In 2012, I sat on a panel at The Wrap’s first Women in Power Summit with then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris and then-City Controller Wendy Greuel, who was running to become mayor of Los Angeles. The topic turned to stumbling blocks that women face when they enter politics.
Harris launched into a truth that she acknowledged might seem “crude,” but the reality for women running was simple. “You gotta raise money.”
Harris acknowledged that too often women tried to shy away from this fact. “I don’t want to talk about that,” she said, parroting a typical reaction. “That’s crude. Talk to me about your policies.” Then Harris repeated the message emphatically: “Women, you have to raise money to run for office.”
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At that point, Harris turned to Greuel and asked point-blank, “How much do you need to raise for the mayor’s race?”
“Five million,” replied Greuel.
“Thank you,” said Harris, appreciating Greuel’s candor. Then Harris explained why it’s harder for women to ask for funds.
“I’m gonna tell you how I was raised,” she said, adding that she was sure that all the women in that room had been raised similarly. Then Harris wagged a finger and cosplayed a parent giving a daughter advice: “You become independent. You don’t ask anyone for money.”
Harris laughed and stated the obvious irony. “So here I am—asking everybody for money.”
Harris agreed that the discomfort around asking for money is cultural and that men who have been making deals forever don’t share this struggle.
“It’s very much within the culture of successful men that they talk about money,” she said, adding “They talk about what you will lend… what will the interest rate be…”
Harris was ten-years-old when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 changed the way financial institutions were allowed to treat women. Before then, women were often refused loans unless they had a man–preferably a husband–as a co-signer. Lenders could also charge women higher interest rates. These practices seemed deeply unfair to a young lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsberg. With a series of lawsuits, Ginsberg chipped away at these practices until it was illegal to discriminate in credit transactions on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status or age.
Money is not just important to a campaign for buying ads and hiring staff. Harris pointed out that when running for office, people want to know if “you’re a good person” and if “you’ve got good ideas,” but, she added, “...what all the consultants and the pundits and the journalists and everyone else is gonna look at is ‘How much money are you sitting on?’”
In the 24 hours since Biden endorsed Harris for the top of the Democratic ticket, she raised a record $81 million on ActBlue which, according to the website, was “biggest fund-raising day of the 2024 cycle.” On top of that, the Future Forward PAC received $150 million in new commitments from Democratic donors in the same time period.
That year, Greuel lost her race for LA mayor to Eric Garcetti in a runoff. It would take another ten years for Karen Bass to become the first woman–and first Black woman–to serve as mayor of LA. Can Harris follow in her footsteps?
“Listen when you are asking them for money, you are not asking them to buy you a pair of shoes,” Harris instructed the women in the room back in 2012
Today, she is asking for the Oval Office.
