CNN
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Backstage, Vice President Kamala Harris pulled Rep. Jahana Hayes aside to draw local media attention to the congresswoman and give her a photo opportunity, but first she needed to address why she was stopping in Connecticut in the final month of the 2022 midterm election campaign: Rep. Hayes hadn’t raised enough money.
Harris told Hayes to “figure it out for yourself,” and that if Hayes didn’t figure it out for herself, the DNC wouldn’t endorse her.
Long before she became the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris had quietly begun cultivating a network of the next generation of politicians — mostly women of color, many with legal backgrounds, many of whom didn’t even know who was in the group. This networking often took place through check-in calls where she offered encouragement and advice, many of the women told CNN, though they also said Harris would sometimes interrogate them about details of their campaign strategy or how they dealt with workers and other constituencies.
She kept up a text exchange with Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, who counseled her through a whirlwind weekend last fall that culminated with the Senate appointment of her longtime friend and former aide, LaFonza Butler, and a dinner for black women lawmakers at the Naval Observatory, the vice presidential residence.
Tears are shed. Big, life-changing decisions are made. Harris always asks about her kids. And those relationships have become central to her personality, the mission of a politician who takes seriously her mother’s advice to be “first, not last.” They also provide solace for a vice president who remembers all too well her own loneliness as she rose to the top, and a political base that, until July, had seen much of the Democratic establishment turn its back on her.
“She pays attention to people that no one else pays attention to,” said first-term congresswoman Jasmine Crockett of Texas, who teared up as she recalled the first time she and Harris met at a reception last month marking Crockett’s first visit to the Naval Observatory. Harris looked at her and said, “What’s wrong?”
Crockett said it was in that moment that he realized how overwhelmed he was feeling, wondering if running for Congress had been a mistake, on top of the stress of battling Republicans on the House Oversight Committee to defend President Joe Biden.
Crockett said Harris “saw my true nature” and felt that only another Black woman who had experienced the same pressures and hurts of politics could do that.
‘She saw right through me’: Crockett describes emotional moment of first meeting with Harris
As women feel proud to support Harris as she comes within reach of the Oval Office, they are also thinking about what a win for her would mean for them, the issues they care about and their careers. Many of them never imagined they’d enter politics and are aghast at the idea that we might have a president who looks like them and whose name they know.
Maryland Democratic Senate candidate Angela Alsobrooks has started collecting magazines with Harris on the cover, buttons, T-shirts and other memorabilia. Latifah Simon, who first met Harris more than 20 years ago when a young assistant district attorney in San Francisco approached her as the leader of a troubled girls group, is now all but certain to win the open Oakland-based House seat. She broke down in tears during Maya Harris’ convention speech as she recalled memories of the vice president’s mother.
Ms. Simon often jokes that when she gets calls from strangers, it’s either her student loan company or Ms. Harris. One call she got in March was from Ms. Harris, congratulating her and giving what Ms. Simon called “the most amazing word of encouragement I’ve ever received from anyone” a few hours before the polls closed in the primary.
If Harris calls Simon from the White House anytime soon, it would be the ultimate proof of the biggest lesson she’s learned from Harris over the years: “That this can be done, that you don’t need a legacy or a billionaire family,” she said. “There is a path to leadership.”
Campaign advice and legislative assistance
Now one month shy of 60, Harris isn’t much older than most of these women, but she is old enough to have been hailed on multiple occasions as a “first” in the roles she has won.
She came into their lives in different ways, at different times: Alsobrooks read an article in Essence magazine about Harris’ restorative justice work as San Francisco’s district attorney when she was running for county attorney in Maryland, and started talking about it on the campaign trail. Then, a few days after Harris was elected, her phone rang.
“‘Hello, this is Kamala Harris,'” Alsobrooks remembers hearing.
She was shocked.
“Can you imagine that feeling, like talking to someone you read about in a magazine? I didn’t even know she knew who I was,” Alsobrooks told CNN after a recent campaign event. “Not only did she call me, she said, ‘Let me know how I can help you.'”
Alsobrooks ended up flying to San Francisco, where Harris set up meetings with people from Goodwill Industries, who oversaw a workforce-development program that partnered with Harris’ office, and a judge who helped steer a youthful offender into a restorative-justice program. The two hit it off, and a few years later, Harris invited Alsobrooks to again travel across the country and ride on her campaign bus during the final stretch of her 2016 Senate campaign.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell first saw Ms. Harris when the then-district attorney spoke at her UCLA law school graduation in 2009. She was intrigued, attended a fundraiser for Ms. Harris in Boston and flew to California for her Senate victory party.
“Joy” was the theme of the Democratic National Convention in August, but Alsobrooks and Campbell said Harris has been emphasizing the word for years. For Campbell, it wasn’t just about forcing a momentary sentiment, but also encouraging people not to shy away from talking about the time their fathers and brothers spent in prison.
Harris “always gave me encouragement, love and advice on not being fooled by people who want to attack me,” Campbell said. Instead, she used her story to draw people into the political world who “may not feel like politics or government is for them.”
Harris’ advice has several consistent lines: “None of it is personal,” “Don’t keep it to yourself,” “Arrive early and stay late,” “Stay focused on your purpose,” and, perhaps most consistently, “If it were easy, everyone would do it.”
“I hope she understands the reality of running for high office as a Black woman — there are big challenges. It’s much harder to raise funds. It’s even harder to break through, including in the media, to have your race covered, to have your story covered with the thoughtfulness that it deserves,” Campbell said.
But sometimes the advice is specific.
Malia Cohen, the current California Comptroller, first met Harris as a volunteer for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s campaign and then became interested in the young Black woman who was running for district attorney. She worked a few shifts with Harris’ campaign.
A few years later, when Cohen was launching her own campaign for San Francisco City Council, a man she met to solicit his support invited her to a Bruce Springsteen concert and offered to buy her drinks.
Cohen remembered telling Harris in a phone call what had happened.
“She said, ‘When you talk to these guys, be assertive, talk about work, and make it very clear that this is not a date,'” Cohen recalled. “So I asked her if that had ever happened to her, and she said, ‘No, these guys know that when I’m in the room, I talk about work,’ and that was it.”
Danielle Monroe Moreno, the Nevada Democratic Party chair and speaker pro tempore of the state Assembly, met Harris at a lunch in Las Vegas shortly after her Senate victory, and the two began talking about a maternal and child health bill that Monroe Moreno was working on.
“Kamala said, ‘I’m working on that too. Let me help you,’ and I was like, ‘Sure, sure, let me help you,’ but she’s a senator, right? She’s busy,” Monroe-Moreno recalled. “But then just a few weeks later, I got a call from one of her staff members who said, ‘My boss is Kamala Harris. She said you’re working on policy. We’ve done a lot of research.'”
The bill was passed after two weeks of collaboration and discussion with his colleagues, and Monroe Moreno said without their help the law would not have become law.
Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan hasn’t met Harris that often, but the one she did meet was memorable: Backstage at an EMILY’s List gala in the spring, Flanagan, who is of Native American descent, gushed about how wonderful it was to watch a video the vice president’s office had just released, teaming up with the old cast of “A Different World” to talk about the administration’s efforts to combat student debt.
Before Harris took the stage, Flanagan said, “She grabbed me by the shoulders and said, ‘I want you to know that I’m on your side,'”
Loyalty goes both ways: Ms. Campbell, then seven months pregnant, flew to Iowa to campaign for Ms. Harris, who lost her bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. And amid the Democratic Party’s early collapse over Mr. Biden’s candidacy in July, Mr. Hayes expressed concern in a private meeting with House members that the vice president would be unfairly blamed if he were suddenly asked to take over a doomed campaign.
In the afternoon, as Biden retreated and Harris began fielding dozens of calls, it wasn’t just senior officials and potential rivals who heard from her.
“I don’t know how I got selected,” Crockett said. “I called to say thank you. I was just like, ‘Thank you.'”
Ms. Campbell recalled the goosebumps and tears that day, and Ms. Alsobrooks said that as she watched Ms. Harris’ campaign gain momentum in the weeks since, she felt the same pride she felt for her “sister.”
But despite all their support for Harris’ victory and their efforts to make it happen, these women still can’t fully comprehend the idea that if Harris wins, beyond the huge political and cultural implications, the woman who for years has only been on the other end of the phone and known only as Kamala will become the next president of the United States.
It’s an overwhelming thought for women who have never imagined themselves serving in elected office, but it’s even more so when they imagine their president to be the woman who helped and inspired them to get to where they are.
“It’s not just that I’m proud that she’s president, I just know what she’s been through,” Alsobrooks said. “She’s someone who’s worked hard for over 30 years, so the pride that I feel isn’t because I drank the Kool-Aid. If she were president, I’d be proud of that. But I’m very proud of her.”