This story is a partnership with the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a nonprofit news organization.

The newly renovated convention center was lined with booths offering flyers and merchandise; the upstairs conference rooms were hosting a series of information sessions about housing, education, and health care services, and a couple of bouncy castles had been set up as part of the provided child care. 

The daylong event called Res-Con, held on a sunny Saturday in April, was meant as a community resource fair, aimed at connecting residents with vital services. But the event was mostly empty. The front door traffic never amounted to much more than a trickle, and few of the upstairs talks had more than a handful of people in attendance. 

Among those wandering the convention floor was 67-year-old Cece Brown, who over the last decade has become one of the state’s well-known proponents for addiction treatment and recovery services following the death of her 27-year-old son, Ryan. 

By then, the boy who had loved Little League and played the cello had spent years battling the addiction he’d developed in college and struggled to find health care while working food service jobs that did not offer benefits. Then, in early 2014, millions of uninsured Americans were offered a lifeline when, as part of the Affordable Care Act, states were given the ability to opt-in to an expansion of Medicaid eligibility. But, for Ryan, it came too late. In April, he received his health care card in the mail. Three days later, he fatally overdosed on heroin. 

“I can’t say that he would have lived. But I can say that it would have given him a chance.”

“I can’t say that he would have lived,” Brown said of an alternative history in which her son had access to health care sooner. “But I can say that it would have given him a chance.”

President Obama’s signature effort to improve access to health care, which came to be known as Obamacare, issued an “individual mandate” requiring all citizens to have health insurance or pay a fine, created a government-ensured marketplace of health care plans, and restricted insurance companies from denying care for those with preexisting conditions, among other reforms. The 800-page bill was, at the time, deeply unpopular, especially in deep red states like West Virginia. Just two years later, Donald Trump would ascend to the presidency—with the support of nearly 69 percent of voters here in West Virginia—in part by promising to overturn the law, which at the time a Kaiser Family Foundation poll showed was seen favorably by just 43 percent of Americans. 

“They didn’t even understand that they were benefiting from Obamacare in so many cases,” said Kim Jones, who became a health care advocate in West Virginia after struggling to find medical care for her daughter’s diabetes, and who recounted a spirited local town hall in which proponents and opponents of the law angrily clashed. “I stood in the back, at one point, and realized that everybody…was saying exactly the same thing: that they wanted their families to be safe, and they wanted to be able to afford health care.”

While the ACA remains a political battleground, its popularity improved dramatically once its benefits became available. Today, it’s seen favorably by 62 percent of Americans. “We should all be proud of the enormous progress that we’ve made,” Obama declared from the stage at the Democratic National Convention in August. “And I’ve noticed, by the way, that since it’s become popular, they don’t call it Obamacare no more.”

In West Virginia, the rate of uninsured residents dropped more than half between 2013 and 2021, thanks to the ACA. And residents continue to sign up for the benefits it has provided in droves: In 2023, West Virginia saw the highest year-over-year enrollment in marketplace plans of any state in the nation.

“If any major changes were to happen [to the ACA] it could be devastating,” Brown said.

That potential for devastation in communities that have loyally supported him has not prompted Trump to abandon his vows to scrap the ACA. Last November, he declared that the program’s cost was “out of control” and promised that he was “seriously looking at alternatives” before adding that Republicans “should never give up” their efforts to overturn the health care law.

While there is little likelihood such proclamations will undercut his campaign in places like West Virginia—a MetroNews West Virginia poll found in August that Trump had the support of 61 percent of likely voters, compared with just 34 percent supporting Kamala Harris—a successful repeal would take health care benefits from some of his most ardent supporters. 

“The repeal of the ACA would make [access to health care]…just catastrophically worse in our state,” said Rhonda Rogombé, an analyst at the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. “It would mean that hundreds of thousands of people lose coverage overnight. And within the recovery population, it would just decimate their access to treatment.”

Even as they acknowledge that attacks on the ACA remain potent political rhetoric, health care experts question whether, at this point, it would even be possible to extract the benefits, reforms, and services provided by Obamacare from the rest of the American health care system. “It’s like trying to repeal the interstate highway system,” said Timothy Jost, a policy expert and emeritus law professor at Washington and Lee University. “It’s there. And I mean, there’s no way you could repeal the entire statute.” 

“The Affordable Care Act is so entangled in the fabric of our lives. I don’t know how the healthcare system would survive if the entire ACA was repealed,” added Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, who administers the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in an interview.

Yet even if a second Trump administration is unlikely to fully repeal the ACA, it could take further steps to undermine its services. In 2017, Republicans were able to reduce the penalty for not having health insurance to zero, effectively eliminating the individual mandate, something Trump mentions on his campaign website. And under Trump, federal funding for “navigator programs,” which help citizens figure out how to enroll and take advantage of ACA services, was slashed from $63 million a year to just $10 million. 

“All week they had been trying to do away with the Affordable Care Act in Congress,” Brown recalls of a September 2017 trip she took to appear at the White House alongside first lady Melania Trump and other families that had suffered amid the opioid epidemic. 

When each person at the roundtable was asked to share suggestions, Brown told Ryan’s story, including how he received his Medicaid card just before he died, thanks to the ACA. Unbeknownst to her, her response was recorded and ended up being broadcast by the local news. 

“I was glad for that, because I thought, you know, people need to hear what kind of a difference having healthcare through the Affordable Care Act can bring,” Brown said. “Because it just makes such a difference in the lives of people, or even giving them life.”

If repeated during a second Trump presidency, such cuts could upend programs like the West Virginia navigator program run by First Choice Services, said Jeremy Smith, the program director, who has worked with the program since its inception in 2013. In 2016, the state’s three navigator programs received a combined $600,000 in funding. By the last year of Trump’s presidency, two of those programs had been forced to close due to underfunding, with the remaining office getting just $100,000. 

“We wanted to continue to do whatever work we could to help the community since we’d already been doing it for so long. So, you know, we hung in there and made it work,” Smith said. “But it definitely changed things as far as how much help we could provide.” 

Under the Biden administration, which has focused much of its outreach on trusted messengers programs, funding for navigator programs has surpassed pre-Trump levels. Last year the administration provided $80 million in navigator grants, just over a million of which went to First Choice Services in West Virginia.

Health care providers credit such funding, as well as other Biden-era subsidies that drove down costs, with helping propel the spikes in ACA marketplace enrollments in states like West Virginia. Under the Trump administration, Smith said, his group was lucky if they could manage 50 events each year. In 2024, they held more than 30 events during each of the first three months of the year. The work, they acknowledge, can be difficult. 

But even sparsely attended events, like the Res-Con convention center fair in April, can lead to crucial connections. “We’ll meet a lot of people where they are by handing out literature and talking to them, you know, just telling the community, and that seems to make a big difference,” explained Smith. “We really think it’s making…a healthier population.”

This story is a partnership with the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a nonprofit news organization.

The newly renovated convention center was lined with booths offering flyers and merchandise; the upstairs conference rooms were hosting a series of information sessions about housing, education, and health care services, and a couple of bouncy castles had been set up as part of the provided child care. 

The daylong event called Res-Con, held on a sunny Saturday in April, was meant as a community resource fair, aimed at connecting residents with vital services. But the event was mostly empty. The front door traffic never amounted to much more than a trickle, and few of the upstairs talks had more than a handful of people in attendance. 

Among those wandering the convention floor was 67-year-old Cece Brown, who over the last decade has become one of the state’s well-known proponents for addiction treatment and recovery services following the death of her 27-year-old son, Ryan. 

By then, the boy who had loved Little League and played the cello had spent years battling the addiction he’d developed in college and struggled to find health care while working food service jobs that did not offer benefits. Then, in early 2014, millions of uninsured Americans were offered a lifeline when, as part of the Affordable Care Act, states were given the ability to opt-in to an expansion of Medicaid eligibility. But, for Ryan, it came too late. In April, he received his health care card in the mail. Three days later, he fatally overdosed on heroin. 

“I can’t say that he would have lived. But I can say that it would have given him a chance.”

“I can’t say that he would have lived,” Brown said of an alternative history in which her son had access to health care sooner. “But I can say that it would have given him a chance.”

President Obama’s signature effort to improve access to health care, which came to be known as Obamacare, issued an “individual mandate” requiring all citizens to have health insurance or pay a fine, created a government-ensured marketplace of health care plans, and restricted insurance companies from denying care for those with preexisting conditions, among other reforms. The 800-page bill was, at the time, deeply unpopular, especially in deep red states like West Virginia. Just two years later, Donald Trump would ascend to the presidency—with the support of nearly 69 percent of voters here in West Virginia—in part by promising to overturn the law, which at the time a Kaiser Family Foundation poll showed was seen favorably by just 43 percent of Americans. 

“They didn’t even understand that they were benefiting from Obamacare in so many cases,” said Kim Jones, who became a health care advocate in West Virginia after struggling to find medical care for her daughter’s diabetes, and who recounted a spirited local town hall in which proponents and opponents of the law angrily clashed. “I stood in the back, at one point, and realized that everybody…was saying exactly the same thing: that they wanted their families to be safe, and they wanted to be able to afford health care.”

While the ACA remains a political battleground, its popularity improved dramatically once its benefits became available. Today, it’s seen favorably by 62 percent of Americans. “We should all be proud of the enormous progress that we’ve made,” Obama declared from the stage at the Democratic National Convention in August. “And I’ve noticed, by the way, that since it’s become popular, they don’t call it Obamacare no more.”

In West Virginia, the rate of uninsured residents dropped more than half between 2013 and 2021, thanks to the ACA. And residents continue to sign up for the benefits it has provided in droves: In 2023, West Virginia saw the highest year-over-year enrollment in marketplace plans of any state in the nation.

“If any major changes were to happen [to the ACA] it could be devastating,” Brown said.

That potential for devastation in communities that have loyally supported him has not prompted Trump to abandon his vows to scrap the ACA. Last November, he declared that the program’s cost was “out of control” and promised that he was “seriously looking at alternatives” before adding that Republicans “should never give up” their efforts to overturn the health care law.

While there is little likelihood such proclamations will undercut his campaign in places like West Virginia—a MetroNews West Virginia poll found in August that Trump had the support of 61 percent of likely voters, compared with just 34 percent supporting Kamala Harris—a successful repeal would take health care benefits from some of his most ardent supporters. 

“The repeal of the ACA would make [access to health care]…just catastrophically worse in our state,” said Rhonda Rogombé, an analyst at the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. “It would mean that hundreds of thousands of people lose coverage overnight. And within the recovery population, it would just decimate their access to treatment.”

Even as they acknowledge that attacks on the ACA remain potent political rhetoric, health care experts question whether, at this point, it would even be possible to extract the benefits, reforms, and services provided by Obamacare from the rest of the American health care system. “It’s like trying to repeal the interstate highway system,” said Timothy Jost, a policy expert and emeritus law professor at Washington and Lee University. “It’s there. And I mean, there’s no way you could repeal the entire statute.” 

“The Affordable Care Act is so entangled in the fabric of our lives. I don’t know how the healthcare system would survive if the entire ACA was repealed,” added Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, who administers the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in an interview.

Yet even if a second Trump administration is unlikely to fully repeal the ACA, it could take further steps to undermine its services. In 2017, Republicans were able to reduce the penalty for not having health insurance to zero, effectively eliminating the individual mandate, something Trump mentions on his campaign website. And under Trump, federal funding for “navigator programs,” which help citizens figure out how to enroll and take advantage of ACA services, was slashed from $63 million a year to just $10 million. 

“All week they had been trying to do away with the Affordable Care Act in Congress,” Brown recalls of a September 2017 trip she took to appear at the White House alongside first lady Melania Trump and other families that had suffered amid the opioid epidemic. 

When each person at the roundtable was asked to share suggestions, Brown told Ryan’s story, including how he received his Medicaid card just before he died, thanks to the ACA. Unbeknownst to her, her response was recorded and ended up being broadcast by the local news. 

“I was glad for that, because I thought, you know, people need to hear what kind of a difference having healthcare through the Affordable Care Act can bring,” Brown said. “Because it just makes such a difference in the lives of people, or even giving them life.”

If repeated during a second Trump presidency, such cuts could upend programs like the West Virginia navigator program run by First Choice Services, said Jeremy Smith, the program director, who has worked with the program since its inception in 2013. In 2016, the state’s three navigator programs received a combined $600,000 in funding. By the last year of Trump’s presidency, two of those programs had been forced to close due to underfunding, with the remaining office getting just $100,000. 

“We wanted to continue to do whatever work we could to help the community since we’d already been doing it for so long. So, you know, we hung in there and made it work,” Smith said. “But it definitely changed things as far as how much help we could provide.” 

Under the Biden administration, which has focused much of its outreach on trusted messengers programs, funding for navigator programs has surpassed pre-Trump levels. Last year the administration provided $80 million in navigator grants, just over a million of which went to First Choice Services in West Virginia.

Health care providers credit such funding, as well as other Biden-era subsidies that drove down costs, with helping propel the spikes in ACA marketplace enrollments in states like West Virginia. Under the Trump administration, Smith said, his group was lucky if they could manage 50 events each year. In 2024, they held more than 30 events during each of the first three months of the year. The work, they acknowledge, can be difficult. 

But even sparsely attended events, like the Res-Con convention center fair in April, can lead to crucial connections. “We’ll meet a lot of people where they are by handing out literature and talking to them, you know, just telling the community, and that seems to make a big difference,” explained Smith. “We really think it’s making…a healthier population.”

It’s fair to say that Michelle Obama stole the show at the Democratic Convention on Tuesday. (Husband Barack was on point in noting how hard an act she was to follow.) And to a journalist like me who covers wealth and inequality, one line in particular stood out. Listen:

Michelle Obama: She understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward. We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. pic.twitter.com/ywBjdwZl3E

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 21, 2024

The affirmative action of generational wealth. That’s a smart reframing of a longtime conservative hobby horse.

Republican politicians and right-wing media have regularly attacked programs designed to counter the generational impacts of government-sanctioned discrimination in housing, education, and veterans benefits. Now they’re targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs—see JD Vance’s recently introduced “Dismantle DEI Act“—and trying to brand Kamala Harris a “DEI hire.” That’s a laughable assertion. (New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen argues that the moniker applies more aptly to Vance.)

But the critics of DEI and affirmative action want to have their cake and eat it too. For example, if you, like our Supreme Court, think the use of race as a factor in college admissions should be illegal, that’s your prerogative. But I hope you are similarly inclined to outlaw the practice of elite colleges giving an admissions boost to children of alumni and to students (like Jared Kushner) whose parents are major donors. Because isn’t that, too, a kind of affirmative action?

In just a handful of words, Michelle Obama managed to convey a simple truth, says Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington think tank that focuses on the racial wealth-and-opportunity gap: “It is not those asking to break up concentrated wealth and opportunity that are asking for an unfair advantage, but rather those who are hoarding concentrated wealth.”

“Most of us,” as Obama noted, “will never benefit” from generational wealth. And that’s true of everyone, but even truer when you are Black or Hispanic. In the Federal Reserve Board’s 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF)*, about 47 percent of white respondents said they’d either received an inheritance or expected to receive one. Their median inheritance expected was $195,500 (in 2019 dollars).

Only 16 percent of Black respondents had received or expected an inheritance—and their median expectation was about half the white figure. Less than 12 percent of Hispanic respondents had received or expected an inheritance.

The disparities are similar when you look at federally subsidized retirement savings, which, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), will cost US taxpayers a whopping $1.9 trillion from 2020-2024. Most of that cash goes to the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, who tend to be, yep, pretty white.

In 2021, the JCT identified 8,000 Americans with Individual Retirement Account (IRA) balances in excess of $5 million who were still getting tax breaks for their annual contributions—which is “shocking but not surprising,” noted Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden. Peter Thiel, ProPublica reported, even managed, using questionable tactics, to amass a Roth IRA worth $5 billion.

Affirmative action for the rich.

According to the latest (2022) SCF, only 35 percent of Black families and less than 28 percent of Hispanic households even had a retirement account, compared with 62 percent of white families. The accounts of those white families were worth over $380,000 on average, more than triple the Black and Hispanic savings—and again, these numbers don’t account for the fact that a large majority of Black and Hispanic households have no private retirement accounts at all.

Then there’s land ownership—see “40 Acres and a Lie,” our acclaimed multimedia package exploring how the few Black families who received land reparations after the Civil War then had their acres cruelly rescinded a year and a half later. And consider these passages on the Homestead Acts, from a chapter of my 2021 book, Jackpot, titled “Thriving While Black.”

The two acts, passed during and after the Civil War, granted 160-acre parcels of public land—a foundation for generational wealth—to families willing to stake out the plots and make improvements. But the timing and circumstances made it extraordinarily difficult for Black Americans to participate:

It was a once-in-a-lifetime bonanza for white fortune-seekers. “The acquisition of property was the key to moving upward from a low to a higher stratum,” wrote author Everett Dick. “The property holder could vote and hold office, but the man with no property was practically on the same political level as the indentured servant or slave.” […]

Between the two acts, about 270 million acres of farmland—14 percent of the total landmass of the continental United States—was granted to 1.6 million white families, but only 4,000 to 5,000 Black families. [University of Michigan professor Trina] Shanks calculates that more than 48 million living Americans are direct descendants of those Homestead Act beneficiaries. Which means there’s a greater than one-in-four chance your forebears benefited directly from the biggest public-to-private wealth transfer in American history—if you’re white, that is. 

Affirmative action for the rich.

Obama hit the nail on the head. Asante-Muhammad says he was struck by her simple acknowledgement “that affirmative action for the privileged happens,” though “I wish there could have been a follow up to re-emphasize why programmatic affirmative action to advance more equal opportunity is necessary.”

But “it felt good,” he adds, “to hear a political speech that connects so personally with my political ideals, and to the challenges of the racial wealth divide and the action and ideals needed to bridge it.” 

*I used 2019 numbers here because the 2022 inheritance data was only available in raw form.

The immediate reaction to former President Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night was that it sounded a lot like the sort of remarks he’d delivered before. He asked the audience at Chicago’s United Center if they were “fired up” and rewrote his 2008 campaign mantra to accommodate the vice president: “Yes she can.” Democrats on the ground here say they’re seeing a level of excitement they haven’t witnessed since Obama’s first campaign; the former commander-in-chief was happy to indulge their newfound hope. 

But there was one item on his agenda that sounded quite different from the Obama of old.

“We can’t just rely on the ideas of the past, we need to chart a new way forward to meet the challenges of today and Kamala understands this,” Obama said, as he rattled off key planks of Harris’ domestic agenda. “She knows for example that if we want to make it easier for young people to buy a home, we need to build more units—and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that made it harder to build homes for working people in this country. That is a priority, and she’s put out a bold new plan to do just that.”

Just a few years ago, if you’d asked the leading political scientists & thought leaders whether YIMBY ideas would be advanced by a figure like Obama on a national stage, they’d have laughed you. Clear evidence for the power of (correct) ideas. pic.twitter.com/GwxGFSfUw5

— Jerusalem (@JerusalemDemsas) August 21, 2024

That’s right—the push for zoning reform has gone presidential. Obama’s lengthy convention remarks are a useful barometer for where the party stands. I checked to see if any of his previous DNC speeches had tackled the housing shortage that has squeezed low- and middle-income Americans’ finances, displaced working people, and powered a homelessness crisis in places like Los Angeles and New York City. The issue never came up in 2020 or in 2016. In 2012, in the aftermath of a severe recession triggered by a predatory mortgage lenders, Obama did talk up home construction—but only the idea of making them more environmentally friendly. In 2008, as that housing bubble was bursting, he addressed falling home values—but that’s a much different problem than an affordability crisis driven by limited supply and high demand. The idea that the government should clear the road for a massive home-construction boom was simply not the sort of thing people talked about in primetime.

“I plead guilty,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders told me this week, after praising Harris’ proposal. “It just hasn’t been as high up on the agenda as it should have been. It’s an issue that’s staring us right in the face. You know, walk two blocks away from the Capitol you have people sleeping out on the street. I talk to people who pay 50, 60-percent of their income in housing. It’s an issue that we should have dealt with, and we’ve got to be bold.”

The failure to tackle the housing crisis has recently seeped into Republican messaging, albeit in a far different way. A good deal of Trump’s narrative of “American Carnage” in largely Democratic cities is really a story about the downstream effects—things like tent cities and visible drug use. At the Republican National Convention last month, Ohio Sen. JD Vance even offered a radical solution to the crisis.

“The absurd cost of housing is the result of so many failures, and it reveals so much about what’s broken in Washington,” he said in his convention speech. In his telling, “Wall Street barons crashed the economy and American builders went out of business,” and then “tradesmen scrambled for jobs, houses stopped being built.” Then: “Democrats flooded this country with millions of illegal aliens. So citizens had to compete—with people who shouldn’t even be here—for precious housing.”

His plan, and Trump’s, was to free up housing stock by deporting 11 million people.

When Barack Obama takes the stage in Chicago tonight to support the candidacy of his old friend Kamala Harris, many Americans will see it as another torch-passing moment in a Democratic National Convention that’s already been replete with them. This one is extra emotional because of the sheer improbable nature of what the former president and current vice president have achieved. What many people won’t realize is that without Harris’s early and enthusiastic support, Obama’s career might have taken a different trajectory. Maybe he would have ended up in the White House anyway in 2008, maybe later, but Harris gave him a critical boost at a time when he was still largely unknown. And she did it at enormous risk to her own standing with the Democratic Party’s donor class.

In 2007, the vast majority of those donors were Team Hillary. Harris became one of the first elected California politicians to endorse Obama. Many of her Democrat-elite pals were miffed.

Back in 2007, Harris was a rising star in Bay Area politics, a “progressive prosecutor” before that became a thing, with a catchphrase that was already being borrowed by legislators and law enforcers across the country. Instead of claiming to be tough on crime, she insisted she was “smart on crime.” She was a shoo-in to win reelection as San Francisco district attorney after coming from way, way behind in her first race against a well-known incumbent—a victory that was made possible thanks to the support of rich socialites and other deep-pocketed San Franciscans who also happened to be extremely active in national politics. 

In 2007, the vast majority of those donors were Team Hillary. Harris became one of the first elected California politicians to publicly endorse Obama. Many of her Democrat-elite pals were miffed. It wasn’t that they didn’t like Obama—they thought he was amazing. But this was supposed to be Hillary Clinton’s moment. 

The New York Times covered some of this territory in a story about the longstanding Obama-Harris friendship and alliance. But it didn’t quite get at the audacity of what Harris was doing when she sided with the junior senator from Illinois over the former first lady and feminist icon whose supporters believed the nomination should be hers for the asking. 

Harris told me in 2007 that she met Obama when he was running for the Senate three years before. “We had a lot of common friends, and he and his wife and I—we know a lot of the same people. The world”—by which she meant the universe of Black and brown politicians with grand ambitions as it existed two decades ago, which of course was pre-Obama—“is very small.” Not only did they share similar cultural backgrounds, “We shared a lot of values, so it’s been easy to develop a friendship around shared experiences and values,” she told me. They also shared a gift for communication and a charisma that people found thrilling. “It has been phenomenal to watch how he is exciting to the incredibly large number of people who have never been involved [in politics] or who have walked away from it because they’ve been turned off,” she told me. They did fundraising events for each other, but the bond went beyond the mere transactional: “We just have forged a great friendship.”

Because of that friendship, Harris never faltered when Obama asked for her support, people around her told me back then. They had something else important in common: Harris knew what it was like to be told that now wasn’t the right time, that this was someone else’s moment, that people “weren’t ready.” “It was the same as the [first] DA’s race many years ago,” she told me in an interview a few years later.

Harris expounded on the theme in a commencement speech to San Francisco State University students in 2007 that was picked up by the New York Times. “I remember the day I got my first poll results back [in the DA’s race],” she told the crowd. “I was sitting in a small conference room, a little nervous, but very hopeful. Then I read them. I was at 6 percent. And that wasn’t good. So I was told what you all have probably heard in your life, and that you will certainly hear in your future. I was told that I should wait my turn. I was told that I should give up. I was told that I had no chance.

“Well, I didn’t listen. And I’m telling you, don’t you listen, either. Don’t listen when they tell you that you can’t do it…. And surround yourself with people who will support you and will encourage your ambition.”

When Barack Obama takes the stage in Chicago tonight to support the candidacy of his old friend Kamala Harris, many Americans will see it as another torch-passing moment in a Democratic National Convention that’s already been replete with them. This one is extra emotional because of the sheer improbable nature of what the former president and current vice president have achieved. What many people won’t realize is that without Harris’s early and enthusiastic support, Obama’s career might have taken a different trajectory. Maybe he would have ended up in the White House anyway in 2008, maybe later, but Harris gave him a critical boost at a time when he was still largely unknown. And she did it at enormous risk to her own standing with the Democratic Party’s donor class.

In 2007, the vast majority of those donors were Team Hillary. Harris became one of the first elected California politicians to endorse Obama. Many of her Democrat-elite pals were miffed.

Back in 2007, Harris was a rising star in Bay Area politics, a “progressive prosecutor” before that became a thing, with a catchphrase that was already being borrowed by legislators and law enforcers across the country. Instead of claiming to be tough on crime, she insisted she was “smart on crime.” She was a shoo-in to win reelection as San Francisco district attorney after coming from way, way behind in her first race against a well-known incumbent—a victory that was made possible thanks to the support of rich socialites and other deep-pocketed San Franciscans who also happened to be extremely active in national politics. 

In 2007, the vast majority of those donors were Team Hillary. Harris became one of the first elected California politicians to publicly endorse Obama. Many of her Democrat-elite pals were miffed. It wasn’t that they did like Obama—they thought he was amazing. But this was supposed to be Hillary Clinton’s moment. 

The New York Times covered some of this territory in a story about the longstanding Obama-Harris friendship and alliance. But it didn’t quite get at the audacity of what Harris was doing when she sided with the junior senator from Illinois over the former first lady and feminist icon whose supporters believed the nomination should be hers for the asking. 

Harris told me in 2007 that she met Obama when he was running for the Senate three years before. “We had a lot of common friends, and he and his wife and I—we know a lot of the same people. The world”—by which she meant the universe of Black and brown politicians with grand ambitions as it existed two decades ago, which of course was pre-Obama—“is very small.” Not only did they share similar cultural backgrounds, “We shared a lot of values, so it’s been easy to develop a friendship around shared experiences and values,” she told me. They also shared a gift for communication and a charisma that people found thrilling. “It has been phenomenal to watch how he is exciting to the incredibly large number of people who have never been involved [in politics] or who have walked away from it because they’ve been turned off,” she told me. They did fundraising events for each other, but the bond went beyond the mere transactional: “We just have forged a great friendship.”

Because of that friendship, Harris never faltered when Obama asked for her support, people around her told me back then. They had something else important in common: Harris knew what it was like to be told that now wasn’t the right time, that this was someone else’s moment, that people “weren’t ready.” “It was the same as the [first] DA’s race many years ago,” she told me in an interview a few years later.

Harris expounded on the theme in a commencement speech to San Francisco State University students in 2007 that was picked up by the New York Times. “I remember the day I got my first poll results back [in the DA’s race],” she told the crowd. “I was sitting in a small conference room, a little nervous, but very hopeful. Then I read them. I was at 6 percent. And that wasn’t good. So I was told what you all have probably heard in your life, and that you will certainly hear in your future. I was told that I should wait my turn. I was told that I should give up. I was told that I had no chance.

“Well, I didn’t listen. And I’m telling you, don’t you listen, either. Don’t listen when they tell you that you can’t do it…. And surround yourself with people who will support you and will encourage your ambition.”