Who is Behind Kamala Harris?

As the saying goes, personnel is policy.

This column was published in partnership with Unherd. I joined Unherd’s D.C. correspondent Emily Jashinsky for the debut episode of Undercurrents to discuss this piece and more about Kamala Harris’s history.

The center of gravity in Democratic politics quaked on Sunday — and in a flash, everything changed. Barring an act of divine intervention, Kamala Harris will become the party’s standard bearer in Chicago in less than a month’s time. Her ascent, however, signals more than just a nominal shift.

In the corridors of Washington DC, it will represent a rapid transfer of power, much of it beyond view, among the operatives, donors and advisors filtering through her presidential campaign. How Harris will differentiate herself from Joe Biden remains a mystery.

It is likely she will run on many of the same policies and accomplishments of his administration and with the aid of many of the same party organs and supporters. More revealing will be the decisions Harris makes over who she brings into to advise her campaign.

As the saying goes, popularized in the Reagan administration and later by Senator Elizabeth Warren, “personnel is policy.”

In her ill-fated 2019 bid for the presidency, Harris’s campaign was chaired by her sister, Maya Harris, whose husband, Tony West, is an influential voice in Silicon Valley and a major fundraiser for Democratic politicians. West’s then title at Uber — chief legal officer — belied his outsized role at the company. During the 2020 election, he helped to engineer Uber’s successive political victories over organized labor.

Harris is also in negotiations with Bearstar Strategies, a consultancy firm that is largely unknown in DC but presides over California’s political scene. Known for their cunning use of deep “opposition research” and sensitivity to culture-war issues to market centrist, business-friendly causes and candidates, it was Bearstar strategists who shepherded Harris from her perch as the state’s attorney general to the Senate and her last presidential campaign. And it was Bearstar strategists who, over the past decade, elected a cadre of prominent Democrats in California, while simultaneously advising the state’s largest corporations on political strategy. Until last year, California senator Laphonza Butler also worked for the firm, where she advised Uber on its campaign to avoid classifying drivers as employees.

In other words, far from the extreme liberal the Trump campaign is preparing to run against, Harris’s advisors and donors have long embodied a more West Coast style of moderate power politics. In recent days, GOP campaigns have produced videos clipping Harris’s remarks from her 2019 primary campaign. At the time, she veered far to the Left, pledging support for Medicare for All and the Green New Deal; she even suggested she might consider abolishing the immigration enforcement agency (ICE).

But a look at her inner circle reveals few, if any, radicals. A number of Harris’s former closest aides — Yasmin Nelson, Meaghan Lynch, Andy Vargas, Michael Collins, Michael Fuchs and Deanne Millison — have taken jobs in the world of corporate lobbying since parting with her. As the American Prospect reported, several of these aides are in fact working on behalf of tech giants to defeat rules proposed by the Biden administration. Indeed, while Harris is keen to feed off the iconography of civil rights marches and activism, Leftists have never held a place at her side in her 20 years in elected office.

Perhaps unsurprisingly her initial campaign recruitment efforts reinforce this trend. Take, for instance, reports that she is attempting to recruit Obama administration alumni Karen Dunn and David Plouffe. Both choices suggest a far more pro-business line than the popular Harris narrative. Plouffe previously advised Uber, while Dunn is the lead lawyer representing Google in its antitrust lawsuit filed by the Biden administration. If hired, they will join Eric Holder, who served as Obama’s attorney general before becoming a corporate advisor at the law-lobbying firm Covington & Burling, and has now been chosen by Harris to vet her potential running mates.

At its core, this is a very Californian way of doing politics. Governor Gavin Newsom — who served alongside Harris in San Francisco when he was mayor and she was district attorney — also owes his election victories to Bearstar. His leadership style bears a striking resemblance to his former colleague: just like Harris, he panders to the Left, but governs largely from the center. In 2019, in an attempt to mobilize progressive votes in his gubernatorial primary, Newsom promised the moon to the Left, campaigning on single-payer health care and a “Marshall Plan” to build huge tracts of new housing. Once in office, however, both goals fell by the wayside.

Nine years earlier, during her first bid for attorney general, Harris campaigned in a similar fashion: she promised a crackdown on corporate criminals, much to the delight of Left-leaning voters, but enforced the law sparingly once in office. Most contentiously, she eschewed cases against big business, declining to criminally charge financial industry firms such as OneWest Bank, which had been accused of fraudulent foreclosure practices and PG&E, the utility giant that ended up killing eight San Bruno residents with a gas pipeline explosion.