line during a reception on Crockett’s first visit to the Naval Observatory. Harris looked at her and said, “What’s wrong?”
Crockett said that it wasn’t until that moment that she realized how overwhelmed she felt wondering if she’d made a mistake running for Congress, on top of the stress of battling with Republicans on the House Oversight Committee in defense of President Joe Biden.
Harris, Crockett said, “saw right through me,” as she felt only another Black woman who had experienced the same pressures and bruises of politics could.
With Harris within reach of the Oval Office, these women feel the pride of now supporting her, but also of what her win would mean to them, the issues they have connected on and their own careers. Many who had never imagined careers in politics boggle at the idea of a president who might look like them and know them by name.
Angela Alsobrooks, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maryland, has started collecting magazines with Harris on the cover, buttons, a T-shirt and other memorabilia. Lateefah Simon, who first met Harris over 20 years ago when the young San Francisco assistant district attorney reached out to Simon as the leader of a group for young girls in trouble, is now all but certain to win an open House seat anchored in Oakland. She broke down sobbing during Maya Harris’ convention speech when thinking of her own memories of the vice president’s mother.
Simon likes to joke that whenever an unknown caller comes up, it’s either her student loan company or Harris. When she got one of those calls in March, it was Harris with a congratulations and what Simon says was “the most beautiful pep talk that I’ve ever had from anybody,” hours before the primary polls closed.
If Harris will soon be making those calls from the White House, to Simon that would be the ultimate proof of the biggest lesson she has learned from Harris over the years: “That this thing is doable, that we don’t need to have legacy or families that are multimillionaires,” she said. “There is a road to leadership.”
Campaign advice and help crafting bills
Now about a month shy of 60, Harris is not that much older than most of these women, but she is older enough and has been credited enough times for being a “first” in the offices she has won.
She came into their lives in different ways, at different points. Alsobrooks read an article about Harris’ restorative justice work as San Francisco district attorney in Essence magazine when she was running to be a county prosecutor in Maryland and started talking about it on the trail. Then, a few days after she won, her phone rang.
“’Hi, it’s Kamala Harris,’” Alsobrooks remembers hearing.
She was shocked.
“Can you imagine like you’re talking about someone you read about in a magazine? I didn’t even know she knew I existed,” Alsobrooks told CNN after a recent campaign stop. “Not only did she call, but she said, ‘Tell me, how I can help you?’”
Alsobrooks ended up flying to San Francisco, where Harris set her up with meetings, including with people at Goodwill Industries, who oversaw the workforce development program that had partnered with Harris’ office, and with a judge who helped guide younger offenders toward the restorative justice program. They hit it off, and years later, Harris invited Alsobrooks back across the country to ride her campaign bus for the final stretch of her 2016 Senate campaign.
For Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell, the first time she saw Harris was when the then-district attorney spoke at her 2009 UCLA law school commencement. She was intrigued, went to fundraisers for Harris in Boston and flew to California for her Senate election victory party.
“Joy” was the theme of the Democratic convention in August, but Alsobrooks and Campbell say that Harris has been stressing the word to them for years. To Campbell, it wasn’t just pushing an ephemeral feeling, but encouraging her not to shy away from speaking about the time her father and brothers spent in prison.
Harris “always encouraged me, offered love and guidance on how not to be distracted by those who would want to use it against me,” Campbell said. Instead, she used that story to pull people “into the political fold where they may feel as though politics and government isn’t for them.”
Harris’s advice hits a few consistent beats: “None of it is personal,” “Don’t internalize it,” “Come early and stay late,” “Stay focused on your why” and, perhaps most consistently, “If it was easy, everyone would do this.”
“She wants us to understand the reality of what it means to be a Black woman running for higher office, that there are significant challenges: It’s much harder to fundraise. It can be more challenging to break through, including in the media, to cover your race or to cover your story with the thoughtfulness maybe it deserves,” Campbell said.
But sometimes the advice is specific.
Malia Cohen, now the California state controller, first met Harris as a volunteer for Gavin Newsom’s mayoral campaign in San Francisco, but then she got interested in the young Black woman who was running for district attorney. Cohen switched over to Harris’ campaign for a few shifts.
When Cohen launched her own campaign years later for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, a man she met with to ask for an endorsement invited her to a Bruce Springsteen concert and offered to buy her drinks.
Cohen remembered telling Harris on a call what happened.
“She said, ‘When you’re talking to these guys, stick to your guns, talk business, and make it very, very clear that this is not a date,’” Cohen recalled. “And I asked her if she ever experienced that and she said, ‘No. All of these men know that when I’m in the room, that I’m about business.’ And that was the end of that.”
Daniele Monroe-Moreno, the Nevada Democratic Party chair and the speaker pro tempore of the state Assembly, was at a luncheon in Las Vegas when she met Harris, not long after the Senate win. They started talking about the maternal health legislation Monroe-Moreno was working on.
“Kamala said, ‘I’ve been working on that myself. Can I help you?’ And I thought, ‘Sure, OK, you can help me’. But she’s a senator, right? She’s busy,” Monroe-Moreno remembered. “But just a few weeks later, I get a call, and it’s one of her staff, who said, ‘Hey, my boss is Kamala Harris, and she said you’re working on a policy, and we’ve done a lot of research.’”
Two weeks of collaborating and wrangling with colleagues later, the bill passed. Monroe-Moreno said she doubts the law would have ended up on the books without that help.
Peggy Flanagan, the lieutenant governor of Minnesota, hasn’t had as many encounters with Harris, but the ones she’s had stick with her. In the spring, backstage at an EMILY’s List gala, Flanagan — who is of Native American heritage — was going on about how great it was to see the video the vice president’s office had just put out with the old cast of “A Different World” about the administration’s work on student debt.
Before Harris went out onstage, Flanagan said, “She grabbed me by my shoulders and said, ‘I want you to know that I have your back.’”
‘I just know what she endured’
The loyalty runs both ways. Campbell, seven months pregnant at the time, flew to Iowa to campaign for Harris during her unsuccessful bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. And amid the early Democratic implosion around Biden’s candidacy in July, Hayes spoke out in a private meeting of her House colleagues, worried that if the vice president was suddenly asked to take over a doomed campaign, she’d get an undue share of the blame.
The afternoon that Biden dropped out and Harris started ticking through dozens of calls, it wasn’t just senior leaders and potential rivals who heard from her.
“I don’t know how I made the cut,” Crockett said. “It was a call of gratitude, and just, ‘I want to say thank you.’”
Campbell recalled goosebumps and tears that day. Alsobrooks said the pride she feels in seeing Harris’ campaign take off in the weeks since is like that “for a sister.”
As much as they’re rooting for and working toward Harris’ win, though, these women still haven’t quite wrapped their heads around the idea that if she does, beyond all the greater meaning politically and culturally, the next president of the United States would be the woman who for so many years has just been Kamala on the other end of the phone.
For women who never saw themselves in elected office, that’s an overwhelming thought anyway. But to imagine that the president would be a woman who helped and inspired them get to where they are, it’s much more.
“It is not just like, I’d be proud she’s president. I just know what she endured,” Alsobrooks said. “This is a person who, over 30 years, worked hard. So the pride I feel is not that I drank the Kool-Aid. She’d be president, and I would be proud of that. But I am so proud of her.”
