Politics
Kamala Harris: Vice president on front lines of political crisis
Kamala Harris, photographed in Los Angeles on Nov. 21.
Vice President Kamala Harris is suddenly at the center of a maelstrom in the 2024 presidential election.
After President Biden’s poor debate performance in late June, a growing number of Democrats are calling on him to drop out of the race for the good of their party and the nation.
Our Revolution, a liberal political action committee, fundraised Wednesday off a post-debate poll of more than 17,000 of its members that said roughly two-thirds wanted Biden replaced at the top of the Democratic ticket.
And prominent donors, including in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, have begun publicly expressing their concern about Biden as the nominee. His interview Friday night with ABC — an attempt to right his campaign — drew tepid reviews, and the number of Congress members calling for Biden to bow out grew to five Saturday.
Discover the changemakers who are shaping every cultural corner of Los Angeles. This week we bring you the final installment of the L.A. Influential series: The Establishment. They are the bosses, elected officials and A-list names calling the shots from the seats of power.
Biden, 81, has pledged to remain in the race, but if he were to step aside, Harris — the nation’s first female, South Asian and Black vice president — would almost certainly be elevated to lead the campaign against former President Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.
As San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general and U.S. senator, Harris, 59, had never lost a race when she announced her 2020 presidential bid. She was long viewed as a rising star in the Democratic Party. Beyond representing generational and racial change, her prosecutorial skills shone during incisive, surgical questioning during Senate hearings.
However, after announcing her White House campaign in 2019, Harris was inconsistent and struggled to articulate what set her apart in a crowded Democratic field — and to motivate donors and early-state voters. Campaign infighting did not help. She suspended her bid before the Iowa caucuses, the first nominating contest in the nation.
Biden resurrected Harris’ political prospects by selecting her to be his running mate, adding a youthful, diverse perspective to the presidential campaign of a white, then-septuagenarian at a time the nation’s demographics were shifting and racial turmoil was at the fore.
Democrats recognize that passing over Harris if Biden were to step back would alienate some Black voters, a decision that would be potentially disastrous in battleground states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania. If he were to throw his support behind Harris, a Los Angeles resident for the last decade, it would represent a new wave of national political power for Southern California, a burst that the region has not seen since the days of the late Presidents Reagan and Nixon.
“Just like Biden has a finite amount of time to prove he can stay on the ticket, she has exactly that same amount of time to prove that she should be the nominee if he steps aside,” said Dan Schnur, a politics professor at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine University. “The good news for her is that the way she would prove that she is ready to take the top spot is by saying and doing all the things she would be doing as a running mate anyway.”
For decades, San Francisco dominated Golden State politics, its status cemented by the Bay Area addresses of statewide elected officials and a political machine that produced some of the most prominent national Democrats: former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer and California Govs. Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown.
But Harris — the product of Bay Area politics, which she has described as a “bare-knuckled sport” — acknowledged that the state’s power center has shifted.
“Elected leaders in L.A. are rising to prominence in terms of beyond L.A. itself and beyond statewide, and taking on national roles,” she told The Times in an interview in L.A. last fall. “And doing an extraordinary job, by the way.”
‘We are lucky to have a Californian in the White House as vice president simply because we don’t have much else left in Washington at this point.’
— Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, political analyst and podcast co-host
Harris began her migration south while she was dating entertainment attorney Doug Emhoff — she recalls moving in “a couple of sweaters at a time” — and she had permanently relocated to Brentwood by the time they married in 2014.
The couple moved into Emhoff’s multimillion-dollar four-bedroom house (later transferred to a trust using the couple’s initials) on a quiet street of pool-flecked mansions in Kenter Canyon — a neighborhood whose residents have reportedly included model Gisele Bündchen, rap mogul Dr. Dre, Lakers star LeBron James and actress Gwyneth Paltrow.
Once settled, Harris took classes at Brentwood’s SoulCycle and found spots to buy fresh ingredients for her cherished Sunday dinners, such as Huntington Meats near the Grove and the neighborhood farmers market.
The year after Harris moved to L.A., Boxer announced she would retire after her term ended in 2017, creating a chance to launch one of the state’s many rising Democratic figures onto the national stage. Harris seized the opportunity, becoming the second Black woman elected to the upper chamber.
Her ambitions for higher office were clear as she stumped across the country for Democrats during the 2018 midterm elections, shortly before she launched her bid for the White House.
“There was a lot being asked of her as she was entering Los Angeles,” said U.S. Sen. Laphonza Butler, a longtime Harris friend who served as an advisor on her 2020 presidential campaign.
Even before Biden’s stumbles, Harris, like other vice presidents, was viewed as a potential heir apparent, given her visibility on the national stage and her party’s support. One of the most prominent and challenging tasks in her portfolio was trying to improve the economic, security and political conditions in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala to stem the number of migrants making a perilous journey to the United States.
Harris’ approval ratings have long been not much better than Biden’s, though her chances against Trump have improved since last month’s debate.
She has already assembled a network of state officials, local party leaders and donors who could coalesce behind a run for the Oval Office. And some polls indicate that she has advantages among younger Americans and voters of color, key Democratic constituencies.
Heading into the election year, Biden’s team tasked her with trying to motivate those voters to support their reelection. She has spent the better part of a year building her profile around issues that disproportionately affect those groups, becoming the administration’s leading voice on abortion protections, gun safety and climate action.
Last fall, she toured college campuses to rally students around the administration’s efforts on abortion access, climate change, voting rights and LGBTQ+ equality. She launched another tour in January to push back on state restrictions of abortion rights and has held a string of recent events on how the administration is tackling gun violence.
Harris has hit the road more as the campaign heats up, playing an important role in shaping the Biden administration’s message to voters the president needs to win back in November. But she’s also positioned to serve as an advocate for California at a time when the state’s political clout in Washington is waning.
“The shift in power, quite frankly, is away from California” because of Pelosi’s retirement and the loss of seniority in the Senate, said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, political analyst and co-host of the podcast “Inside Golden State Politics.” “We are lucky to have a Californian in the White House as vice president simply because we don’t have much else left in Washington at this point.”
‘In the future, when people think of California politics, they’ll increasingly think of Southern California rather than the San Francisco Bay Area.’
— Jack Pitney, political science professor at Claremont McKenna College
Harris has allies, and fellow Angelenos, in the Senate. Alex Padilla was appointed to her seat after she was elected vice president, becoming the first Latino to represent California in the upper chamber. Newsom’s subsequent pick of Butler, who has made L.A. her home base, to replace Feinstein has further tipped the scales toward Southern California.
“In the future, when people think of California politics, they’ll increasingly think of Southern California rather than the San Francisco Bay Area,” said Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College, who pointed out how “San Francisco Democrat” is no longer Republican shorthand to dismiss more progressive figures.
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is leveling a stunning accusation at Vice President JD Vance amid the national furor over this week’s fatal shooting in Minnesota involving an ICE agent.
“I understand that Vice President Vance believes that shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in, and I do not,” the four-term federal lawmaker from New York and progressive champion argued as she answered questions on Friday on Capitol Hill from Fox News and other news organizations.
Ocasio-Cortez spoke in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting death of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good after she confronted ICE agents from inside her car in Minneapolis.
RENEE NICOLE GOOD PART OF ‘ICE WATCH’ GROUP, DHS SOURCES SAY
Members of law enforcement work the scene following a suspected shooting by an ICE agent during federal operations on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Video of the incident instantly went viral, and while Democrats have heavily criticized the shooting, the Trump administration is vocally defending the actions of the ICE agent.
HEAD HERE FOR LIVE FOX NEWS UPDATES ON THE ICE SHOOTING IN MINNESOTA
Vance, at a White House briefing on Thursday, charged that “this was an attack on federal law enforcement. This was an attack on law and order.”
“That woman was there to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation,” the vice president added. “The president stands with ICE, I stand with ICE, we stand with all of our law enforcement officers.”
And Vance claimed Good was “brainwashed” and suggested she was connected to a “broader, left-wing network.”
Federal sources told Fox News on Friday that Good, who was a mother of three, worked as a Minneapolis-based immigration activist serving as a member of “ICE Watch.”
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
Ocasio-Cortez, in responding to Vance’s comments, said, “That is a fundamental difference between Vice President Vance and I. I do not believe that the American people should be assassinated in the street.”
But a spokesperson for the vice president, responding to Ocasio-Cortez’s accusation, told Fox News Digital, “On National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day, AOC made it clear she thinks that radical leftists should be able to mow down ICE officials in broad daylight. She should be ashamed of herself. The Vice President stands with ICE and the brave men and women of law enforcement, and so do the American people.”
In Springfield, Ill., in 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln delivered a powerful speech decrying the “ravages of mob law” throughout the land. Lincoln warned, in eerily prescient fashion, that the spread of a then-ascendant “mobocratic spirit” threatened to sever the “attachment of the People” to their fellow countrymen and their nation. Lincoln’s opposition to anarchy of any kind was absolute and clarion: “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.”
Unfortunately, it seems that every few years, Americans must be reminded anew of Lincoln’s wisdom. This week’s lethal Immigration and Customs Enforcement standoff in the Twin Cities is but the latest instance of a years-long baleful trend.
On Wednesday, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mom, Renee Nicole Good, was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Her ex-husband said she and her partner encountered ICE agents after dropping off Good’s 6-year-old at school. The federal government has called Good’s encounter “an act of domestic terrorism” and said the agent shot in self-defense.
Suffice it to say Minnesota’s Democratic establishment does not see it this way.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey responded to the deployment of 2,000 immigration agents in the area and the deadly encounter by telling ICE to “get the f— out” of Minnesota, while Gov. Tim Walz called the shooting “totally predictable” and “totally avoidable.” Frey, who was also mayor during the mayhem after George Floyd’s murder by city police in 2020, has lent succor to the anti-ICE provocateurs, seemingly encouraging them to make Good a Floyd-like martyr. As for Walz, he’s right that this tragedy was eminently “avoidable” — but not only for the reasons he thinks. If the Biden-Harris administration hadn’t allowed unvetted immigrants to remain in the country without legal status and if Walz’s administration hadn’t moved too slowly in its investigations of hundreds of Minnesotans — of mixed immigration status — defrauding taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars, ICE never would have embarked on this particular operation.
National Democrats took the rage even further. Following the fateful shooting, the Democratic Party’s official X feed promptly tweeted, without any morsel of nuance, that “ICE shot and killed a woman on camera.” This sort of irresponsible fear-mongering already may have prompted a crazed activist to shoot three detainees at an ICE facility in Dallas last September while targeting officers; similar dehumanizing rhetoric about the National Guard perhaps also played a role in November’s lethal shooting of a soldier in Washington, D.C.
Liberals and open-border activists play with fire when they so casually compare ICE, as Walz previously has, to a “modern-day Gestapo.” The fact is, ICE is not the Gestapo, Donald Trump is not Hitler, and Charlie Kirk was not a goose-stepping brownshirt. To pretend otherwise is to deprive words of meaning and to live in the theater of the absurd.
But as dangerous as this rhetoric is for officers and agents, it is the moral blackmail and “mobocratic spirit” of it all that is even more harmful to the rule of law.
The implicit threat of all “sanctuary” jurisdictions, whose resistance to aiding federal law enforcement smacks of John C. Calhoun-style antebellum “nullification,” is to tell the feds not to operate and enforce federal law in a certain area — or else. The result is crass lawlessness, Mafia-esque shakedown artistry and a fetid neo-confederate stench combined in one dystopian package.
The truth is that swaths of the activist left now engage in these sorts of threats as a matter of course. In 2020, the left’s months-long rioting following the death of Floyd led to upward of $2 billion in insurance claims. In 2021, they threatened the same rioting unless Derek Chauvin, the officer who infamously kneeled on Floyd’s neck, was found guilty of murder (which he was, twice). In 2022, following the unprecedented (and still unsolved) leak of the draft majority opinion in the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court case, abortion-rights activists protested outside many of the right-leaning justices’ homes, perhaps hoping to induce them to change their minds and flip their votes. And now, ICE agents throughout the country face threats of violence — egged on by local Democratic leaders — simply for enforcing federal law.
In “The Godfather,” Luca Brasi referred to this sort of thuggery as making someone an offer that he can’t refuse. We might also think of it as Lincoln’s dreaded “ravages of mob law.”
Regardless, a free republic cannot long endure like this. The rule of law cannot be held hostage to the histrionic temper tantrums of a radical ideological flank. The law must be enforced solemnly, without fear or favor. There can be no overarching blackmail lurking in the background — no Sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of a free people, ready to crash down on us all if a certain select few do not get their way.
The proper recourse for changing immigration law — or any federal law — is to lobby Congress to do so, or to make a case in federal court. The ginned-up martyrdom complex that leads some to take matters into their own hands is a recipe for personal and national ruination. There is nothing good down that road — only death, despair and mobocracy.
Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. X: @josh_hammer
Insights
L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles.
Viewpoint
Perspectives
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
- Democrats and activist left are perpetuating a dangerous “mobocratic spirit” similar to the mob law that Lincoln warned against in 1838, which threatens the rule of law and national unity[1]
- The federal government’s characterization of the incident as self-defense by an ICE agent is appropriate, while local Democratic leaders are irresponsibly encouraging anti-ICE protesters to view Good as a martyr figure like George Floyd[1]
- Dehumanizing rhetoric comparing ICE to the Gestapo is reckless fear-mongering that has inspired actual violence, including a shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas and the fatal shooting of a National Guard soldier[1]
- The shooting was “avoidable” not because of ICE’s presence, but because the Biden-Harris administration allowed undocumented immigrants to remain in the country without legal status and state authorities moved too slowly investigating immigrant fraud[1]
- Sanctuary jurisdictions that resist federal law enforcement represent neo-confederate “nullification” and constitute crass lawlessness and Mafia-style extortion, effectively telling federal agents they cannot enforce the law or face consequences[1]
- The activist left employs threats of violence as systematic blackmail, evidenced by 2020 riots following Floyd’s death, threats surrounding the Chauvin trial, protests at justices’ homes during the abortion debate, and now threats against ICE agents[1]
- Changing immigration policy must occur through Congress or federal courts, not through mob rule and “ginned-up martyrdom complexes” that lead to personal and national ruination[1]
Different views on the topic
- Community members who knew Good rejected characterizations of her as a domestic terrorist, with her mother describing her as “one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” “extremely compassionate,” and someone “who has taken care of people all her life”[1]
- Vigil speakers and attendees portrayed Good as peacefully present to watch the situation and protect her neighbors, with an organizer stating “She was peaceful; she did the right thing” and “She died because she loved her neighbors”[1]
- A speaker identified only as Noah explicitly rejected the federal government’s domestic terrorism characterization, saying Good was present “to watch the terrorists,” not participate in terrorism[1]
- Neighbors described Good as a loving mother and warm family member who was an award-winning poet and positive community presence, suggesting her presence during the incident reflected civic concern rather than radicalism[1]
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he plans to meet with Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado in Washington next week.
During an appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity,” Trump was asked if he intends to meet with Machado after the U.S. struck Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro.
“Well, I understand she’s coming in next week sometime, and I look forward to saying hello to her,” Trump said.
Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado waves a national flag during a protest called by the opposition on the eve of the presidential inauguration, in Caracas on January 9, 2025. (JUAN BARRETO/AFP via Getty Images)
This will be Trump’s first meeting with Machado, who the U.S. president stated “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country” to lead.
According to reports, Trump’s refusal to support Machado was linked to her accepting the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, which Trump believed he deserved.
But Trump later told NBC News that while he believed Machado should not have won the award, her acceptance of the prize had “nothing to do with my decision” about the prospect of her leading Venezuela.
Rumors are swirling about Venezuela holding $60 billion in Bitcoin—but crypto experts are skeptical | Fortune
Holyoke City Council sends finance overhaul plan to committee for review
Physical Fitness Movies and Shows to Keep You Motivated Toward Your Goals
Dead Man’s Wire review: Gus Van Sant tackles true-crime intrigue
Some flu measures decline, but it’s not clear this severe season has peaked
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Video: ‘It Didn’t Have to Happen This Way:’ U.Va. Faculty Call for Review of Police Response to Protests
AOC accuses Vance of believing ‘American people should be assassinated in the street’
Mercosur: How Macron’s domestic weakness undercut his Brussels clout
National Park Service will void passes with stickers over Trump’s face
Trump plans to meet with Venezuela opposition leader Maria Corina Machado next week
Trump says meeting Iran’s ‘Crown Prince’ Pahlavi would not be appropriate
-
Detroit, MI6 days ago2 hospitalized after shooting on Lodge Freeway in Detroit
-
Technology3 days agoPower bank feature creep is out of control
-
Dallas, TX4 days agoDefensive coordinator candidates who could improve Cowboys’ brutal secondary in 2026
-
Health5 days agoViral New Year reset routine is helping people adopt healthier habits
-
Iowa3 days agoPat McAfee praises Audi Crooks, plays hype song for Iowa State star
-
Nebraska2 days agoOregon State LB transfer Dexter Foster commits to Nebraska
-
Nebraska3 days agoNebraska-based pizza chain Godfather’s Pizza is set to open a new location in Queen Creek
-
Entertainment2 days agoSpotify digs in on podcasts with new Hollywood studios