What a Vice President Kamala Harris means for California
Goodbye, state of resistance. Hello, state of influence.
California’s status has shifted dramatically with the inauguration of Joe Biden as the next president. The reasons are both political — deep blue California will have more inroads to a White House controlled by Democrats — and personal: For just the second time in American history, a Californian has become vice president.
Kamala Harris — California’s junior senator and former state attorney general — made history Wednesday after American voters chose Biden to replace Republican President Donald Trump. She is the first vice president who is a woman, a woman of color and a California Democrat.
It’s a significant boost for a state that in recent years has held a high profile in Congress, but little sway at the White House. Congressional leaders from both parties, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, hail from the Golden State. But the last Californian president was Ronald Reagan more than 30 years ago. And the last Californian vice president was Richard Nixon — 60 years ago.
California has changed radically since then. Once the home of a thriving conservative movement that propelled Republicans Nixon and Reagan to national prominence, it’s now a state where Democrats hold all the political power and a diverse electorate elevated Harris — the child of immigrants from India and Jamaica — to the United States Senate. She emphasized her California roots when she launched her short-lived campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, calling herself a “proud daughter of Oakland” as she stood before its city hall, not far from the hospital where she was born.
Her deep ties to California include a friendship with Gov. Gavin Newsom that goes back decades. She was sworn in as San Francisco district attorney on the same day in 2004 that he became the city’s mayor. They rose through the ranks of California politics sharing a circle of wealthy benefactors and political consultants. They’ve even vacationed together.
After the last four years of California’s tumultuous relationship with the Trump administration — the state sued it more than 100 times while Trump frequently threatened to yank federal funding — the friendship between Newsom and Harris positions California for a vastly different dynamic.
“With Kamala Harris as vice president, we won’t have to feel like we’re walking on landmines all the time, because we know she’s not looking for ways to harm California,” said Daniel Zingale, Newsom’s strategy and communications director until retiring early this year.
Harris could become an influential vice president in part because the office itself is more powerful than in earlier periods of American history, said Joel K. Goldstein, a Saint Louis University law school professor and scholar of the vice presidency.
Beginning with Jimmy Carter’s inclusion of Vice President Walter Mondale in the 1970s, he said, presidents started giving their VPs an office in the West Wing, an open invitation to attend meetings and lots of access to confer privately with the president. That was how Biden experienced being Barack Obama’s second-in-command, Goldstein said, and the way he expects Biden to treat Harris.
When Biden selected Harris as his running mate, he envisioned her holding a significant role, saying he wanted Harris “to be the last one in the room” as he weighed big decisions.