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With the Democratic establishment — in Maryland and across the country — quickly coalescing around Vice President Kamala Harris to replace President Biden at the top of the White House ticket, it’s easy to forget that her first foray into presidential politics, in 2019, wasn’t nearly as triumphal. But she had a hardy band of supporters in Maryland then who are reveling in the moment now.
“Sometimes I know what I’m talking about,” Prince George’s County Council Member Wanika Fisher (D), an early Harris supporter, joked recently.
Harris, then a first-term U.S. senator from California, entered the 2020 presidential race to great fanfare in her hometown of Oakland, with a raucous well-attended rally in late January. By the end of the year, she was out of the race.
That was hardly a disgrace: Two dozen credible Democrats, from Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet to finance bro Andrew Yang, sought the White House nomination, and many flamed out quickly. By the time the filing deadline for the 2020 Maryland presidential primary rolled around, only 14 Democrats made it to the ballot, and by the time the primary took place on June 2, Biden was already the presumptive nominee.
But Harris’ history-making bid attracted some passionate supporters in Maryland. And for a period, Harris notably established a beachhead in downtown Baltimore, where her campaign opened a second headquarters in an office building on South Charles Street — in part, her advisers said at the time, because Charm City resembled Oakland, where the main headquarters was.
So who was part of the Maryland #KHive five years ago?
Del. Jheanelle K. Wilkins (D-Montgomery) was a supporter — and in fact had been tracking Harris’ political career on social media since before she had even been elected to the Senate, in 2016. State Sen. Mary L. Washington (D-Baltimore City) was also a supporter.
So was then-state Comptroller Peter Franchot — the epitome of an anti-machine Democrat at the time — who said in a social media post after one of the Democratic candidate debates that in an impressive field, Harris was “the most presidential.”
For Fisher, who was a freshman in the House of Delegates during Harris’ first presidential bid, the connection with the vice president runs deep — and is both professional and personal.
Fisher, like Harris, is the daughter of immigrants, and is half-Black and half-Asian. Maryland Secretary of State Susan C. Lee once called Fisher “the Kamala of Maryland.”
“We share the same journey,” Fisher said. “We’re both former prosecutors. We share the same sorority [Alpha Kappa Alpha]. We have the same ethnicity. Growing up, I never imagined that anyone like Kamala or me could succeed in politics. We’re a place where dreams come true. That’s how I’m feeling about Kamala right now.”
Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate and another former prosecutor, has described Harris as a professional mentor and personal friend, and they have campaigned together over the years in California and in Maryland. In 2019, Alsobrooks and her teenaged daughter traveled to Detroit, site of a televised Democratic presidential debate, to provide Harris with moral support.
Alsobrooks has already parlayed her relationship with Harris into a speaking gig at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month, with the details yet to come. Harris, she said this week, “will provide a clear and stark contrast to the regressive vision Donald Trump has for this country. She will make this race about the future and the kind of country our children deserve to inherit. Each and every one of us deserves that kind of leader.”
Beyond elected leaders, Harris’ presidential campaign benefited from the sweat and wisdom of some local political strategists.
Martha McKenna, the Baltimore-based Democratic media consultant and co-founder of the powerhouse Democratic group Emerge Maryland, cut TV ads for Harris’ 2016 Senate campaign. It “was a terrific experience,” she recalled.
While McKenna remained officially neutral in the 2020 White House primary, she lobbied Harris’ presidential campaign to open a headquarters in Baltimore and hosted a happy hour for Harris’ Baltimore-based campaign staff to meet local politicos.
Bill White, who had been a lobbyist with the Annapolis-based firm Capitol Strategies and previously had been the 2018 campaign manager for state Sen. Sarah K. Elfreth (D-Anne Arundel), joined the Harris campaign as a national ballot access coordinator. While he was based in the Baltimore headquarters, he spent a lot of time on the road for the campaign.
Patrick Denny was a Baltimore-based fundraiser for the Harris campaign in 2019. He used those Maryland connections to become finance director of Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D).
It was a smallish band of supporters then. But now almost every Democratic leader in Maryland is all-in for Harris.
Fisher said the vice president can appeal to voters on many levels, not just as a woman of color. She was a vocal supporter of same-sex marriage as California attorney general and as a prosecutor in San Francisco, Fisher said. She was an early advocate for re-entry programs and accountability in the criminal justice system.
And in a society, that’s ever more diverse, Harris’ interracial marriage, with loving step-children and religious diversity, is a sign of encouragement to many voters “and the new American family,” Fisher said, in a country where the “1950’s, white-picket fence notion of families” is no longer commonplace.
“Kamala didn’t come out of nowhere,” she said. “She knew things and worked hard and was a leader.”
Maryland Matters is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: editor@marylandmatters.org. Follow Maryland Matters on Facebook and X.
