Politics

Republicans’ outrage over Kamala Harris’ birthplace exposes a glaring double standard

Published

1 year ago

November 12, 2024

Republicans’ outrage over Kamala Harris’ birthplace exposes a glaring double standard

In what counts as one of the bizarre attacks of this year’s presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, stands accused of wrongly characterizing herself as a “daughter of Oakland.” According to an investigative report in The New York TimesHarris was born in the adjacent Berkeley, California.

Jesse Watters at Fox News went so far as to hold up Harris’ birth certificate with that Berkeley home address listed. As awful as that was, Watters using Harris’ birth certificate as some kind of gotcha was not only a reminder of the “birther” attacks on President Barack Obama, but it also revealed what this inquisition is really about: portraying Harris as sneaky, inauthentic and unworthy of trust.

Watters using Harris’ birth certificate revealed what this inquisition is really about: portraying Harris as sneaky, inauthentic and unworthy of trust.

Americans give a lot of attention to where a candidate is from and presidential candidates spend a lot of time emphasizing where they’re from — or at least emphasizing the place they’ve chosen to say they’re from. For example, as a candidate, and even as a president, Joe Biden has rarely missed an opportunity to mention his scrappy Scranton, Pennsylvania, roots. Yes, that’s where he was born, but Biden’s family relocated to Delaware when he was in elementary school. It’s likely that relatively few people know which cities in that state he called home as a child and teenager, but we know Biden eventually ended up in Wilmington where many residents affectionately refer to him as “Delaware Joe.”

All politicians, Harris included, are aware that the question of where they’re from is more about identity, or at least the identity we want to project, than geography. Home isn’t just a matter of where we say we’re from, it’s also about where others decide it makes the most sense for us to be from. If I tell you I’m from Detroit, then that conjures up not just associations, but expectations and explanations that are different than what they’d be if I told you I grew up in Boulder, Colorado. Geographers, city planners and urban designers call this place-based identity. Politicians call this useful.

As someone who was born in the Bay Area and then lived in Evanston, Illinois; Madison, Wisconsin; and MontrealCanada, before returning to the East Bay, there are a lot of places for Harris to gesture toward as potential homes and homes-away-from home. She chose Oakland.

Harris supporters like that she’s the celebrated daughter of a city we want to root for, too. They like the association for the same reason that her critics want to question it: it is politically useful, just like Biden’s beginning in gritty Scranton, or her running mate Tim Walz’s in small-town Nebraska. After all, the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland in 1966 and organized a host of social services for low-income families such as legal aid, health clinics and free breakfast programs for kids. At least since then, Oakland has become synonymous with Black resistance, racial pride and self-reliance. It kind of reminds us of the underdog Harris says she is.

Barack Obama always put his Kansas roots (where his mother grew up) alongside his Hawaiian birthplace even as he claimed the South Side of Chicago as a home. Jeb Bush and George W. Bush shedding their ties to coastal Maine helped them get elected the governors of Florida and Texas respectively, and the Texan was twice elected president. Donald Trump is from Queens but has always wanted to be seen as the “king of Manhattan.”

Rightfully or not, a candidate’s hometown ends up symbolizing something profound about the individual, what the person stands for and, as importantly, whom the candidate will fight for. It’s why some of Harris’ Republican critics insist she was “raised in Canada.”

Harris may be fudging things slightly when she calls herself “the daughter of Oakland,” but she shouldn’t be singled out for it. Many people who grew up next to a big city call that bigger city home. Instead of asking whether it’s technically true that she’s from Oakland and whether she ought to be corrected for slighting Berkeley, we ought to be asking whether we put more demands on Black candidates to authenticate who they say they are, and whether their answers are more closely scrutinized.

Instead of asking whether it’s technically true that she’s from Oakland, we ought to be asking whether we put more demands on Black candidates to authenticate who they say they are.

By all indications, Oakland loves Harris and claims her back and doesn’t care where she went to primary school. Republicans who profess to be upset about it are, in keeping with Trump’s insulting attack on her identity, suggesting that she is falsely trying to claim Blackness. When she’s only doing what all politicians do: naming a place of origin that signals her politics. Yes, Harris gains bona fides from being associated with a city that symbolizes Black working class grit and activism, and not the image of white elitism and radicalism associated with San Francisco but especially Berkeley.

But JD Vance made a name for himself by highlighting his Appalachian roots and using that to illustrate how far he’s come even though Appalachia isn’t where he’s actually from.

Candidates such as Harris and Obama are subjected to more questions about their origins not because politicians as a rule give wholly truthful and clear declarations about their origins, but because they’re seen as not belonging in the first place.

Writer Zadie Smith”https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/02/26/speaking-in-tongues-2/” target=”_blank”> summed it up nicely in 2008 when she said that many of the public’s reservations about Obama stemmed from their inability to pinpoint where exactly he was from and who exactly he represented. To these people, he appeared too chameleonlike, too skilled at speaking to the many faces of American society. Smith said it was less a matter of Obama changing himself depending on his location, and more that he was from more than one place all at the same time, none truer or fuller than another.

“Where are you from?” is a loaded question that on its surface seems simple. The answer isn’t clear-cut for me, and it isn’t clear-cut for many of us. Are we talking about where I was born or where I grew up? What do we say if our family moved around a lot or if we spent some formative years abroad? We might answer differently depending on who’s asking, why we think they’re asking or what we feel comfortable sharing.

As for Harris, it’s not that important where home is according to her birth certificate. She had no say in that matter. Where she chooses to say she’s from tells us a lot more.

Robyn Autry

Robyn Autry is a sociology professor and director of the Center for the Study of Public Life at Wesleyan University. She is the author of “Desegregating the Past: The Public Life of Memory in the U.S. and South Africa.”

Politics

What to know about Trump’s $12 billion critical minerals strategy | Energy Pod

Published

42 minutes ago

February 4, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

What to know about Trump’s $12 billion critical minerals strategy | Energy Pod

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Politics

Some Democrats stayed home in 2024. The DNC wants to find out why.

Published

57 minutes ago

February 4, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Democrats are launching a new program Wednesday to try to reach voters in their corner who opted to stay home in 2024 instead of voting against then-candidate Donald Trump, as the party continues its search for its identity in the second Trump era.

The Democratic National Committee program — details of which were shared first with Blue Light News — targets over a million voters they view as likely Democrats in battleground House districts who voted in 2020 but didn’t vote four years later.

The large-scale voter contact operation called “Local Listeners” is a tacit acknowledgement of one of the ways Democrats fell short in 2024, when then-Vice President Kamala Harris failed to engender enough enthusiasm from likely Democrats frustrated with the Biden administration’s economic agenda and its handling of the war between Israel and Hamas.

“We didn’t lose to Donald Trump. We lost to the couch,” DNC Deputy Executive Director Libby Schneider said in an interview. “We saw our voters, many of our important voters, stay home. Obviously, that is a trend that cannot continue.”

A key element of the strategy, according to the party, will be training volunteers to engage infrequent voters with a “listening first” approach that prioritizes “active listening” and “having difficult conversations about politics.”

Part of President Donald Trump’s winning strategy included engaging with unlikely voters his campaign identified as being potential Republicans. Trump aggressively courted people who had skipped previous elections, focusing predominantly on young men, and ultimately defeated Harris among voters who skipped the previous midterm and presidential elections.

“If we want to keep earning back the trust and support of voters, we have to listen to them,” DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a statement. “The Democratic Party is done with waiting until the last minute to engage voters — these conversations need to happen early and often.”

Rima Mohammad, an executive board member of the Michigan Democratic Party and a former delegate who represented the “Uncommitted” movement at the Democratic convention in 2024, said she welcomed the attempts to engage voters who remain disenchanted by Democrats.

“I saw the level of disengagement, the frustration from people about the party, starting with Gaza and now with what’s happening now with ICE, what’s happening with all these corporate Dems,” Mohammad — who said she ultimately did support Harris — said in an interview.

“I’m glad that the DNC is doing this. I don’t know if it’s too late. I think that work should have happened right after Kamala lost,” she added.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, co-founder of liberal donor group Way To Win, said the DNC’s push to win back unreliable voters is supported by her group’s December analysis of the party’s shortcomings in 2024 and the lessons that can be learned ahead of the midterms.

“They weren’t uninformed, right?” Ancona said of potential Harris voters who stayed home. “They just didn’t like what they heard. So that’s why I feel like it’s so important for any engagement plan to recognize how kind of burned and cynical these voters are.”

The outreach to 2024 skippers marks one of the few public strategy shifts acknowledging the roots of Democrats’ electoral defeat to Trump, following a year of heated internal debate over the direction of the party. In December, the DNC announced it would not be publicly releasing an autopsy report diagnosing the causes of the party’s losses, in part to redirect focus to Democrats’ electoral victories in 2025.

Schneider said the outreach to voters who stayed home in 2024 is an extension of the introspection party organizers undertook following Trump’s victory.

“The work started immediately after we lost, and it was sort of a self-reflection of … what can we do differently and what is within our control?” she said. “This is one of those things that it’s a no-brainer that it should live with the DNC, and that we should have been doing it for a lot longer.”

Politics

Republicans are freaking out about Hispanic voters after a Texas upset

Published

11 hours ago

February 4, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Republicans are in full-out panic mode over their plunging support with Hispanic voters after losing a special election in a ruby-red Texas district over the weekend.

On Saturday, a Democrat posted a 14-point victory in a Fort Worth-based state senate district President Donald Trump had won by 17 points in 2024, a staggering swing that was powered by significant shifts across the district’s Hispanic areas.

It’s the clearest sign yet that the GOP’s newfound coalition that propelled Trump’s return to the White House may be short-lived. Many Republicans are warning the party needs to change course on immigration, focus on bread-and-butter economic issues and start pouring money into competitive races — or risk getting stomped in November.

Polling already showed that Republicans were rapidly losing support from Hispanic voters. But the electoral results were a confirmation of that drop.

“It should be an eye-opener to all of us that we all need to pick up the pace,” U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Republican from a majority-Hispanic district in South Texas, said in an interview. “The candidate has to do their part, the party has to do their part. And then those of us in the arena, we have to do our part to help them as well.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told reporters Tuesday that the election was a “very concerning outcome.” Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick posted on X that the results should be a “wake-up call for Republicans across Texas. Our voters cannot take anything for granted.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said “a swing of this magnitude is not something that can be dismissed.”

Taylor Rehmet, the Democrat who flipped the state Senate seat over the weekend, made huge gains with Hispanic voters amid national pushback to the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement tactics and widespread economic frustration across demographic groups.

Ahead of the election, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — an immigration hardliner who bused migrants to Democratic-led cities during the Biden administration — said the White House needed to “recalibrate” on its immigration crackdowns following the shooting of Alex Pretti by an immigration officer in Minneapolis.

“That imagery coming out of Minnesota in the last few days has had a huge impact on not only Hispanic voters, but swing voters, independents in Texas and around the country,” said Texas GOP consultant Brendan Steinhauser. “What’s transpired there has definitely led to a bit of a political backlash.”

As Republicans panic, Democrats are feeling a renewed jolt of optimism after they swept statewide races last year in Virginia and New Jersey. They believe they found a winning formula with Rehmet, whose working-class biography as a union leader, Air Force veteran and Lockheed Martin machinist resonated with voters, along with his narrow focus on local issues like maintaining public school funding.

Tory Gavito, president of Democratic donor network Way to Win, said she received excited texts from several major donors over the weekend after the win. “Knowing it’s a wave year, this just adds a little bit of more wind in our sails,” she said. “It’s not just a question around Texas, it’s a question around Texas and Mississippi and Alabama and what does this mean for lots of places.”

Texas Republicans have the most to worry about of any in their party about a major Hispanic snapback towards Democrats.

Hispanics are now the largest ethnic group in Texas, making up 40 percent of the population. Trump carried Latinos in the state in 2024, exit polls showed, a massive swing from earlier elections, and Republicans had been making especially strong gains with rural, more conservative Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande Valley. But as Texas Democrats look to win a U.S. Senate election for the first time since 1988, they’re eyeing an opportunity to pull those voters back in.

“They are leaving in droves and going in the opposite direction,” said Javier Palomarez, president and CEO of the U.S. Hispanic Business Council. “This is a warning sign.”

And Texas Republicans also banked on retaining at least some of their newfound Hispanic support when they redrew their Congressional map last year, creating several majority-Hispanic districts that Trump would have carried by double digits last year. That includes rejiggering district lines for two top GOP targets, Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, as well as a third district outside San Antonio.

“They’ve banged three of these five new Republican seats on a demographic that Democrats were never able to turn out for 30-40 years, ” said GOP consultant and Trump critic Mike Madrid, referring to young, Hispanic male voters. But now, Trump’s hardline immigration policies have “angered and upset them.”

Samuel Benson and Alex Gangitano contributed to this report.