Back in 2003, when Kamala Harris was first running for office in San Francisco, she wasn’t just battling Terence Hallinan, the erratic, older white guy who’d served as district attorney for eight years (and been her boss for 18 or so miserable months). She was running against the city’s powerful Democratic machine.
To win, Harris had to pull together her own support system—a network of accomplished and well-connected friends who were passionate, and practical, about helping women get elected. One of those early boosters was Andrea Dew Steele, a Hillary Clinton ally and former Capitol Hill staffer who had recently moved to San Francisco. Her dismay at how few women held local office in the early 2000s led her to co-found a training program for women candidates called Emerge California, and a few years later, a national version, Emerge America.
“The minute I met Kamala I thought she should run for office,” Steele told me back in 2007 when I was interviewing her for a profile of Harris. “She is extremely smart and very good on the policy side, but also, such a charismatic person.” But Harris needed convincing. “Men wake up in the morning and they think, ‘Well, I think I’ll run for president,’” Steele said. “Women need to be cajoled and encouraged. And they need training.” Once she was in, Harris proved to be an extraordinarily quick study, honing a clear message, raising lots of money, and winning over some influential pols (including US Senator Dianne Feinstein but not House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a machine stalwart and Hallinan loyalist). After starting the race with just 6 percent name recognition, Harris went on to trounce her old boss with 56 percent of the vote.
“Men wake up in the morning and they think, ‘Well, I think I’ll run for president.’ Women need to be cajoled and encouraged. And they need training.”
That 2003 race was a proof of concept. Twenty years later, Emerge and its state affiliates have helped elect more than 1,200 Democratic women currently in office, including two governors, two lieutenant governors, and eight members of Congress. For 2023 races, Emerge claims a 74 percent win rate—nearly 250 alums elected; this November, more than 600 alums are on the ballot. Steele, a social entrepreneur and philanthropic strategist, is now an Emerge emeritus; the organization’s current leadership reflects what it calls the New American Majority—an increasingly diverse and youthful electorate that Harris herself embodies. “I don’t think we’re surprised to see the original Emerge woman at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket,” says A’shanti Gholar, Emerge’s president since 2020. “It is such an exciting moment.”
But mixed with the exhilaration is also frustration with the racism and sexism that permeate politics and the media. Plus a serious concern with escalating and seemingly pervasive disinformation, which Gholar says, “really spikes when it comes to women candidates,” from the nation’s highest office to down-ballot races. Now, with Harris enjoying a historic candidacy, I was curious to learn more about how Emerge has evolved over these last two decades and what it is doing to make good on its mission of “creating a world where there are no more firsts”—where Black, brown and Indigenous women, young women, unmarried women, and LGBTQ women routinely run for office and win. I spoke with Gholar from her Washington, DC, base. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Both Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein—two of the most iconic women politicians of their era—came from San Francisco. But, the city’s Democratic power structure was dominated by men. What kind of hurdles did Harris face in taking that on?
People think, “Oh, San Francisco, it’s a Democratic city. There’s going to be lots of women in politics and expertise to tap into.” But that wasn’t the case when the vice president was starting out, and there was no place for them to go to get those basics of what it takes to run for office. It’s why our co-founders created Emerge. They were learning, right along with Kamala Harris: how to write a good bio. You have to put your contacts in order. You have to do the canvassing. You have to hustle.
Twenty years later, in most parts of this country, women candidates still seem to be outsiders.
Even in blue states, there are still so many offices where a woman has never been elected, a woman of color has never been elected, an LGBTQ person has never been elected. I say our work at Emerge has no end date because there are still a lot of good women that we need to get in office.
Thinking back to that first Harris campaign, and then fast forwarding to today, what are the most important things you’re trying to give women candidates? Where do you start?
One of the reasons the vice president was able to be so successful was that she had that network of support with her throughout the campaign. From day one, a huge part of Emerge’s training program is making sure that women are not alone when they’re doing this. From the minute you join the program, we are with you throughout your whole journey. From being in the classroom where we’re demystifying what it takes to run for office, to when you put your name on the ballot, to when you are elected and wanting to run for higher office, we continue to give you those tools, those skills, that support that you need to be a great candidate and a great elected official.
The core Emerge programs include a six-month training for newcomers and “boot camps” for women who are actually running. What do they consist of? I’ve heard they’re really intense.
A key part of our training is that participants are in a room with like-minded women who want to run for office, who have the same goals, the same values. It creates that sisterhood that is so important.
We also want to get them into the immediate mindset of, “Yes, you.” We start the first day by saying, your candidacy begins today, and really getting the women to start to see themselves as candidates, as future elected officials, and honing in on their “why.” For most women who run for office, there’s a singular “why” that drives them.
We then get down to, OK, how do you put your name on the ballot? How do you hire campaign staff? How do you fundraise? How do you do public speaking, debates, canvassing, phone banking— everything that you need to know, going through that very intensively. It’s not “OK, Phone banking 101.” It’s, “How do you run an effective phone bank? What are the different scripts that you need based upon the voters in your community?” A big piece is, calculating your win rate—what are the number of votes that you need to win? And helping build that campaign and their overall operation to be a great candidate.
So many of our alums say, “There’s no way I would have won if I didn’t do Emerge.” We’ve had alums who said, “I literally thought campaigning was going to be me canvassing in my heels, in a suit, because I still had to look professional.” And we’re like, “Please don’t do that!”
Campaigning in heels sounds extremely painful!
One of the most important things we impart to our alums is to be authentic. You don’t have to change who you are in order to get people to vote for you and to get elected. We see that with Vice President Harris. She has an authenticity that is showing through. Be true to you, because if you’re not comfortable in your skin, that’s going to show. Especially in this day and age, people feel like so many of their elected officials have failed them. Candidates who are from the community, who have the same shared experiences, who want to do good work—those are the candidates that people are looking for.
“Be true to you, because if you’re not comfortable in your skin, that’s going to show. Especially in this day and age, people feel like so many of their elected officials have failed them.”
You also mentioned hustle. In some quarters, it could have a bit of a negative connotation— “Oh, Harris is just hustling us.”
There’s a story the vice president told at our annual meeting this year that I love. She talked about putting her ironing board in her car and then setting up the ironing board at the grocery store—during that first campaign, that was her table. She was very grassroots; she had good hustle. I think that is something that we will continue to see from her.
You gotta be scrappy. I’ll take this from the fundraising point of view. We know that women candidates, especially first-time candidates, will almost always get heavily outspent. And we say, what you don’t have in money, you make up with in shoe leather and a good message. It’s putting your ironing board in the backseat of the car. Contacting that friend who is a great cook and asking them to do the catering for your event. It’s throwing house parties in the backyard to create an intimate environment. Just you DM-ing that local reporter saying, “Hey, do you want to come to my home, sit on my couch, and talk about my race?” Because that can lead to good press. Our alums regularly beat those smooth, “I-got-tons-of-consultants” type of candidates with their scrappiness and their hustle.
A lot of people are really surprised by how well Harris has been doing since The Big Switch. You hear all the time, “She doesn’t seem like the same candidate she was in 2019, or 2020.” And, “Where did she learn to give speeches like this?”
The person we see now is who the vice president has always been. I think that some people don’t want to recognize it, they don’t want to see it, and that’s something that we’re also very honest about. We tell our alums, “You’re not going to be for everyone.”
We also have to look at the role that the media plays in shaping the narrative about women candidates. I mean, there can be a race full of women, and they will somehow find ways to make the article about what they wore and not their policies. We see it all the time. We’ll hear, “Those men are running for the same seat.” But the women, “They’re running against each other.” We can have multiple men, but, why do there need to be multiple women? Why do there need to be two Latino women?
I’m very honest in telling our alums: We can teach them how to be confident on the campaign trail. We can make it a lot less lonely when they’re running for office. But we can’t take away racism and misogyny. At the same time, every time a woman puts her name on the ballot, every time a woman is elected, we are changing that narrative. When you see multiple women running for the same position, we’re normalizing that.
Another frequent complaint from journalists: Why hasn’t Harris done any press conferences? Why won’t she sit down for more interviews?
The reality is, we know that the vice president has done interviews before. There have been lengthy articles about her. It goes back to the whole media narrative: “Where’s Kamala? What’s Kamala doing?” My response is, “Everything and everywhere!” I get the e-mails from her team, and reading her daily schedule makes me exhausted.
They’re not avoiding the press, they’re being thoughtful about it. Frankly, they should be thoughtful because it’s a coveted interview—she is the prize. I say, take your time and do it right. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
When she did finally sit down with CNN, how do you think it went?
It was more about asking her to respond to a lot of the things that we have been hearing on the right from Donald Trump, and not a lot about her vision, how she’s going to govern. I felt it could have been a lot more forward-looking. That question about her ethnicity—“They’re saying you aren’t Black enough, you’re not Indian enough”—was that really something they needed to ask her? She gave the perfect response. But why are we constantly asking women to defend who we are?
As you see the candidate Harris has become, is there something she does that you wish you could bottle and hand out to all your Emerge candidates?
I actually will take this back to the vice presidential debate in 2020. It was her being there in her power. She let Mike Pence be Mike Pence, just like I expect she’s going to let Donald Trump be Donald Trump when they debate. And she’s going to focus on answering the questions about the real issues and talking about why she is the perfect candidate for this moment.
It’s what I love about her, something that women are seeing on the campaign trail and that little girls are seeing as they grow up. People are trying to diminish her, but she is not letting that happen. She is keeping that energy going and not letting the negativity seep in. Because the negativity, the racism, the sexism are all a part of wanting to scare us into not wanting to run for office and not making change. When she says, “You do not let people tell you who you are—you show them who you are,” it is such a masterclass in leadership and women owning their power.
