Politics
The first female vice president is from California. Could she help elect the state's first woman governor?
It’s too soon to know whether California’s next governor will be a woman, with the race still two years away. But Vice President Kamala Harris’ visit to Sacramento on Thursday highlighted the possibility after the nation’s first female vice president spent time with two women aiming to become California’s first female governor.
At a historic mansion near the state Capitol, Harris met with Democratic state lawmakers, where she was introduced by Senate leader Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), the first woman to hold that post. Then Harris attended a fundraiser hosted by another female first — Democratic Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, the first woman elected to that office.
Atkins and Kounalakis have already launched campaigns to run for governor in 2026 in what is expected to be a crowded field that will include at least one other woman — Betty Yee, vice chair of the California Democratic Party.
Neither of them was the focus of Harris’ visit. The vice president’s message Thursday to a friendly home-state audience was trained on rallying Democrats to reelect President Biden. She called this year’s election a “binary” choice between “a former president who openly talks about his admiration for dictators” and Biden, whose administration “is about lifting up the condition of the people.”
“The split screen could not be more stark. And the stakes could not be higher,” Harris said to donors gathered at the sprawling Sacramento home of Kounalakis’ parents, which featured marble columns, crystal chandeliers and golden candelabras.
Guests included Democratic Reps. Robert Garcia of Long Beach and Doris Matsui of Sacramento; Jodi Hicks, president of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California; and numerous lobbyists who do business at the state Capitol. Donors were asked to give between $5,000 and $50,000 to attend, according to the invitation, and Kounalakis said the event raised $648,000 for Biden’s reelection.
Ties between the vice president and the lieutenant governor go back about 20 years, Kounalakis said, to when Harris was first elected San Francisco district attorney. Kounalakis was running her family’s home-building business at the time and routinely helped raise money for Democratic politicians.
“We started having regular lunches together… around San Francisco, and just check in on what it was like to be a woman professional, some of the challenges that we had,” Kounalakis said in an interview. “We would often compare notes on shoes and suits, and where to get the best ones.”
Kounalakis said she once set Harris up on a date, but “it was not a love match.”
California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis signing a bill into law while acting as governor in 2022 when Gov. Gavin Newsom was on vacation. State Senate leader Toni Atkins stands behind her.
(Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)
They remained connected as Harris’ career advanced. Kounalakis and her family donated at least $29,000 to support Harris’ campaigns for California attorney general in 2010 and 2014, campaign finance records show. When Kounalakis ran for lieutenant governor in 2018, Harris provided a critical endorsement “that built credibility for my campaign early in the race,” Kounalakis said.
Two years later, when Joe Biden was searching for a running mate, Kounalakis lobbied his campaign to choose Harris as his vice president.
“I felt that there was a lack of appreciation for her skills and her talents and her capabilities. A lot of us in California felt that way,” Kounalakis said.
She set up a Zoom meeting with Biden’s selection committee and invited elected officials and labor leaders from around California. Each one got two minutes to give a testimonial about Harris.
“Dolores Huerta’s was the most memorable to me because she stared down the selection committee and said, ‘We should be telling our daughters that being ambitious is a strength, not a weakness,’” Kounalakis recalled.
In Sacramento on Thursday, Harris described her visit as a homecoming of sorts, having spent six years working in state government as attorney general.
“She has close ties with so many members of our caucus. It was great to welcome her,” said Democratic Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas.
Harris talked to lawmakers about benefits California is getting from Biden’s initiatives, such as the federal infrastructure bill and the CHIPS and Science Act, which directs billions of dollars toward domestic semiconductor research and development, and told them that California plays an important role in pushing a Democratic policy agenda that can wind up shaping the nation.
“The message she sent was a great reminder of how important the work is that we do as a state Legislature,” Rivas said.
Republicans, unsurprisingly, saw it differently.
“Californians are worse off today because of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” California Republican Party Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson said in a statement that criticized “their disastrous policies” at the southern border, on the economy and on crime.
Atkins said she appreciated Harris talking with lawmakers about reproductive rights and abortion access, a key theme Democrats will push in races up and down the ballot in this year’s election. Harris’ reelection message was inspiring, Atkins said, and Democratic lawmakers feel a sense of pride that the nation’s first female vice president is a Californian.
What that will mean for the women seeking to break the glass ceiling in the California governor’s office remains to be seen.
“We all have these relationships,” with Harris, Atkins said. “She knows Betty Yee, she knows Eleni, she knows me.”
Atkins said “there was no jostling or jockeying” Thursday to shift Harris’ attention to California’s gubernatorial race in 2026.
“That day will come, I am sure,” she said. “But that was not today.”
The week after Election Day in 2016, Shirley Morganelli, a women’s health nurse and lifelong Democrat, invited a dozen friends over to the living room of her rowhouse in Bethlehem, Pa., for a glass of wine. Actually, many glasses.
“Misery loves company,” she said.
Ms. Morganelli’s friends, mostly women then in their 50s and 60s, were teachers, nurses, artists and ardent supporters of Hillary Clinton. Some of them had dressed in suffragist white to cast their votes that day, expecting to celebrate the election of America’s first female president. Instead, they had ended the night consoling their college-aged daughters.
“When she called me at three o’clock in the morning — I get all choked up now, because it was the first time I couldn’t say, ‘Everything’s going to be all right,’” said Angela Sinkler, a nurse and former school board member in Bethlehem.
The get-together — Ms. Morganelli called it “unhappy hour” — became a regular event. By the end of the month, commiserating had turned into organizing. They started with writing postcards to elected officials calling on them to oppose Donald J. Trump’s agenda, then moved on to raising money for a local Planned Parenthood chapter and joining in community protests.
Local political candidates began showing up to their gatherings, too, and the group, now called Lehigh Valley ROAR, turned to campaigning. In 2018, several members were elected to City Council in Bethlehem, and Susan Wild, the city solicitor in nearby Allentown and old friend of Ms. Morganelli’s, was elected to Congress with the group’s support.
Lehigh Valley ROAR was one of more than 2,000 similar grass-roots groups formed in the wake of Mr. Trump’s first election — a moment of mass organization larger than even the Tea Party movement at its peak during President Barack Obama’s first term, said Theda Skocpol, a Harvard University professor of government and sociology who has studied both movements.
A vast majority of the groups were led by women, and many traced a similar arc to Ms. Morganelli’s, their shock at Mr. Trump’s election sparking political activism and then, often, electoral victories.
But then there was the defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris in November.
As Mr. Trump returns to the White House on Monday with a popular vote majority and a governing trifecta in Washington, there are few signs of the sort of mass public protest that birthed “the resistance” the last time he took office.
Mr. Trump’s inauguration in 2017 was met with the largest single-day public demonstration in American history. Although thousands marched in Washington Saturday and smaller protests were held in other cities, their numbers fell far short of the hundreds of thousands that rallied eight years ago.
Organizers of the 2017 efforts say this shift reflects the lessons learned from the street protests that took place early in the first Trump presidency, tactics that were quickly abandoned in favor of more strategic organizing — and that opposition to a second Trump term is unlikely to take the same forms.
But some concede that the opposition is more uncertain than it once was. Congressional Democrats and governors now openly debate the wisdom of locking arms against Mr. Trump’s agenda, as they eventually did during his first presidency. And Democrats still now bear scars from last year’s conflicts over Israel’s invasions of Gaza and Lebanon, their embrace of identity politics and President Biden’s aborted candidacy.
In 2017, “everything felt bigger, more important,” said Krista Suh, a screenwriter in Los Angeles. When the Women’s March was announced for the day after Mr. Trump’s swearing-in, Ms. Suh, a novice knitter, came up with a pattern for a cat-eared pink cap to wear to the protest and posted it online.
Within days, “pussy hats” became a ubiquitous emblem of anti-Trump dissent.
Ms. Suh has stayed somewhat politically involved; she canvassed for Ms. Harris in Arizona. But she had no plans to protest this weekend.
“I feel like I’m just so much more jaded now,” she said.
‘He Won the Popular Vote’
When members of Lehigh Valley ROAR assembled once again in Ms. Morganelli’s living room this month, days before Mr. Trump would return to the White House, few were certain about what they should do next. They had canvassed and phone-banked for Ms. Harris. “You name it, we did it,” Ms. Morganelli said.
Ms. Wild had lost her seat, too.
In the corner of Ms. Morganelli’s living room, a cardboard cutout of Mr. Obama still wore a pink hat from the 2017 Women’s March, which most of the group members had attended. But none of them were going to Washington to protest Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
Some members had come to question the effectiveness of the Women’s March. Others were now more concerned about the safety of demonstrating. Last fall, one member’s car was broken into by someone who also tore up the Harris yard signs she had in the back seat.
Four years after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, Ms. Morganelli was ambivalent about the optics of protesting the outcome of a fair election.
“This time, he won the popular vote,” she said, referring to the president-elect. “As good Americans and good Democrats, you have to accept that, right?”
Instead of protest, the group planned to get together to drink wine and write thank-you notes to Mr. Biden. “Moving forward, all we can do is try to be our best selves as good citizens,” Ms. Morganelli wrote on the group’s Facebook page.
A Resistance With Some Regrets
In its early days, the opposition to Mr. Trump seemed to practically organize itself. Grieving liberals poured their energy into any vessel available. People who had never organized a protest in their lives were transformed into leaders of demonstrations of historic scale, sometimes overnight, as was the case for Naomi Lindquester.
Jolted by Mr. Trump’s election, Ms. Lindquester, then a 42-year-old elementary schoolteacher in Denver, created a Facebook event called Women’s March on Denver. She thought she would have to beg her friends to attend.
Instead, the day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, a crowd estimated at more than 100,000 people arrived at the State Capitol to denounce the new president. It was likely the largest demonstration in the history of Colorado.
The Women’s March protests drew some 500,000 attendees to Washington and hundreds of thousands more rallied across the country. But the groups that materialized to organize them, often led by media-savvy young urban professionals, soon found themselves struggling to maintain momentum and, at times, infighting.
The national Women’s March organization splintered after one organizer accused others of antisemitism. Other groups disintegrated amid more prosaic conflicts over priorities and egos.
“It got really ugly, really fast,” said Ms. Lindquester, who has not spoken with her fellow organizers of the Denver march since they fell out in late 2018.
Many such groups, she believes, were victims of their sudden celebrity. “I’ll be really honest with you,” she said, “I very much enjoyed my 15 minutes of fame.”
Since November, Ms. Lindquester has found herself questioning the impact of the march she organized. “The fact that we did that ginormous march and he still got re-elected a second time?” she said.
She has mostly stepped back from public politics — a shift that was in part a result of her move from Denver to a small, conservative town elsewhere in the state, and the heightened scrutiny on teachers’ politics in recent years.
While she was proud of her role in the 2017 protest, “I don’t talk to anyone about that, because I will hear about it if I do,” she said.
In a Facebook post this month she suggested a list of actions that she argued would make a bigger difference now than marching: Plant trees. Volunteer in the community. “Engage with people who think differently than you and find your common ground.”
A New Message: ‘This Is Hard.’
Some argue that the energy is still out there, but the goals are different. Ezra Levin, the executive director of Indivisible, an organization he co-founded in 2017 to channel grass-roots opposition to Mr. Trump, said the group had registered more new local chapters since November than it had at any other point since 2017.
In a new blueprint for action released shortly after the election, Indivisible urged its members to focus not just on Mr. Trump and Congress but also on local elected officials — particularly Democrats in blue states that could serve as a bulwark for resisting Mr. Trump’s policies.
It conceded that “too often in Trump 1.0, we embraced the aesthetics of protests instead of using them as part of a strategy.”
“You shouldn’t start with a tactic,” Mr. Levin said. “You should start with a goal.”
In Ms. Morganelli’s living room, the Lehigh Valley ROAR members spoke of leaning on one another even more as some family members drifted away from their politics in recent years: children who had grown enamored with right-wing survivalism or opposition to vaccines during the coronavirus pandemic, or turned on Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris over their support for Israel.
“I lost my liberal, progressive son to Joe Rogan,” one said, as others nodded in sympathy.
They felt alienated from younger Democratic activists who seemed to see fighting Mr. Trump as a lesser priority than matters of ideological purity.
“If you’re not lefty-left enough, they are willing to sacrifice their vote and throw it away,” either by not voting or voting for a third-party candidate, said Lori McFarland, a member of the group who is now the chairwoman of the Lehigh County Democratic Committee. “And they’ve just set us back.”
Ms. Suh, the “pussy hat” creator, has not sought to reprise her role in the protest movement. She thought that a unifying phenomenon like her hat would still be possible — but the message should now be something different than the defiance of early 2017.
“I think,” she said, “it has to be something like: ‘I hear you. This is hard.’”
Politics
How will DeSantis, Youngkin and other 2028 hopefuls stay relevant outside the Trump administration?
During a busy week in the nation’s capital, far from the action, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had no trouble keeping his name in the political spotlight.
“This is a time for action. And a time for Washington, D.C., to deliver results to the American people. There are no more excuses for Republicans,” the conservative two-term governor and 2024 Republican presidential candidate said Thursday as he named Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody to succeed Sen. Marco Rubio in the Senate.
Two days earlier, President-elect Trump gave his onetime bitter GOP primary rival a shout-out after the governor called for a special state legislative session to implement Trump’s expected immigration crackdown.
“Thank you Ron, hopefully other governors will follow!” the president-elect said in a social media post.
VANCE IS THE EARLY FRONTRUNNER, BUT HERE ARE THE OTHER REPUBLICANS WHO MAY RUN FOR PRESIDENT IN 2028
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox listens before President-elect Trump talks at a meeting with Republican governors at Mar-a-Lago Jan. 9, 2025, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Due to the national profile he’s built over the past four years, the governor of one of the country’s most important states will likely continue to stay in the headlines as he takes a lead on some of the nation’s most consequential issues.
The spotlight should help DeSantis if he ends up launching a second straight GOP presidential nomination run in 2028, a race in which soon-to-be Vice President JD Vance will be considered the clear early frontrunner as the perceived America First and MAGA heir apparent to Trump.
“He needs to do what he did in 2022, which is pick good fights. And he’s shown a lot of capability to pick good fights with the left both in Florida and nationally,” longtime Republican strategist David Kochel said of DeSantis.
RNC CHAIR SAYS GOP HAS ‘DEEP BENCH’ FOR 2028
“I think he’ll be in demand to come do stuff in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina,” Kochel, a veteran of numerous GOP presidential campaigns, predicted, pointing to the three key early voting states in the Republican presidential primaries.
“I wouldn’t change a lot from how he did the run-up to his 2024 campaign. The problem was he basically ran against an incumbent president. He didn’t have the wrong playbook. He had the wrong cycle.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holds a news conference with emergency officials as a hurricane bears down on his state Oct. 9, 2024 (AP)
While the initial moves in the 2028 White House run will likely start in the coming months, including some early state visits, most Americans won’t be paying a lick of attention until after the 2026 midterms, when the next presidential campaign formally gets under way. And that’s when DeSantis will be wrapping up his second and final four-year term steering Florida, allowing him to concentrate 100% on a White House run if that’s in his cards.
But what about another high-profile Republican governor who likely has national ambitions in 2028?
HERE ARE THE DEMOCRATS WHO MAY RUN FOR THE WHITE HOUSE IN 2028
The Virginia Constitution doesn’t allow for incumbent governors to run for a second consecutive term, so Gov. Glenn Youngkin will be out of office in Richmond in a year.
Compared to DeSantis, who also enjoys large GOP majorities in his state legislature, which will allow him to continue to enact a conservative agenda, Virginia is a purple state where Democrats have a slight upper hand in the legislature.
“It might be a little tougher for Youngkin, a little tougher for him to find ways to stay in the news” after he leaves office in a year, Kochel suggested.
But, Younkin predicted, “You’re going to see me a lot.”
“We’ve got a very aggressive agenda for being governor in the last 14 months,” he said in a Fox News Digital interview in November. “But part of that agenda that I have is to make sure that we have [Lt. Gov.] Winsome Sears as our next governor. [Virginia Attorney General] Jason Miyares is back as our attorney general and a super lieutenant governor who we will pick at our primaries.”
Youngkin, who energized Republicans nationwide in 2021 as a first-time candidate who hailed from the party’s business wing, edged former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe to become the first GOP candidate in a dozen years to win a gubernatorial election in the one-time swing state that had trended toward the Democrats over the previous decade. He could also potentially end up in the Trump administration after his term in Richmond sunsets in a year.
“I told the president when I called him and told him that I wanted to finish my term that I would be available to help him at any time while I’m governor and afterwards,” Youngkin told Fox News Digital, referring to a call he held with Trump right after the November election.
But if he doesn’t enter the Trump administration, another route for Youngkin to stay in the spotlight in 2026 would be criss-crossing the country on behalf of fellow Republicans running in the midterm elections. It’s a role Youngkin previously played in 2022, helping fellow Republican governors and gubernatorial candidates.
“He’s got to do the blocking and tackling, go state by state, help a lot of candidates, raise a lot of money for them. Get a bunch of governors elected,” Kochel suggested. “That’s the playbook for him.”
What about NIkki Haley, the former two-term Republican governor of South Carolina and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in Trump’s first administration, who was the last rival standing against Trump in the 2024 GOP presidential primaries?
Nikki Haley, the former U.N. ambassador and former South Carolina governor, speaks at the Republican National Convention July 17, 2024, in Milwaukee. (Fox News/Paul Steinhauser)
Out of office and shut out of the Trump world while still facing social media zingers by the president-elect, Haley’s ability to grab attention should she seek the presidency again may be a more difficult climb within a party once again on bended knee to the former and future president.
Haley does have a weekly national radio show on Sirius XM, where she noted a few weeks ago, “I had no interest in being in [Trump’s] Cabinet.”
But a lot can happen in the two years until the next White House race officially gets under way. There could be some buyer’s remorse among voters if the new administration is not successful in enacting some of its goals.
“While JD Vance starts as the presumed frontrunner right now, there’s a million miles to go between now and then,” seasoned Republican strategist Colin Reed told Fox News.
And Kochel added that for some Republicans mulling a 2028 presidential bid, “I think a little strategic distance is not a bad idea. Because you don’t know what’s going to happen over the next two years.”
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But holding statewide office — either as a governor or senator — doesn’t guarantee favorable coverage.
“Having a day job cuts both ways. It gives you a platform, a megaphone, and an ability to make news whenever you want. But it also carries with it the responsibilities of governing or legislating or being part of government bodies, whether it’s Congress or the state you are running, where things can go wrong and end up on your doorstep and become political baggage,” Reed noted.
Reed warned that “history is littered with those officeholders who ran and won for a second term only to have political baggage at home become political headaches on the campaign trail.”
Unlike the many people who are upset that Donald Trump is being inaugurated on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I see it as a good thing. First, it calls even more attention to the day and its significance. Second, it is a chance to speculate about what King might say and do if he were alive in the Trump era.
Counterfactual, “what if” history is a trend in the literary world. Trump’s inauguration on the holiday may prompt us to think about what America and the world might have looked like with King alive and well. Conversely, how did America and the world devolve without him?
King was the kind of leader who comes along once in a lifetime, one with unmatched eloquence and passion. His gift for oratory could energize all kinds of people, including workers, presidents and other heads of state. He possessed visionary insight on the complex racial, social and economic ills as well as their solutions and consequences.
He worked tirelessly to build a grassroots civil rights and social justice movement and serve as its guiding force. And his charismatic presence influenced people to act on the issues and problems he was working to solve.
How might that play out in the Trump era? To begin with, King abhorred all violence. He most likely would have been deeply pained by the mass gun killings that have become somewhat commonplace in American cities. He would almost certainly have butted heads with the National Rifle Assn. and its ardent backer Trump while lobbying Congress to pass comprehensive gun control legislation.
When it comes to international politics, King surely would have condemned Russia’s war in Ukraine. One can also envision him speaking out against Hamas’ kidnapping and slaughter of Israelis as well as Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians. He would have called these wars ineffectual, repressive and wasteful, a drain on resources that should go to programs that aid the poor and minorities. On this point, he and Trump, who repeatedly claims he has kept America out of wasteful wars, would likely be in some agreement.
It’s impossible to imagine King not fighting tooth and nail against the rash of voter suppression laws and the GOP’s ploys to dilute Black and minority voting strength, including the assault on the Voting Rights Act. He’d bump heads with Trump on that. But Trump would also have a comeback: He’d cite the sharp increase in Black and Hispanic votes for him in the recent presidential election.
King would almost certainly try to prevent the country’s Republican-led rightward sprint, drawing negative attention from Trump and his MAGA coalition. But even he would not have been able to stop the many powerful forces with vested interest in halting or reversing the country’s momentum toward expanded civil rights, labor protections and economic fairness.
The resurgence of overtly racist sentiments, acts and conflicts under Trump would obviously trouble King, who famously hoped for a day when Americans are judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
King would have had to find new ways to challenge the continuing ills of poverty and wealth inequality, which ballooned in the decades after his death. Even given his superb organizing and planning skills, this growth likely would have been a losing battle.
Had he lived, King’s unshakable commitment to the cause of human rights and economic equality surely would not have diminished. Wherever there was a campaign, march, rally, lobbying effort or event that his presence could boost, it’s a safe bet that he’d have much to say and do. In the Trump era, there would be plenty to keep him busy.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s latest book is “Day 1 The Trump Reign.” His commentaries can be found at thehutchinsonreport.net.
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