Kamala Harris, a former California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney who was elected to the Senate two years ago, officially launched her campaign for president on Monday.
Harris, the first African-American to enter the 2020 presidential race and the first black senator from California, made the announcement on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” She simultaneously released a video teasing the formal start of her campaign at a rally this Sunday in Oakland, California, Harris’ birthplace and the city that cultivated her political rise.
"The American public wants a fighter, and they want someone that’s going to fight like heck for them and not fight based on self-interest, and I’m prepared to do that,” Harris said Monday morning.
Harris will base her campaign in Baltimore, with a second office in Oakland, according to her aides. The bi-coastal arrangement gives them a foothold in two diverse cities and will allow the campaign to be close to Washington where it can be on the Eastern time zone.
Among her first decisions will be to reject corporate PAC money and super PAC activity, the aides said. The question has become an early litmus test for what’s expected to be a sprawling field with a record number of women. Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York have opened exploratory committees, while Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is readying her run. Other women, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar, could also jump in.
Harris maintains a tight inner circle of advisers who will guide the campaign, including Averell “Ace” Smith, Sean Clegg, Laphonza Butler, and Juan Rodriguez, partners at San Francisco-based SCRB, which also works for California Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Gov. Jerry Brown. Rodriguez was tapped to serve as Harris’ campaign manager and Clegg, Smith and Butler are senior advisers. Harris’ pollster is David Binder, who served on Barack Obama’s campaigns, and her digital firm is Authentic Campaigns, spearheaded by Mike Nellis, who worked on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 run.
Other members of the campaign team include: Marc Elias, general counsel; Angelique Cannon, national finance director; David Huynh, senior advisor; and Lily Adams, communications director.
Harris also counts a trio of family members among her closest confidants: Her husband, Doug Emhoff, an attorney whom she married in 2014; her sister, Maya Harris, a senior policy advisor to Hillary Clinton in 2016; and the senator’s brother in law, Tony West, the third highest-ranking official in the Justice Department during the Obama administration. Maya Harris will serve as her sister’s 2020 campaign chair.
Harris’ announcement on Martin Luther King Jr. Day was steeped in symbolism: Her aides said the red-and-yellow color scheme for Harris’ campaign logo was inspired by former Rep. Shirley Chisholm, whose 1972 run for president was the first by a black woman from a major political party. Harris’ video outlines the theme of the career prosecutor’s candidacy: “For the People.”
“Truth. Justice. Decency. Equality. Freedom. Democracy. These aren’t just words. They’re the values we as Americans cherish. And they’re all on the line now,” Harris, a 54-year-old Democrat, says in the direct-to-camera video. “The future of our country depends on you and millions of others lifting our voices to fight for our American values.
“That’s why I’m running for President of the United States. I’m running to lift those voices. To bring our voices together.”
The daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India who served as district attorney of San Francisco before ascending to statewide office in 2011, Harris spent the last two years as a leading critic of President Donald Trump, opposing most of his nominees and grilling them in the Judiciary Committee.
Harris is expected to base her campaign around her law enforcement background, highlighting elements of her record fighting for various key voting constituencies without dipping into purely ideological waters. At the same time, she will contrast her fact-based approach to politics and the law with the investigations and controversy that’s dominated Trump’s presidency.
Yet her background has met early criticism. She’s taken heat from some who say her past work advanced an unjust criminal justice system, and for decisions she made while in lower offices. Critics have long sought to portray her as too tepid, pointing to her refusal to endorse statewide ballot measures, including sentencing reform initiatives.
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Harris aides have been pushing back against the critiques while positioning her as among the nation’s earliest law enforcement leaders on many of the issues that became flashpoints in the Black Lives Matter movement. The senator will travel to South Carolina on Friday, where she is making a concerted play for support of black voters. She will speak at the Pink Ice Gala, hosted by the Gamma Nu Omega chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, of which Harris became a member while at Howard University.
She also will appear Thursday for a previously scheduled interview with Trevor Noah of “The Daily Show.” Aides see the Sunday speech in Oakland as a chance for Harris to lay out her rationale for running and her vision for the county.
Harris had been laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign since arriving in the Senate, bolstering her foreign policy portfolio with trips to Afghanistan and Iraq, and meeting troops and their families at California military basis. She spent heavily to build out her digital campaign infrastructure and cultivate financial supporters online. She visited 17 states including Georgia, South Carolina and Florida to campaign for Democratic candidates ahead of the midterms, sending $25,000 to Democratic parties in the early nominating states of Iowa, South Carolina, Nevada and New Hampshire.
In recent weeks, she’s been testing potential campaign slogans, including “If it’s worth fighting for, it’s a fight worth having.”
Harris enters the race relatively unknown on a national scale. Yet she’s exceeded expectations in races for her first two offices. She was a long-shot in her 2003 race for San Francisco district attorney and, though close with former President Barack Obama — they appeared at each other’s early fundraisers — she was also an underdog in the primary and general election for attorney general in 2010.
As one prominent California strategist put it at the time, she was “a woman running for attorney general, a woman who is a minority, a woman who is a minority who is anti–death penalty, a woman who is a minority who is anti–death penalty who is DA of wacky San Francisco.”
But by the time she sought reelection in 2014, Harris was such a juggernaut that she coasted to victory. She drew only nominal opposition in her 2016 run.
Once Harris arrived in the Senate, she felt freer to shed the cautious image she often projected in her law enforcement roles. Harris had a breakout moment speaking at the inaugural Women’s March in Washington, then again during Senate hearings in which she questioned Trump officials and appointees, including then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. During a hearing with former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Republicans tried to cut off her mic, a moment that went viral and helped endear her to progressives.
Harris has authored legislation to provide a $6,000 tax credit for families to address the rising cost of living, encourage states to reform or replace cash bail, reduce racial disparities in maternal mortality and guarantee access to legal counsel for immigrants held or detained while trying to enter the U.S.
Earlier this month, she embarked on a soft campaign launch with book tour stops and media appearances that allowed her to speak in depth about her biography and compare her worldview with Trump’s. But people close to her said it was her appearances in key states during the midterms — and the reaction she generated on the ground — that helped seal the deal.
Several days after joining then-Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson to speak at four black churches in Miami, Harris pulled aside some aides and asked detailed questions about how the vote broke down in those areas, drilling down to specific demographics.
“The staff question was whether she can generate a crowd,” one person familiar with the discussion recalled. “She was looking for whether she could feel like her presence could move people to action.”