Kamala Harris - Another Californian Who Could Signal a Shift in American Politics

Kamala Harris will represent so many firsts when she’s sworn in next week as Vice President. First woman. First Asian. First Black. She will not, however, be the first Californian sworn in as VP. Richard Nixon won that honor in 1953.

Between 1933 and 1969, Democrats had the White House and a majority of the House and Senate 72% of the time. Two Californians ended that dominance. Nixon in 1968 and 1972 and Reagan in 1980 and 1984 won the presidency in landslide victories. Nixon brought the Dixiecrats –southerners who left the Democratic party after Johnson signed Civil Rights legislation ending segregation – into the party of Lincoln. Reagan was big government’s most charismatic critic. They so shifted American politics that Democrats did not win back the White House until they ran Bill Clinton – a southerner who as president declared, “the era of big government is over.”

Blue jeans, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and the late-20th century conservative movement of Nixon and Reagan came out of California. Kamala Harris could easily represent the next wave to come out of the state.

California is now no place for Republicans. As the Republican Party has become more anti-immigrant and pro-conspiracy theory, it has lost support in the state.

California lets the top two candidates in a primary race run against each other in the general election. It doesn’t matter if one is Republican and another is Democratic or both are Democrats (as happened in seven House races in 2020). In 2016, Kamala Harris ran for senate against a fellow Democrat. Democrats won 27 House seats by more than a two to one vote in 2020. (And another 15 by smaller margins.) 27 is the same number of representatives that New York and Florida send to Congress. Republicans represent only 11 of the state’s 53 districts.

Why have Republicans done so poorly in California? California has built an economy dependent on education, research, immigrants and access to foreign markets.

In 1960, California governor Pat Brown signed legislation that made California the only state in the nation to offer free education from kindergarten through grad school. Clark Kerr – who headed the committee that drafted the plan Brown turned into law – was head of the University of California and had a theory about economic progress. In the same way that the railroad in the late 1800s and the automobile in the early 1900s had reshaped the economy, he thought that the late 1900s would be transformed by knowledge workers; Kerr’s education plan was designed to produce them.
Kamala Harris was born of Clark Kerr’s vision to create a world-class university system. Her mother came from India and father came from Jamaica, two grad students who met at UC Berkeley, fell in love, and had two children, Kamala and her little sister Maya. (Kamala’s mother insisted on giving her daughters names from Hindu mythology stating that, “a culture that worships goddesses produces strong women.”) Kamala wasn’t the only birth resulting from Kerr’s vision.

California became home to Silicon Valley. Intel was founded in 1968, Apple in 1976, and Google in 1998. California’s early investment in education paid off with millions of high-paying jobs and trillions of dollars in new wealth. The late 1900s – as Kerr predicted - was transformed by the knowledge economy. His plan had prepared California for this new reality.

One of the best predictors of how a community will vote has become levels of education. Harris split her childhood between two Bay Area counties; 77% of adults in those counties have a BA. That education ties to income; median household income in the two counties where Harris grew up is $119,00 a year. The Bay Area is defined by returns to intellectual – not industrial - capital. On two campuses six miles apart – Google and Facebook – median employee pay is $200,000 and $240,000. Billionaires get a lot of attention but stock options have made multi-millionaires out of thousands of west coast employees.

In the California counties where Harris spent her childhood, Trump won only 17%. In California, Trump’s campaign promises sounded like threats. Trade wars with China? A wall to keep immigrants out? It is connection to and not protection from the rest of the world that has helped California to thrive. A regional Hollywood is a playhouse. A regional Google search engine is the yellow pages. Silicon Valley is capital of the worldwide – not the nationwide - web.

It seems safe to bet that the country will follow Silicon Valley into a more entrepreneurial, information economy dependent on knowledge workers and global markets rather than follow Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky into coal mines, “protecting” workers and consumers from trade and immigration. That is, it seems safe to bet that Kamala Harris – like Nixon and Reagan before her – represents a set of policies and philosophy that will shape national politics for a generation.