Finding Kamala Harris
Sometimes Kamala Harris wakes up in the middle of the night because there’s something on her mind. Did anybody get back to so-and-so? How is my stepdaughter adjusting to her apartment in New York City? Sometimes those early-morning moments are her only chance, as the junior Senator from California and a top Democratic presidential candidate, to think through the events of the past day.
“Oh, I worry,” she says, “I worry.” Sitting at a table upstairs from the stage where she’s just held a town hall in Waterloo, Iowa, Harris begins to laugh, that deep, body-shaking laugh of hers. “Let me just tell you, I was born worrying. I had a mother who worried, I had a grandmother who worried. It’s kind of in my blood.”
That jolt awake at 3 a.m. has become Harris’ campaign theme, the crux of her wandering stump speech. What wakes the American people at 3 a.m., she says, is not ideological mudslinging but practical concerns: holding down a job, getting through a health crisis, weathering hurricanes and tornadoes. Harris’ “3 a.m. agenda,” as she calls it, is the backbone of her campaign’s policy approach, a road map of solutions for the middle class. But so far it has failed to get much traction. At a time when the electorate is looking for sharp definitions and ambitious visions, her emphasis strikes some Democrats as vague and noncommittal.
And so Harris is here, in Iowa, trying to regain her footing in the race. After a promising start in January, her campaign has stalled. While she is in the competition for the nomination, she’s stuck in the mid–single digits in most national and early-state polls and draws modest crowds. Perhaps three dozen people showed up to see her in Waterloo, where they were packed into a few rows in front of the stage so that the large room—an ornate century-old former department store—wouldn’t look so empty.
In mid-September, Harris said she’d be focusing on the first-to-vote caucus state. It was something of an unwitting announcement: she was overheard in Washington joking to a colleague, “I’m f-cking moving to Iowa.” (At
