Kamala Harris’ trip to Iowa stirs up Obama-like energy

DES MOINES, Iowa — Iowans are accustomed to a parade of high-profile politicians showing up at pizza parlors, community colleges and farm bureaus to mingle with voters and woo local party leaders long before the state kicks off the presidential campaign season.

But Sen. Kamala Harris’ arrival this week is stirring up the kind of enthusiasm that Democrats say reminds them of another first-term senator whose upset Iowa caucus victory jump-started his path to the White House in 2008.

“I haven’t seen that kind of energy since Barack Obama,” Sean Bagniewski, the chair of the Polk County Democrats, said Monday night after Harris fired up several hundred people inside a Des Moines ballroom on her first trip to Iowa since she volunteered here for Obama a decade ago.

While she’s not on the ballot for November’s mid-terms and hasn’t officially declared a run for the White House in 2020, it’s no secret why the California senator is hopscotching across the Hawkeye State more than 15 months before its coveted first-in-the-nation presidential caucus.

Several potential 2020 candidates have already passed through the state, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, who campaigned in Iowa over the weekend, and Sen. Cory Booker, who brought down the house at a dinner earlier this month. Others like East Bay Rep. Eric Swalwell have racked up as many as a dozen Iowa trips.

“This is an inflection moment in the history of our country,” Harris told about 200 people in a suburban community college auditorium in a Des Moines suburb, urging them to get involved in campaigns over “the next 15 days.”

She has campaigned with several candidates in closely-watched Iowa congressional and statewide races, insisting that she’s focused on 2018 and not 2020. But some of the Iowans attending rallies this week are providing Harris with the kind of encouragement she came here to hear: “Run for president, Kamala!” one man shouted, prompting cheers.

More than two dozen Iowans who came to Harris’ events across the state said the former San Francisco prosecutor stood out from the pack of Democrats because of how she took on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his controversial nomination hearings, citing viral moments like her asking the judge if he could name any laws that regulate a man’s body.

“She wasn’t letting him squirm away,” said Lu Ann Pedrick, a data analyst who said she was riveted by the hearings.

At least a half dozen women walked away from meeting Harris wiping away tears, most after telling her about their personal experiences of sexual assault. Isabelle Barrett, a 21-year-old student at Drake University, said she “saw my own rapist in Brett Kavanaugh” — who fought back accusations from a Palo Alto professor and other women that he had sexually assaulted them during his high school and college years.

“Showing emotion is a strength,” Harris told Barrett, gripping both her arms.

The national spotlight on the Kavanaugh hearings has undeniably raised Harris’ profile. In the northeast Iowa city of Waterloo, people packed into a narrow political office covered in campaign posters and precinct maps to hear Harris speak.

“We don’t get that kind of crowd in an off-year on a Tuesday afternoon,” said Dave Nagle, a former Iowa congressman who ran the state’s presidential caucuses in 1984. Harris spurred a “hell of a turnout,” he said — and a larger crowd than other national figures who’ve passed through in recent months, including Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.

A CNN poll of Democrats nationwide released last week found Harris polling third behind former Vice President Joe Biden, and Sanders, and just ahead of Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Several of Harris’ campaign stops took place near spots where Obama spoke when he was running a decade ago. After Harris told several hundred people in an Iowa City church that “what unites us is far greater than what divides us,” State Sen. Bob Dvorsky praised her presence on the stump as showing “echoes of Obama.” Her crowd sizes were comparable to those of the former president or Sanders early in the caucus process, he said.

But Justin Wasson, the chair of the Linn County Republican Party in Cedar Rapids, said he doubted Harris would be able to swing Iowa — a state that voted for Trump by 10 points in 2016 — back to the Democratic side if she was the party’s nominee.

“My experience has been that people from the coasts don’t do too well in Iowa,” he said, noting that even Trump, a New Yorker, lost the state’s caucus. Among the Democratic field, he said, it seems like “everyone’s trying to be Obama right now… but people see through that imitation.”

At this point in the embryonic 2020 campaign, her most important task in Iowa is to build relationships with the activists, organizers, and officials who would provide the political muscle for a hard-fought caucus campaign, observers say. Already, many potential 2020 candidates are quietly courting local party bigwigs and trying to lock down the state’s top talent.

“Lots of people are getting the calls and the emails and the sit-downs and the dinners,” said Jackie Norris, one of Obama’s top political advisers in the state during the 2008 caucuses.

Notably, Harris is crisscrossing the state with Deidre DeJear, the Democratic nominee for secretary of state who would be Iowa’s first black statewide elected official. DeJear, who’s considered a rising star in state Democratic circles, told one rally that she had “never met anybody in my life who defends justice so tenaciously and with such grace” as Harris.

Harris, who turned 54 on Saturday, also traveled with her husband Douglas Emhoff and sister Maya Harris, the former policy director on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, as well as several of her top California political advisers.

One issue Harris campaigned for across her events is a newly introduced tax bill that would provide a $6,000 tax credit for every family making less than $100,000, which Harris frames as an antidote to the Trump administration tax reform that focused the largest cuts on corporations and wealthy.

Trump has also talked up the idea of a new push for middle class tax relief as he campaigns around the country in the last few days. Harris said she wasn’t sure whether the president’s suggestion was credible. “He says a lot of things,” she argued.

Most of her stump speech weighs heavier on applause lines than policy. At one event, she repeated the word fight nearly 20 times over the course of 17 minutes.

The old-school retail politicking that’s the bread and butter of Iowa politics is a world away from the typical ad-driven political campaigns of California. But Harris said meeting voters in smaller settings reminded her of her early days running for district attorney of San Francisco, when she’d set up an ironing board festooned with campaign posters outside local grocery stores to talk to voters.

“I’d walk up and down the hills and knock on doors,” she told reporters. “There’s nothing more important than engaging with people on a one-on-one basis.”

That kind of hustle is crucial in the Hawkeye State, said Mary Campos, an 88-year-old activist in Des Moines who’s led fights for labor and immigrant rights here. When she met Harris Monday morning, Campos leaned in close to give her a piece of advice: “There’s nothing that can replace a phone call or a knock on the door.”

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