View the San Francisco for Sunday, July 28, 2024
Kamala Harris’ ascension to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket has energized local Democrats and spurred many to do what they can to get voters in crucial battleground states to turn out and vote for the Bay Area native.
Fearful of a second Trump presidency and thrilled that Harris this week replaced President Joe Biden as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, San Francisco party members urged one another this week to reach out to voters outside The City, whether through phone banking, text messages or by traveling to some of the key swing states that could decide the 2024 election. Such an effort obviously would have been paramount for Biden’s campaign too. But Harris’ newly launched presidential campaign has heightened the excitement among local Democrats. For many, it’s quickly begun to feel as if nearly all of San Francisco — which is overwhelmingly Democratic — is running for president together, even though Harris hasn’t lived here in years. “Everyone knows that she came up through San Francisco politics, she was a prosecutor here, she came from The City, and people are very proud of that and excited,” state Sen. Scott Wiener said. “Also, people understand that she actually has a real shot at beating Donald Trump.” It is precisely because San Francisco and California are so overwhelmingly blue that local political leaders are calling on the area’s Democrats to reach out or even travel to not-so-blue states. “I think the best way for folks to help is to plug in on the fundraising side, and also turnout in purple and red states,” City Attorney David Chiu said. “San Francisco Democrats have always done a good job of organizing volunteers, phone banks, text banks and other outreach efforts into swing states and battleground districts. But we have to double down. The fate of our democracy hangs on this.” Biden’s endorsement of Harris — and her inheritance of his campaign infrastructure and money — does not guarantee her the spot as the Democrats’ presidential candidate. But with many of her potential rivals, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, stepping aside earlier this week to make way for her and the massivethat now feel like they want to show up for Kamala Harris,” Nancy Tung, chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party, told The Examiner. Of course, not everyone has extra cash to donate to a campaign. But for those without robust bank accounts who are looking to pitch in, the closest swing state is just a bus ticket away. “One of my goals as chair of the San Francisco Democratic party has been to make sure that we use our numbers for good, and that means getting out of San Francisco to help where we can,” Tung said. Harris’ entry into the race has made it easier for party leaders to pitch such efforts, they said. Prior to Harris’ announcement, “it truly felt like such a bleak situation in which our resources would be better used for local races,” said Ernesto Cuellar, vice president of the San Francisco Young Democrats. “Now that Kamala Harris is at the top of the ticket, it’s not only us mobilizing, it’s a lot of other big players here in the city,” he said. Cuellar’s group has not yet formally endorsed Harris. It also doesn’t have “the machine to get folks out there yet,” Cuellar said. But it can tap into the resources offered by larger organizations in the party, he said. An example of that early enthusiasm and quick mobilizing by local Democrats took place Monday at City Hall. Less than 24 hours after Biden stepped aside and Harris announced she would run to succeed him, party members from across San Francisco’s shades of blue quickly organized a rally at The City’s Civic Center. Emma Heiken, vice chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party, said she had no plans to organize such an event until she got a call Sunday from a constituent who urged her “to throw a party.” Heiken started reaching out to elected officials, and “everybody across the spectrum was like ‘this is amazing!’” she said. “Everyone wanted somewhere to channel that energy.”— she would be the first female president, the first South Asian president and the first Black woman to be president. She would also be the first from the Bay Area. Born in Oakland and raised in the East Bay, Harris’ deep local roots have invigorated the area’s political leaders and donors. After backing Biden, those leaders and many donors are now betting big on Harris, and confident that she’s a strong contender. Like Biden, she previously appeared to be trailing Trump in the polls, but a new Reuters survey released Tuesday showed her statistically tied with the former president — her nominal “She’s going to inspire a whole new generation of voters to turn out,” Ace Smith, a longtime political advisor of Harris who’s based in San Francisco, told The Examiner. “She’s going to do exactly what Donald Trump did in 2016 in reverse, which is, you’re going to see the voter pool grow in incredibly significant ways in all these places.”Harris has extensive experience in San Francisco and California politics. After graduating from UC Hastings College of the Law , Harris landed a job in 1990 as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County. In 1998, she moved over to the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office before taking a job as an assistant attorney in the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office in 2000. From there, she launched her political career, defeating incumbent Terence Hallinan in 2003 to win the first of her two terms as San Francisco district attorney. In 2010, she won election as California attorney general. After being reelected in 2014, she successfully ran to replace retiring U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer two years later. Much of the focus among San Francisco Democrats has been not only on Harris’ local achievements but also on her new position as the person standing in the way of another Trump presidency — a prospect many here dread. A return to Trump could mean a return to a combative posture between The City and the federal government. While Trump was president, the two sides clashed over The City’s protections for immigrants. And San Francisco was among the jurisdictions that challenged the travel ban Trump imposed on seven majority-Muslim countries. Many also worry about Trump’s proposals such as mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and Project 2025, a playbook for a second Trump term put together by numerous officials from his first administration. That plan, published by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, calls for further slashing of federal taxes, cutting investments in renewable energy and a resumption of construction of a wall along the southern border of United States. “We know that the second coming of Trump will be that much worse,” Chiu said. “We’ve seen it through the Project 2025 documents, the discussions that Republicans are having openly — and everyone should be very, very afraid of what this will be.”Those friends include Mayor London Breed, who recounted at the rally in support of Harris this week how she and Harris went to Springfield, Ill., in 2007 to attend then-Sen. Barack Obama’s announcement that he would run for president.Long before he was a state senator, Wiener got a job in 2002 in the City Attorney’s Office, where Harris at the time was a senior attorney. “She definitely mentored me, and I would go to her for advice on how to handle a challenging judge or whatnot, and she would always give me good advice,” Wiener said. Harris has “continued to be a presence for people” in San Francisco, even after she moved on, Tung said. “She is not just about ‘Well, what can I use this person for now? How can this person help me now?’” Tung said. “It’s really an investment in the communities that she touches that leads to this very, very loyal following.”Abortion-rights and reproductive-health advocates say Vice President Kamala Harris’ emergence as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has made them tentatively hopeful for the first time since the The November presidential election is the first since the court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that there is no federal constitutional right to an abortion. Advocates who spoke with The Examiner said they aren’t surprised Harris highlighted the issue within the first week of announcing she would seek the nomination, calling her campaign-trail focus on reproductive rights an extension of her work as California attorney general. “She has been a longtime champion of these issues,” said Shannon Olivieri Hovis, the vice president of Essential Access Health, a California sexual- and reproductive-health nonprofit. “She speaks with authenticity about issues of abortion access and reproductive freedom, because she really understands access to reproductive health and how essential it is across the board, and we see that through her policies.” Harris wasted little time highlighting abortion as a key issue, promising Tuesday in Milwaukee, during her first rally, that as president she would sign into law a Congressional bill “to restore reproductive freedom” once it hits her desk., leaving the decision to restrict the procedure up to the states while linking such laws to the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause. “We who believe in reproductive freedom will stop Donald Trump’s extreme abortion bans, because we trust women to make decisions about their own bodies and not have their government tell them what to do,” Harris said.. Olivieri Hovis, who also served as a policy advisor to Harris when she was the California attorney general, said the vice president’s support of abortion rights has been a throughline in her career.improving maternal health policy for women of colorearlier this year, and she is believed to have been the first sitting president or vice president to visit an abortion provider. The visit followed the Biden administration calling upon Congress tohosted by Vice President Kamala Harris,” Gilda Gonzales, the president of the Planned Parenthood Northern California Action Fund, said in a statement to The Examiner. “The Vice President’s strong commitment to being a reproductive freedom champion was evident then and continues to be true today.” Heidi Sieck, the co-founder of the national political-engagement platform Vote Pro-Choice, said Harris’ emphasis of abortion comes with expertise. Sieck argued the vice president understands the distinction between reproductive rights and reproductive justice: The latter focuses on general access to clinics, support and care stemming from lawsuits and court decisions, while the latter refers to structural inequities within reproductive health care.in the 1990s who ultimately called upon Congress to thoroughly address such issues. Harris, Sieck said, is a continuation of that legacy. “When we’re talking about women’s issues, she’s talking about access to education, childcare, paid family leave ... she would almost pivot away from just abortion language,” Sieck observed. “it was much more about community well-being, foundational solutions.” Other abortion-rights groups, including Reproductive Freedom for All, have also thrown their support behind Harris. “There’s just a level of excitement and the level of hope and the level of relief,” said Hala Hijazi, the chair of Reproductive Freedom for All California PrivacyPAC. “There was a real fear amongst women across the country, whether you’re Democrat, Independent or Republican, that we would have another Trump presidency.”— just as Biden did before bowing out — and Hijazi said the next few months are going to be extremely challenging. “This is for the first time since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, we’ve had this opportunity to restore a federal protection for abortion access,” she said. “We’re only going to be able to do that by electing her.” Harris’ promise to enshrine abortion rights into federal law if elected faces a number of challenges, said Yvette Lindgren, a reproductive-rights expert and visiting professor at UC Law San Francisco. The filibuster rule in the U.S. Senate imposes a 60-vote threshold to advance legislation to a vote in the chamber, and the Democratic caucus currently contains 51 members. Earlier this month, only Such legislation would be subject to subsequent legal challenges — as Roe v. Wade was — and a future Congress could overturn it, but Lindgren said it would still represent a significant step forward. “We’ve already seen legislation that just hasn’t gained traction, so hopefully she’ll be able to put it at the top of her agenda and make it happen,” Lindgren said. It’s unclear yet how much the new rush of support and contributions to the Democratic Party stems from Harris’ abortion stance, but Hijazi said she has spoken with people who have given money or re-registered to vote because of Harris’ pro-abortion policy. “So many people were going to sit this election out — Democrats — whether from Ohio or Texas or Michigan or Virginia,” she said. Sieck said she anticipates that Harris will “put her warrior hat on” and take a more aggressive approach centering abortion in the election, while Lindgren noted that doing so “can only help her to keep that front and center ... and what distinguishes her from Trump.” Hijazi added that she believes it’s going to be “women who are going to decide this election” following the electoral success of abortion-rights measures across the country in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, as well as the increase in the number of women seeking the procedure in states that still offer it. “It’s like an opportunity for her to be fully self-expressed, explicit, expressing the foundational freedom of this essential thing, and really speaking into the fear of what it’s like to be a woman in post-Roe America,” Sieck said. While some voters might be deterred by Harris’ stance on abortion, Lindgren said that it’s more likely to be a boon to her campaign. “The Dobbs decision has returned abortion to the state legislatures and has really put it into the hands of voters in a way that it’s not been in the past,” she said. “I think that it can only help her to keep that front and center, in terms of her campaign, and what distinguishes her from Trump.” Hijazi agreed, pointing to the rise in women coming to California from other states seeking essential reproductive care since the Dobbs decision as an indication of what voters will likely be focusing on this election.Click and hold your mouse button on the page to select the area you wish to save or print. You can click and drag the clipping box to move it or click and drag in the bottom right corner to resize it. 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