Nearly 14 years ago, Kamala Harris’s opponent in the California attorney-general’s race gave an answer at a little-watched debate that was frank – and fateful for the future Democratic presidential nominee.
The first thing to know about Kamala Harris’ campaign for California attorney-general is that she was not necessarily favoured to win.
It was 2010 – the pinnacle of the Tea Party’s power – and Harris was running statewide for the first time and struggling to shed the same San Francisco liberal label that Donald Trump is yet again wielding as an epithet.
Harris, then 45, was already seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party. “The female Barack Obama,” Gwen Ifill had memorably tagged her the year before. But plenty of rising stars are snuffed out early, and Harris was facing a formidable Republican foe that year in Steve Cooley, the popular and moderate district attorney of Los Angeles County.
Cooley’s reputation as an evenhanded, corruption-busting prosecutor had put him tied or narrowly ahead of Harris entering October – largely on the strength of his uncommon popularity for a Republican in Los Angeles. He had won election three times in what is the state’s most populous Democratic stronghold.
Harris was running out of both time and money when she arrived at their only debate on the first Tuesday of October. Then, about 45 minutes into the hourlong clash, Cooley gave an answer that was frank, fateful and foolish.
It was a turning point in the campaign. Harris would escape a month later with one of the narrowest statewide victories in modern California history – by less than 0.85% of the vote. Yet even on election night, Harris’ chances had appeared so bleak that Cooley declared victory. The race remained unsettled for three weeks.
“Everyone writes history like it’s all inevitable,” said Harris’ chief strategist in the 2010 race, Averell “Ace” Smith. Her first statewide win, he said, was anything but.
“That was as close to a near-death experience for a political career as you can get,” said Chris Jankowski, a Republican strategist who then led a national GOP group that spent US$1 million ($1.65m) in a failed bid to end Harris’ career before it could really get started. “If she had lost that race, she would not be the nominee for President – no chance.”
Now, as Harris seeks to become the first woman to serve as president in US history, that long-forgotten moment at a debate nearly 14 years ago stands out as one of the least known yet most consequential pivot points in the arc of her political career.
This is the story of those 47 seconds – and what followed.
‘I earned it’
To say the lone faceoff of the 2010 attorney-general’s race drew little fanfare would be an understatement.
It was held at noon far from the state’s biggest media markets and inside a practice courtroom at the law school of the University of California, Davis. To the best of anyone’s recollection, it did not even air live on television. The moderator, a local television political reporter named Kevin Riggs, had sat down with three other journalists who served as panellists just that morning at a coffee shop to divide up topics.
Dan Morain, who worked for The Sacramento Bee’s editorial page, asked who would bring up double-dipping – that is, taking both a public salary and a public pension. It had been an issue in the Republican primary, first raised by John Eastman, Cooley’s primary opponent. Eastman is better known now for his efforts to keep Trump in office after the 2020 election, which resulted in an indictment and disbarment.
“I’m going to ask that,” replied Jack Leonard, a Los Angeles Times reporter who covered Cooley.
Public pensions were a white-hot topic at the time, and Cooley was making waves for prosecuting public corruption in the city of Bell, where local officials were pulling in outlandish salaries in an impoverished municipality.
Inside the practice courtroom, Leonard outlined that the US$150,000 ($248,000) salary of the California attorney general was half of the US$292,300 ($482,600) salary that Cooley was earning as the local district attorney. If he double-dipped by taking a taxpayer-paid pension as a former district attorney and a taxpayer-paid salary as the state attorney general, Cooley would be in line to make more than US$400,000 ($660,000).
“Do you plan to double-dip by taking both a pension and your salary as attorney-general?” Leonard asked.
“Yes, I do,” Cooley said without hesitation.
He glanced at Harris. She said nothing.
“I earned it.”
But Cooley was not yet done. “I definitely earned whatever pension rights I have, and I will certainly rely upon that to supplement the very low, incredibly low salary that’s paid to the attorney-general,” he added.
“It was tone-deaf,” Riggs said. “It was startling,” Leonard said. “It was awful,” Morain said. “It was jaw-dropping,” Smith said.
And it was, Cooley recalled in a recent interview, truthful.
“The point is I answered honestly,” Cooley said. “It was a mistake. A lot of people said, ‘You should have dodged that one, Steve.’”
Kevin Spillane, Cooley’s top strategist, blamed himself for not coaching Cooley to evade better. “That’s a credit to his character,” Spillane said of his client’s honesty. “But that’s a liability in politics.”
For her part, Harris had stood in silence. Morain, who has since written a book about Harris’ career, called it her “Vin Scully moment,” likening it to how the famous baseball broadcaster often let the sound of the game speak for itself.
“Anything you’d like to add to that?” Riggs offered.
“Go for it, Steve!” Harris said during the debate, letting loose her now familiar laugh. “You earned it!”
It was all over in less than a minute. The good news for Cooley was that practically no one had seen his answer. The bad news was that was about to change.
The race to cut a powerfully simple ad
Brian Brokaw, Harris’ campaign manager, was sitting next to Smith, the chief strategist, at the debate site. “We looked at each other,” Brokaw said, “and it’s sometimes hard to tell in a room how something lands, and we said to each other, ‘That was pretty bad, right?’”
They agreed it was bad. They soon called the campaign’s admaker, Mark Putnam, and told him to watch a video of the debate.
There is some disagreement as to what exactly came next.
“I called up Mark Putnam,” Smith said, “and I said, ‘I think we just won the race. Can you get this in an ad?’”
Putnam said he was asked to watch the debate to produce some social-media content and was floored with what he saw – and that he was the one who told the team, “We just won the campaign.”
What both Putnam and Smith remembered is that – to the admaker’s delight – Cooley’s answer fit almost perfectly into a 30-second spot.
“I looked at it and realized I didn’t have to do any editing,” Putnam said. Within a day, he cut an ad that was as bare-bones as it was devastating: just Leonard’s question, Cooley’s answer and quiz-show music. At the end, the screen faded to black with white text that read, “$150,000 a year isn’t enough?”
The average California household earned US$54,280 ($89,620) at the time.
Putnam said there had been “real reluctance” to air the ad inside the campaign without having tested the message in a poll. “It’s important to know this ad almost didn’t get made and almost didn’t air,” Putnam said. Smith called that nonsense. “We didn’t have money to test anything,” he said, “and we needed to take decisive action.”
It was certainly true that the campaign was all but broke. The mid-October financial report revealed less than US$850,000 ($1.4m) in the bank – and more than US$100,000 ($165,000) in debts. That was not enough for a single week of television time statewide.
So they decided to plough practically every last dollar into airing the double-dipping ad exclusively in Los Angeles – hoping to cut into Cooley’s home turf. They did not have enough cash to book the final three weeks all at once. “We were spending it as it came in,” Brokaw said.
Still, the ad felt like it was “everywhere,” said Leonard, who stopped watching television with his wife to avoid his “nasally British accent” asking the double-dipping question.
For her part, Harris had dreamed of closing the campaign on a high note, with advertising about her record or her vision. But they did not have enough money to do both.
She ultimately greenlit the all-negative recommendation. “This is eternally to Kamala Harris’ credit,” Smith said. “She literally bought into shoving all the chips into the middle of the table. You will rarely find a candidate able to make that gutsy of a decision.”
The bid to ‘kill Hercules in the crib’
Around the same time, national Republicans, who foresaw the long-term threat Harris could pose, began a last-minute counterstrike against her – a US$1m ad buy in Los Angeles that featured the brutal testimonial of the mother of a slain police officer in San Francisco who criticised Harris for refusing to seek the death penalty for the gang member who killed her son.
Smith, the Harris strategist, surmised they were trying “to kill Hercules in the crib”.
He was right.
“This was an intentional targeting of someone who was clearly a rising star,” said Jankowski, who led the Republican State Leadership Committee at the time. “That’s the way we were thinking, and back then donors were buying it.”
Harris had a cavalry of her own: a late-October visit from President Barack Obama for a Los Angeles rally. Obama was confronting congressional losses nationwide but still prioritised a splashy California event that featured Harris, who had been one of his earliest endorsers in 2008.
“I want everybody to do right by her,” Obama told a crowd of 37,000.
Beyond the blitz of ads about his double-dipping, Cooley faced the collapse of the Republican ticket around him, led by Meg Whitman, the party’s candidate for governor. Cooley recalled that he was leading 10 days out but that his team warned him of a coming Democratic surge.
“The polling was just going south,” said Spillane, the top Cooley strategist.
A contest that stretched past election day
The race was still a nail-biter on election night. Cooley jumped out to an early lead and, against Spillane’s advice, declared victory. The San Francisco Chronicle followed suit, publishing a “Cooley beats Harris” story. A printout still hangs on Smith’s office wall.
At her party, Harris and her supporters huddled over laptops, tracking increasingly favourable returns deep into the night. “People are falling asleep all around her, and she’s still there,” recalled Matt Haney, now an assembly member who worked as a campaign volunteer. “We stayed there until the sun came out.”
The later results in Los Angeles tilted ever more toward Harris, which Smith said had “etched into the historic record” the impact of her late advertising blitz.
An internal Harris poll from early August had shown Cooley ahead by 10 percentage points in Los Angeles County. The final result: Harris carried the county by 14 points.
“The ads were very effective,” Cooley conceded. He still blamed Whitman’s collapse for his defeat more than “some clever ad,” sounding sore about Harris and her qualifications.
Harris ultimately won by less than 75,000 votes, and Cooley conceded to her three weeks after the election. No Republican has since come as close to winning statewide.
“It’s hard to go back and say she definitely wouldn’t have won without that moment,” Putnam said of the double-dipping episode. “I can’t play God. But the moment was decisive.”
A few months after the race, Cooley called up Leonard and invited him to a meal at the Water Grill in downtown Los Angeles. Cooley would not tell him why.
Partway through the meal, Leonard recalled that Cooley reached across the table and shook his hand to thank him.
“If you hadn’t asked that question,” Cooley told him, “I would have to be up in Sacramento.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
Written by: Shane Goldmacher
Photographs by: Monica Almeida, Nicole Craine and Doug Mills
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