From Vogue
If politics is a game best played in temperate weather, Kamala Harris’s arrival in Ripon, Wisconsin, on October 3 caught the luck of an unseasonably warm sun. It’s 71 degrees—by Wisconsin standards, summer—when Air Force Two touches down and Harris rides to Ripon College for a rally. As she nears, the twin downtown storefronts of the florist and the laptop-repair shop are playing Frank Sinatra ballads for passersby. Ripon, a flat, quiet city of fewer than 8,000 people, is a peculiar destination for the Democratic nominee for president: The Republican Party was founded here, in 1854. But for Harris, whose campaign seeks a stabilizing path against her opponent’s angry chaos, it’s a place, as fair as any, for the making of unlikely friends.
In an hour, Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congressperson, former chair of the Republican Conference, and daughter of a vice president—a woman who has never voted for a Democrat for president—will endorse Harris onstage. Before heading out to join her, the vice president will meet me in the basement of the student union. Two chairs have been set up, angled toward each other, with flags between them. I’m shown to one, then the other. I am fussed over by aides, who readjust the draping of the flags. The process authority of American power, the way it calmly drives on like a swimmer down a clear lane, has rarely been so palpable to me; in the space of a few minutes I am greeted by more friendly and laconic people—coming in to check something, nodding, and vanishing again—than I can count. Photographers file in and take their positions, training their lenses on the chairs. I feel I’m entering bilateral talks on behalf of a small, wayward nation.
Then the vice president enters amid a rain-like patter of footfalls, and the energy in the room changes. “Hi! How are you? Good to see you again!” Harris says, grabbing my hand and folding down into the opposite seat.
She is dressed in an easygoing black suit with a plain white blouse, a few pearls on a double necklace, and black patent leather heels. Since becoming vice president, in 2021, Harris has sought reductions in gun violence, middle-class jobs in clean energy, drinking water for poor communities, and a strategy for Americans’ reproductive freedom. Before our meeting, I talked with more than 20 of her former colleagues and collaborators, who described Harris in these projects as a roll-up-the-sleeves leader. I ask what her first call would be on reaching the Oval Office.