The Conversation

The political earthquake that has made Kamala Harris the Democratic Party’s nominee for president is a San Francisco story that began more than 60 years ago.

The cast of characters includes a chain-smoking, hard-drinking and profane political mastermind; a Polish Jewish activist who fled the Nazis and later became a member of Congress; a Black lawyer and civil rights activist from rural Texas; and the scion of a powerful political family who moved to San Francisco when she got married and made it to Congress in substantial part due to a deathbed endorsement from the refugee-turned-congresswoman.

Harris, whose first foray into electoral politics was in 2003 when she won a tough race for district attorney in San Francisco, and Nancy Pelosi, the longtime San Francisco congresswoman who was instrumental in persuading Joe Biden not to seek reelection, can both trace their political origins and their brand of liberal politics to the 1963 mayoral election in San Francisco.