It’s 2010 – the height of the Tea Party’s power – and Harris is running across the state for the first time and fighting to shake off the San Francisco liberal label that Donald Trump once again has as a nickname.
Harris, at the age of 45, has been seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party. “Barack Obama woman,” Gwen Ifill had memorably tagged her years before. But many rising stars were snuffed out early, and Harris faced a formidable Republican opponent this year in Steve Cooley, the popular and moderate district attorney of Los Angeles County.
Cooley’s reputation as an unscrupulous and corrupt prosecutor had him tied or ahead of Harris before his October run — especially given his unusual popularity for Republicans in Los Angeles. He has won re-election three times in the state’s densest Democratic stronghold.
Harris ran out of time and money when he came to the debate only on the first Tuesday of October. Then, about 45 minutes into the hour-long fight, Cooley gave an honest, fateful and stupid answer.
This was a turning point in the campaign. Harris would escape a month later with one of the narrowest statewide victories in modern California history – less than 0.85% of the vote. But even on election night, Harris’ chances looked bleak until Cooley declared victory. The race remains off for three weeks. “Everybody’s writing history like it’s impossible,” said Harris’ 2010 race strategist, Averell “Ace” Smith. His first statewide victory, he said, was nothing. “It’s about as close to a near-death experience for a political career as you can get,” said Chris Jankowski, a Republican strategist who later led a national GOP group that spent $1 million in a failed attempt to end Harris’ earlier career. can really start. “If he loses that race, he’s not going to be a presidential candidate — no chance.”
Now, as Harris arrives this week at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, seeking to become the first woman to run for president in US history, the forgotten moment in the debate nearly 14 years ago is becoming one of the most unknown. the most consequential pivot point in the arc of her political career.
This is the story of those 47 seconds – and what happened next.
‘I got it’
To say the single face of the 2010 attorney general race attracted little attention would be an understatement.
It was held in broad daylight away from the nation’s largest media market and in a practice courtroom at the University of California, Davis’ law school. To remind anyone, there is no live telecast. The moderator, a local television political reporter named Kevin Riggs, had sat down with three other reporters who were panelists in the morning at the coffee shop to share the topic.
Dan Morain, who works on the editorial page of The Sacramento Bee, asked who would be double-dipped — that is, taking public pay and public pensions. It has been an issue in the Republican primaries, first raised by John Eastman, Cooley’s main opponent. Eastman is best known today for his efforts to keep Trump in office after the 2020 election, which led to his indictment and disbarment.
“I’m going to ask,” replied Jack Leonard, a Los Angeles Times reporter who covered Cooley.
Public pensions were a hot topic at the time, and Cooley made waves by prosecuting public corruption in the town of Bell, where local officials drew odd salaries in poor municipalities.
In a practice courtroom, Leonard pointed out that the California attorney general’s $150,000 salary is half of the $292,300 salary Cooley earned as a local district attorney. If he double-dipped by taking his taxpayer-paid pension as a former district attorney and his taxpayer-paid salary as state attorney general, Cooley would have earned more than $400,000.
“Do you have a double plan by taking your pension and salary as attorney general?” Leonard asked.
“Yeah, I know,” Cooley said without hesitation.
He glanced at Harris. He didn’t say anything.
“I got it.”
But Cooley wasn’t done yet. “I will always get whatever pension rights I want, and I will always rely on them to supplement the very low salary that is paid to the attorney general,” he said.
“It’s tone-deaf,” Riggs said. “It was a shock,” Leonard said. “It was really bad,” Morain said. “It’s jaw-dropping,” Smith said.
And that, Cooley recalled in a recent interview, was honest.
“The point is I answered honestly,” Cooley said. “It was a mistake. A lot of people said, ‘You should have dodged that one, Steve.'”
Kevin Spillane, Cooley’s top strategist, blamed himself for not coaching Cooley to better dodge. “It’s a credit to his character,” Spillane said of his client’s honesty. “But that’s a responsibility in politics.”
For his part, Harris has stood in silence. Morain, who has since written a book about Harris’ career, called it his “Vin Scully moment,” comparing it to how the famous baseball announcer often lets the voice of the game speak for itself.
“What would you like to add?” Riggs was offered.
“Come on, Steve!” Harris said during the debate, letting loose he is now familiar with laughter. “You got it!”
It was all done in less than a minute. The good news for Cooley is that almost no one sees the answer. The bad news is that is about to change.
Race to Cut Ad Powerfully Simple
Brian Brokaw, Harris’ campaign manager, sat next to Smith, the chief strategist, at the debate site. “We looked at each other,” Brokaw said, “and it’s sometimes hard to tell in the room how something lands, and we said to each other, ‘It’s pretty bad, isn’t it?'”
They agreed it was bad. He immediately called the campaign’s admaker, Mark Putnam, and told him to watch the video of the debate.
There is some disagreement about what happened next.
“I called Mark Putnam,” Smith said, “and I said, ‘I think we just won the race. Can you get this in the ad?'”
Putnam said he was asked to watch the debate to generate social media content and was satisfied with what he saw — and he was the one who told the team, “We just won the campaign.”
What Putnam and Smith noted was that — much to the admaker’s delight — Cooley’s answer almost exactly coincided with the 30-second spot.
“I looked at it and knew I shouldn’t edit it,” Putnam said. One day, he cut an ad that was as bare as it was devastating: just Leonard’s questions, Cooley’s answers and quiz show music. At the end, the screen went black with white text that read, “$150,000 a year isn’t enough?”
The average California household earned $54,280 during that time.
Putnam said there was a “real reluctance” to deploy the ad in the campaign without testing the message in the polls. “It’s important to know these ads are almost never made and almost never aired,” Putnam said. Smith called that nonsense. “We don’t have the money to try anything,” he said, “and we have to take decisive action.”
It is certainly true that the campaign is all but broken. A mid-October financial statement showed less than $850,000 in the bank — and more than $100,000 in debt. It is not enough for one week of statewide television time.
So, they decided to scrape together every last dollar to air a double-dipped ad exclusively in Los Angeles — hoping to cut off Cooley’s home turf. He didn’t have enough money to book the last three weeks at a time. “We threw it when we got in,” Brokaw said.
Still, the commercials seem “everywhere,” says Leonard, who stops watching television with his wife to avoid the “nasal English accent” that prompts him to ask the second question.
For his part, Harris has dreamed of closing the campaign on a high note, with an ad about his record or his vision. But they don’t have enough money to do both.
He finally gave the green an all-negative recommendation. “This is eternal to Kamala Harris’ credit,” Smith said. “He literally buys into shoving all the chips into the middle of the table. You will rarely find a candidate who can make that gutsy of a decision.”
Bids for ‘Killing Hercules in the Crib’
At the same time, national Republicans, who saw the long-term threat that Harris could pose, launched a last-minute counterattack against him – buying a $1 million ad in Los Angeles featuring the brutal testimony of the mother of a slain police officer. in San Francisco who criticized Harris for refusing to seek the death penalty for the gang member who killed his son.
Smith, Harris’s strategist, suspected he was trying to “kill Hercules in the crib.”
He was right.
“This was a deliberate targeting of someone who was clearly a rising star,” said Jankowski, who chaired the Republican State Leadership Committee at the time. “That’s the way we think about it, and that’s when donors buy into it.”
Harris has his own cavalry: a late October visit from President Barack Obama for a Los Angeles rally. Obama faced congressional losses nationwide but still prioritized the California event that cheered Harris, who was one of his earliest endorsers in 2008.
“I want everybody to do the right thing,” Obama told the 37,000 crowd.
Beyond the ad blitz about double dipping, Cooley faced the collapse of the Republican ticket around him, led by Meg Whitman, the party’s gubernatorial candidate. Cooley recalled that he was out for 10 days, but the team warned that there would be a Democratic surge.
“The polls are just going south,” said Spillane, Cooley’s top strategist.
A Contest That Wrapped Up Last Election Day
The race was still fierce on election night. Cooley jumped out to an early lead and, against Spillane’s advice, declared victory. The San Francisco Chronicle followed suit, publishing a “Cooley beat Harris” story. A printout still hangs on the wall of Smith’s office.
At her party, Harris and her supporters huddled over their laptops, tracking the night’s better results. “People were sleeping around him, and he’s still there,” recalled Matt Haney, now an Assembly member who works as a campaign volunteer. “We stay there until the sun comes up.”
The result later in Los Angeles tilted more towards Harris, which Smith said had “etched into the historical record” the impact of his last advertising blitz.
An internal Harris poll from early August showed Cooley leading by 10 percentage points in Los Angeles County. Final result: Harris carried the district with 14 points.
“The ad is very effective,” Cooley said. He still blames Whitman’s downfall on more than “some clever advertising,” which flatters Harris and his qualifications.
Harris ended up winning by less than 75,000 votes, and Cooley recognized him three weeks after the election. No Republican has come close to winning statewide.
“It’s hard to go back and say they wouldn’t have won without that moment,” Putnam said of the second episode. “I can’t play God. But this moment is decisive.”
A few months after the race, Cooley called Leonard and invited him to eat at the Water Grill in downtown Los Angeles. Cooley wouldn’t say why.
During the meal, Leonard remembers Cooley crossing the table and shaking his hand in thanks.
“If you don’t ask that question,” Cooley said, “I should be up in Sacramento.”
This article first appeared in The New York Times.