The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Astonishing Rise—and Uncertain Odds—of Kamala Harris’s Presidential Campaign

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

Since July 21st, when Joe Biden endorsed her in the Presidential race, all eyes have been on Vice-President Kamala Harris. The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos has been reporting on Harris for months, speaking with dozens of people close to her from her childhood to her days as a California prosecutor, right up to this lightning-round campaign for the Presidency. “What’s interesting is that some of those people . . . were asking her, ‘Do you think there should be a process? Some town halls or conventions?,’ ” Osnos tells David Remnick. “And her answer is revealing. . . . ‘I’m happy to join a process like that, but I’m not gonna wait around. I’m not gonna wait around.’ ” But if Harris’s surge in popularity was remarkable, her lead in most polls is razor-thin. “If she wins [the popular vote] and loses the Electoral College, that’ll be the third time since the year 2000 that Democrats have suffered that experience,” he notes. “You can’t underestimate how seismic a shock and a trauma—that’s not an overstatement—it will be, particularly for young Americans who have tried to say, ‘We’re going to put our support behind somebody and see if we can change this country.’ ” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Since July 21st, when Joe Biden stepped aside from the presidential race, all eyes have been on Vice President Kamala Harris, and no one, I think, has been watching more keenly than the New Yorkers, Evan Osnos. Evan is a longtime staff writer in Washington, and over the past months, he's been speaking with dozens of people close to Harris from her childhood, her days as a California prosecutor, right up to this lightning round campaign

for the presidency. Evan, I think we have to kind of get this out of the way. The last time you were on the show, we talked about the Democratic candidate for president, Joe Biden. Yeah. That was back in March. And you said he didn't do anything that made me think that his mind is any different than it was in 2020, but there's this contrast, this juxtaposition between how he looks and the things. And the things that he says that I think is in some ways what every voter is trying to navigate through and make sense of. So how did you make sense of it? And at what point did you change your assessment of him? I think, like a lot of people, I was pretty shocked by what I saw in the debate. It was not the case that in the interview he was trailing off or staring into space the way he was when he got on TV in June.

I remember his aides who had pushed to have him do this debate because they thought, oh, well, if the world sees this guy answering questions beside Donald Trump, this will put to rest this feeling that he is unfit. And of course, that's not what happened. What happened was he got on that stage and looked utterly unable to do the job. Making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for. for what I've been able to do with the COVID, excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with, look, if we finally beat Medicare. In a way, there was, I think, a rebound effect where people said, we've suspected all along that he wasn't up for it, and now we know.

Where are you on the question of whether Biden's staff covered that up? and is Kamala Harris in any way responsible for that? In part. I think it's actually a much more human kind of process, meaning these were people who worked with this guy every day. They'd see him at times when he was good and they'd see him at times when he was bad. They lost the ability to separate out good faith

from bad faith questions about Biden's health and about his ability to do the job. Let's get to Kamala Harris. Right after that debate, the storm of columns and the Commentariat checked in, Pressing Company included. And there was a very, very rapid debate over whether it would just be Kamala Harris coasting to the nomination or there would be, quote, unquote, a process, town halls, open conventions. Tell me about your reporting on that process or was there a process at all.

Well, there was this expectation. had kind of taken hold, that there might be some kind of blitz primary, was one of the terms people used, that you might have these sessions where people would get up and the leading candidates like Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, or Josh Shapiro from Pennsylvania, that they might all contend and then there would be this coalescence of some kind. And maybe it would happen at the convention. Kamala Harris got a call from Joe Biden that morning. And she basically said to her. This is July 21st. July 21st. And she calls. in her aides, and they made a decision in effect that they were not going to wait around for a process to take shape. So she's calling around. Her job is to call people like... But I'm guessing this is not the first time they've had this conversation, right?

Weeks had gone by. Here's the thing. They actually had originally been putting together for years, this essentially kind of this super spreadsheet of all the names of the influential people they would need. These These are not people that you've heard of, David. These are like on the ground delegates, the 4,000 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, who are the actual foot soldiers that you need if you're going to try to get a nomination. They thought they would use this in 2028 or something. And then all of a sudden, it's becoming clear over the course of these few weeks in advance.

No, no, they're going to use this now. And they sort of tear open this bag of names and begin to call. And she's calling the Obamas and the Clintons and the. and the Pelosi's, the people at the top. And she's also calling the heads of labor unions and so on. What's interesting is that some of those people, I gather, were asking her, do you think there should be a process? Some town halls or conventions.

And her answer is revealing. Her answer was, I'm happy to join a process like that. Very happy. Very happy. I'm not going to wait around. And in fact, she was racing to lock down these delegates. As, you know, as one of her allies said to me, Bacari Sellers, he said, look, frankly, we looked at the process of an open convention. And we thought that was just a euphemism for skipping over Kamala Harris.

And we weren't going to do it. But you describe it as a juggernaut, but a year ago, just a year ago, an NBC poll gave Kamala Harris the lowest approval rating of any vice president in the history of that. poll. And there were all kinds of criticisms about her performance on the immigration issue, in various interviews that we've all seen, Lester Holt and so on. So what accounts for that unbelievable surge and really quick movement in the polls? What happened? You have to remind yourself, by the way, that this was not rapturously received. There were stories with headlines like the Democrats are making a big mistake. And what they overlooked, there was an entire community of voters, some of whom felt close to her because she's an African American,

because she's the children of immigrants, because she's a woman, because she has been involved in abortion rights. But there was this entire community of activists and regular voters who felt that they had been essentially overlooked in all of those pessimistic assessments of her support, and they came out in huge force. And so over the course of the next couple of, really a couple a day. She was putting up just tremendous numbers of volunteers and fundraising, and it was, or should have been, I think, a bit of a humbling moment for people who had declared her candidacy to be a bad idea at the outset. Let's go back a little bit in history to describe what makes Kamala Harris, who she is personally and psychologically. She often cites her mother

as her greatest inspiration. What did she get from her mother? grit and complete and total persistence. Let me be specific. I mean, her mother, Sharmala Gopalan, came to the United States from India in 1958, which you have to remember was much earlier than most of the Indian immigration. It was a really quite wild thing to do. She didn't tell her parents. She was applying to Berkeley for graduate school. She gets the United States. And there were very few Indian students there. And she actually finds her home in the black community. And it was partly because she'd grown up in independence era. India, she felt in a way that these politics were familiar to her, the politics of struggle.

She and her sister Maya were raised by her mother, but her mother very much put in the foreground the idea that she was raising, as she said, proud black women daughters. And she wanted to these women to feel at home in their community. And so that was the core of how she went out into the world as a political person. Evan, at the convention and in her speeches elsewhere, Kamala Harris kind of squares being a prosecutor and fighting for justice. Now, normally, many activists, certainly among progressives in the Democratic Party, who feel that being a prosecutor, is a little hard to square with progressive values. She tries to do it.

How legitimate is that? You know, it was a genuine tension for her, that when activists come to knock on the door, she wants to be the person inside to open it. You know, this is, it was not abstract. I mean, she was quite literally hiring people from the communities that tended to be most affected by crime, both people who were victims of crime

and then people who were going off to prison, they associated law enforcement as being the enemy in a lot of cases. And she said, I don't want that to be the case. I'm trying to figure out a way to make people feel as if they have a civil right to security, that they have some agency, some control over this process. Did she succeed at this? It was a bit excruciating at times, frankly. I mean, she tried, for instance, saying, I'm opposing the death penalty.

And then as soon as she got into office, there was a huge case in which a police officer was killed. And she's sitting in the front row at the funeral. and Diane Feinstein, who was a Democrat like her, but Feinstein read the political moment and said, no, no, I'm going to come out in favor of the death penalty in this case. And this entire, this huge hundreds of police officers stand up and start applauding. So Harris was very isolated at that. But what she did over time was that she sort of proved to them, to these law enforcement organizations, that she was going to be tough on violent crime. She was going to draw this distinction between violent offenses and what she thought of as, essentially the unjust world of incarceration when it came to nonviolent offenses or people whose

lives had been permanently destroyed because of something they'd done when they were young. It was valid enough that she was able to go on to higher office with it. It's really interesting. When you listen to her speeches and her admittedly infrequent interviews, she doesn't talk all that much about being attorney general. She doesn't talk even that much about being in the U.S. Senate, which is, to be fair, not the longest career. She talks mainly about being DA and San Francisco. Why is that? What does she take from that experience?

I think it established for her the idea that you could have a kind of pragmatic politics and not have it look entirely opportunistic. I mean, the irony about San Francisco politics is that, you know, the cliche, of course, is that it's all a bunch of far-left hippies and that that's San Francisco politics. No, the reality is San Francisco is defined partly by old money fortunes that go all the way back to the gold rush. Then you've got these new money libertarians from Silicon Valley. And, of course, you've got movement politics around the environment or around LGBT rights.

So all of this stuff is coming together. And so the functional effect tends to be that the people who survive and thrive, in San Francisco politics go on to higher office are the ones who are not the farthest to the left. They're the ones who are calculatingly pragmatic. Politics ultimately is about winning and you have to win or you're not advancing the causes you care about. What did she prove good at as a senator and what was the downside?

How was her performance as a senator? She has always been pretty capable at the theatrics of politics. She's very mindful of how. politics is a fact of public culture and it's a visual medium in a sense. So in the Senate, she did what she knows how to do, which is interrogate people pretty well. And there are these moments that are quite worth remembering. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Attorney General Barr, has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone? I wouldn't. I wouldn't. Yes or not.

Could you repeat that question? I will repeat it. Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone? Yes or no, please, sir. The president or anybody else? Seems you'd remember something like that and be able to tell us. Yeah, but I'm trying to grapple with the word suggests. I mean, there have been discussions of matters out there that they have not asked me.

to open a investigation. Perhaps they've suggested? I don't know. I wouldn't say suggest. Hinted? I don't know. Inferred? You don't know.

Okay. So his only solution was to quibble with her about the word suggest, which, you know, mission accomplished. She'd done what she did. So she's very good at asking questions in that format. What she was never particularly inclined towards was figuring out what is going to be her signature issue. What could she make a deep impression on?

And then history happened, and she was out of there before she really could make a deep impression. Evan Osnowson is a staff writer based in Washington, and will continue our conversation in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm speaking today with Evan Osnose, who's been reporting on Kamala Harris and her accelerated, unprecedented campaign for the presidency. In that critical slice of the electorate that we call undecided voters, people tend to say things like, I still don't know enough about Kamala Harris.

So Evan went to find out everything he could. When Joe Biden was vice president, he did have frequent lunches with the president. He had a portfolio of issues. He was respected for his experience in foreign affairs. Whether he was right or wrong on certain issues, you can certainly debate. But there was a presence there as vice president. There was never any sense, at least in the public rendering of it, that Kamala Harris's vice president had real visible purchase on that office,

except when it came to immigration, which was not a big success. I don't think that that actually captures what she was able to do. Look, I think Joe Biden, because he had been vice president, it was pretty obvious that he was trying to make her seen in the building as an equal partner. And I think that's because he does believe it's part of his own self-image that being a vice president is a noble act that you're helping somebody achieve. She began to make an impact on his thinking. I mean, there were examples. Like, for instance, she was a big proponent of Katanji Brown Jackson as a nominee for the Supreme Court.

She actually prevailed over other influential voices who were talking to him at the time like James Clyburn, who were favoring other candidates. You know, she also got him to consider the idea of student loan relief beyond what he had imagined. So there were ways in which she was doing it, but she was also really vigilant, perhaps overly so, about never looking to the public like she was angling for her own future. One of the criticisms of Kamala Harris's vice president, even before, was a history of a history of. infighting on her staff, that people made fast exits from her staff. Is that true or is that a Kinnart? No, it's true. She has had, and this goes really back to California, too, a lot of turnover on her staff. Like, she's a tough boss, and there's just no way around it. I mean, people who have watched her up close say that there are times where she can be quite rough on her staff

because maybe she doesn't feel like she is prepared for something, and so she's going to sort of muscle it out. Now, look, as one person said to me, a lot of men get off, get away with that in Washington, including Joe Biden. The reality is she is subject to extraordinary scrutiny, and that's partly because of racism. That's the reality of sexism.

It is also the fact that people put a great deal of weight on her because if she is elected, she will make history in so many ways. I think part of what we saw in this first two years in the vice presidency that were not successful for her was that she was self-editing and self-critical. She would give a bad interview and then she would recede from the press. It's clear she has concluded over the years that everything she says can either cause her great trouble or it can advance these things that she cares about. And that- Isn't that the nature of being a politician at the national level, much less a black politician or a woman? I think the answer is it is, but it is also freighted with so much more. She knows that there are a huge number of Americans who are inspired by what she represents and the possibility that she could reach the highest rung of American power.

And I think there is also a feeling, even among her allies and her support. that they're braced for the backlash, for what we know from when Obama became the first black president of the United States, that there were a lot of Americans who felt that as a threat. Well, the repercussions the first time around are called Donald and Trump. Exactly. The biggest foreign policy question out there, at least let's set aside Ukraine and Russia for a second, is obviously the Middle East. Do you expect, do you sense that there will be any difference between the way Joe Biden has handled this issue and the way Kamala Harris would. It was surprising to me, to say the least,

that at the Democratic Convention that she decided not to even spare a five-minute speech to any Palestinian-American speakers, even at six o'clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday, that was so concerning to a lot of delegates and to many. And to many, many, many people in Michigan and well beyond. The reality is that she is conscious of the risk that there are some voters who describe themselves often as single issue Israel voters, who don't know enough about her to say that they are confident that she's going to be as supportive of Israel as Biden was. Is that have to do with her generation or with her or being black or what?

I mean, because it's described in that as all kinds of explosive material. I think it's all of the above on some level. Look, for a lot of people, they don't even describe it in that. They don't parse it out in those terms. What they say is, we know Joe Biden. They say we knew that Joe Biden has been vocal on this issue for half a century. The simplest way to put it is, she felt more politically vulnerable on the right, even within the confines of the Democratic Party.

than she did on the left. This is, you know, my read of a political calculation, but it's not hard to divine that what she was doing here was she said, look, I run the serious risk of losing centrist voters. And this is not just about Israel. It has to do with how she talks about the economy and how she talks about capitalism and how she talks about a whole range of things that are proxies for, is she a radical or is she something more familiar? And she has spent really, the two months of her time as a candidate, trying to make the case that she is, in fact, something closer to a continuation of the Biden-Obama tradition than she is something unfamiliar. Here we are at a moment when Russia has invaded Ukraine is still there and occupies Ukrainian territory. In the Middle East, we're at the level now of regional war,

and we have no idea where this ends. There are 40,000 dead. in Gaza. October 7th was a shattering experience for Israel and its sense of security. And there are other foreign policy issues that get rarely discussed. This is a crucial time. And yet we know precious little, it seems to me, about Kamala Harris as a foreign policy thinker and actor. People who briefed her when she was in the Senate came away. One person described her to me as a completely blank page back then. Now, the reality is she has spent almost four years in the situation room sitting beside Joe Biden working on hard problems, being involved in these kinds of

issues. She's met with, you know, tons of foreign leaders and so on. What's distinctive, what we have learned about how she thinks about these issues is that she really is actually a bit different than how Biden thinks about some of these things. You know, he comes out of the Cold War generation. He was shaped by this conception that there is a Democratic world and an authoritarian world. He talks about it in those ways, autocracy versus democracy. And it links back to what he's facing at home with Donald Trump. She doesn't really see it that way. I mean, I've talked to people who are involved with her foreign policy who will say, look, the honest fact is she doesn't draw those kinds of distinctions. It doesn't look to her as if countries that the United States is allied with are all that democratic in some cases. I mean, a place like Turkey or even Israel right now. Or, you know, the fact that the United States does a lot of business with Saudi. Arabia, which is by any measure an authoritarian regime. I would not expect that she's going to

deviate dramatically from what the Biden administration and ultimately what the Obama administration did. How does she process the fact that half the country is still with Donald Trump? During the convention, you'll remember this famous picture of somebody, a photographer standing behind her own grand niece, who is a little girl who is looking up at Kamala Harris. And it's It is the moment in which this little girl, like many others, might see something of herself. And when Kamala Harris was asked about it, the temptation, of course, would be to say, I am the person who is going to finally deliver us to the promised land. And this was an example of discipline. She didn't take that bait.

She stopped herself. And what she said was, yes, that photo was moving, but I'm here to be a president for all Americans. And David, that is actually a really revealing thing. It sounds like the kind of pablum that you hear from every presidential candidate, except Donald Trump's never said he wants to be the president for all Americans. And when she's saying that, what she's trying to do is to say to people, look, I don't see myself entirely as the vessel for your specific aspirations. I'm trying to actually get us through this period.

You've been all around the country watching this campaign unfold, and what does your instinct tell you about early November? I couldn't resist. Wait a second. I think that the predictions, as we often say, David, are the worst kind of journalism. I know I've said it a thousand times before, but indulge me. But there is a scary scenario for people who want to be rid of Donald Trump, which is that she is right now running a couple of points ahead of him in the popular vote.

And if she wins that and loses the electoral college, that'll be the third time since the year 2000, that Democrats have suffered that experience. And I think that you can't underestimate how seismic, a shock and a trauma, that's not an overstatement. It will be, I think, particularly for young Americans who have tried to say we're going to put our support behind somebody and see if we can change this country. At the same time, I think as we've hinted at a couple of times today, Donald Trump is unraveling before our eyes. Anybody who watches him for a few minutes, if they're watching on television, they see it. at a rally, people leave early. She took him apart in the debate.

But I think that there are a lot of people in this country who feel that in 2016, that they didn't marshal enough support for Hillary Clinton, who say, we didn't really imagine that Donald Trump could win. And today, I don't think anybody has any illusions that Donald Trump could win and what it would mean for this country. And that explains some of this enthusiasm. for Kamala Harris. Evan Osnos, thank you.

My pleasure, David. You can read Evan Osnos on Kamala Harris and so much more on New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thank you for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccan. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.