When “Saturday Night Live” opened its new season in September, Colin Jost and Michael Che were once again at the anchor desk of “Weekend Update.” Much of their comedic firepower focused on the goings-on in the Trump administration, but they did find time to mention the upcoming midterm elections. Jost announced that Kamala Harris had offered to campaign for Democrats — and then, with a hint of a smirk on his face and with a portrait of the former vice president just over his shoulder, he went in for a big bite of some of the lowest-hanging fruit: “ … because there’s still time for Democrats to blow this thing.”
In the two years since her 107-day campaign for the presidency ended in defeat, Harris has become a reliable punching bag among a wide variety of Americans. Plainspoken Democrats fighting their way forward in Republican territory want nothing to do with the lady who once proclaimed her pronouns with wokey-woke, big-city solemnity. Adam Hamilton, the Democratic Senate candidate from Kansas, told Politico that in response to people who ask, “Should she come here to campaign for you?” he answers, “Please no.” Mary Peltola’s Senate campaign in Alaska, which President Trump won by 14 points, even made the ungrateful move of disavowing Harris’ support after she had publicly offered it. “Mary,” the campaign said, “isn’t seeking endorsements from anyone from the Lower 48 — her focus is and always will be Alaska.” Harris has been similarly shunned by Democrats in Iowa, Arizona and Texas.
Her reputation is no better among progressives, who in their search for a perfect candidate are still disappointed that she didn’t speak up boldly and candidly about Palestinian rights in 2024, instead offering a word salad of platitudes. “Kamala Harris Completely Fails to Read the Room on 2028,” read a headline in the liberal New Republic earlier this year.
To plenty of voters — left, center and everywhere in between — Harris is an unwelcome ghost of the Biden era, a reminder of muddled priorities and the malpractice of refusing to face the devastating reality of a man’s decline happening in plain sight. In the public imagination, she remains the bewildering politician who went on “The View” in October 2024 and — when asked what she would have done differently from the exceedingly unpopular Joe Biden — replied, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” (Not a thing? Really?) To her most dismissive critics, she is the presidential candidate whose vague policy positions could be summed up as little more than “joy” and an abundance of references to coconut trees and brat green.
I will not deny that Harris has a multitude of flaws. She has a habit of getting lost in her own verbiage. Her demeanor at an informal campaign event can be stiff. Her public interactions with media can be so cautious that she renders herself two-dimensional. And, well, no one forced her to run in the absurdly compressed, fraught aftermath of Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 race. So, I’m not here to tell you that she deserves your empathy, your undivided attention or your vote — if she should aim to woo you in 2028.
What I am here to tell you is that all of this contempt is unwarranted. Harris — who made triple history when she became this nation’s first Black, South Asian and female vice president — deserves respect. She should not be the recipient of an aggrieved electorate’s belittlement. She has earned more.
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In less than two years, we seem to have lost sight of the totality of Harris’s resume. She was district attorney in San Francisco and California’s attorney general. And while her background in law and order has sometimes left progressives cold, she also developed a reputation for skill and sensitivity when working with victims of sexual violence and for support of the LGBTQ community. She presided over same-sex marriages as district attorney during San Francisco’s “winter of love” in 2004 — more than a decade before such marriages would become legal nationwide.
In 2016, she became the second Black woman and first South Asian candidate ever elected to the Senate. Once in Washington, she proved expert at asking pointed questions of Trump officials and eliciting revealing answers as they tried to obfuscate, prevaricate and condescend.
“Attorney General Barr, has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone?” Harris said during a 2019 hearing on the Mueller report. “Yes or no, please sir.”
Harris held her gaze as Barr stumbled and stalled and explained that he was trying to “grapple with the word ‘suggest.’” In her response, she employed a perfectly calibrated mix of disdain and skepticism: “Perhaps they’ve suggested … hinted … inferred?” She didn’t get a definitive answer from Barr but the laser focus of her inquiry created a valuable record of the administration’s wobbly ethics.
While questioning Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on whether Roe v. Wade had been decided correctly, she brilliantly laid bare the discrepancy between the law’s treatment of men and women. “Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?” she asked a flummoxed Kavanaugh. And if you were wondering: No, he could not.
As vice president, Harris spoke with clarity, authority and compassion about issues that have long been neglected. In 2021, she hosted a White House discussion about disparities in Black maternal health care. In March 2024, she likely became the first vice president to visit an abortion provider. “Everyone get ready for the language,” she warned those in her audience in St. Paul, Minnesota, as she reeled off words related to women’s health. “Uterus.” “Fibroids.” “Breast cancer screenings.” “Contraceptive care.”
And amid all the recriminations about her short presidential campaign, everyone seems to have forgotten the genuine affection and enthusiasm she stirred in the summer of 2024. In the hours after Biden withdrew from the race, more than 44,000 Harris enthusiasts hopped on a last-minute Sunday evening Zoom call organized by Black women. That call raised more than $1.5 million in three hours. Joy should not be equated with frivolousness. Joy was a powerfully motivating, cleansing, instructive force.
I was on the Ellipse in October 2024 when Harris made her closing argument before Election Day. It was a perfect fall evening and throngs of folks came out to see her. Many of them had already voted. But still they began assembling some four hours before her speech — to bear witness to someone who they believed could make history and to breathe in the air of unity and optimism that Harris was creating.
There weren’t any soaring lines from her address that were destined to be widely quoted. But I do recall her allowing for her own shortcomings, something of a rarity in politics. “I’ll be honest with you: I’m not perfect. I make mistakes,” Harris said. “But here’s what I promise you: I will always listen to you, even if you don’t vote for me. I will always tell you the truth, even if it’s hard to hear. I will work every day to build consensus and reach compromise to get things done.”
The point here is not that Harris was an exceptional presidential candidate — or vice president or senator or attorney general or district attorney. But she was qualified. She was skilled. She should not have to be exceptional to be treated just as respectfully as others who’ve walked a similar path. Harris, after all, is hardly the only politician to have grabbed at the brass ring multiple times and failed to latch onto it. John McCain ran for president twice and failed. So did Bernie Sanders. And Mitt Romney. Biden came up empty twice before finally winning on his third attempt. As their egos kept them grasping for the grand prize, none of these men gained a reputation as an embarrassing pest who refused to go away. They were allowed to fail, to be mediocre, to try again, to be celebrated for their effort, and to continue to exercise power in Washington and beyond.
Like Harris, they said and did things that became fodder for derision. Romney’s campaign and biography were littered with awkward moments: his reference to “binders full of women” as evidence of his inclusive hiring philosophy; the tale of how he transported his dog Seamus on the roof of the family station wagon during a 12-hour road trip. Yet he moved on from his two presidential defeats to spend six years in the Senate and retired as a widely respected political figure, a learned voice of temperance in an increasingly shrill political environment. This year, his support, in the form of a fundraiser, has been welcomed by a former colleague, Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who’s in a close race in Maine to retain her seat.
During McCain’s 31-year career in the Senate, he was entangled in the Keating Five banking scandal and championed the misguided invasion of Iraq. As a presidential candidate, he introduced a woefully ignorant Sarah Palin into the national political bloodstream. But when he died in 2018, he was among the country’s most revered statesmen.
Sanders, Vermont’s longtime independent senator, inspired a community of “Bernie bros” during his presidential campaigns who had a deeply misogynistic streak. And while African American voters have long been a crucial voice in Democratic primaries, Sanders neglected to consider that demographic with proper care and focus. Today, despite having lost twice, he is one of the most influential figures in Democratic politics, a kingmaker for young progressives. Democrats complain that he hasn’t been more involved in this year’s midterms.
Sadly, it should be no surprise that more was expected of Harris, and any flaws would be judged more gravely. This is the way success and failure have long worked for women and people of color — or basically anyone who is not a straight, white man — especially when they’re breaking new ground. They become a test case, and if all does not go well, it’s not their individual screwup, it’s a strike against a race, a gender, an ethnicity or a religion. It gets chalked up to: Americans are not ready to elect a (fill-in-the-blank) president. (Most of the Democratic candidates now being touted as 2028 possibilities are … white men.)
But there’s more at work here than simmering sexism or racism. In 2024, Democrats were in search of a godsend of a candidate who could save the country from so much: a dangerously narcissistic Trump; a feckless Congress; a politicized Supreme Court; a carnivorous tech industry; all our mean neighbors who are more attuned to their virtual relationships than real-life ones; and the millions of our fellow voters who had stopped expecting political figures to lead with dignity, to find consensus or to offer smart ideas about how to make the country better — not as a business proposition, but as a democratic one.
When the search is that dire, that desperate, when we have already lost so much as Americans and as decent human beings, it’s all too easy to scapegoat an accomplished, respectable, admirable candidate simply because she didn’t win — and ignore the fact that what we were really looking for was someone who could save us from ourselves. We still are.
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Not all Democrats have shunned Harris. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic nominee for the Senate, recently campaigned alongside her. As with all things political, each had something to gain. With pro-Israel sentiment eroding among Democrats, it’s advantageous for Harris to be in the company of the progressive El-Sayed, who has described the deaths in Gaza as a genocide and was a supporter of the “uncommitted” movement that aimed to pressure the Biden administration to shift its Middle East policies. For his part, El-Sayed could use someone to vouch for him among Black voters who overwhelmingly favored his opponent in the primary.
He and Harris sat next to each other for a roundtable conversation with activists and health care providers focused on Black maternal health. Theirs was not the body language of close friends. Their chairs looked to be about two feet apart. They were cordial but not physically chummy. Her pitch to voters was direct: “Let’s please elect him to the United States Senate.”
He was appreciative. But most importantly, he was respectful. “So, I think we’re at the point of our new relationship where I’m going to now call you Abdul,” she said as the event was wrapping up. “Perfect,” he replied. “For me, it’s going to be Madam Vice President.”
At a time when so many other Democrats have turned Kamala Harris into persona non grata, this small moment of deference demonstrated his confidence and acknowledged her strength. “That’s appropriate,” she said. She was clearly joking — but she was also right.
Robin Givhan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic, a New York Times Opinion contributing writer and a former senior critic at large for The Washington Post.
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