Swing States of Anxiety

Supporters arrive for a Kamala Harris campaign event in Atlanta last weekend. Georgia officials say early voting has broken state records.Jacquelyn Martin/AP

After Joe Biden’s debate debacle and Donald Trump’s near-assassination, the 2024 election looked like it could be a GOP blowout. Then Biden dropped out, Kamala Harris stepped up, the Democrats raised $1 billion-plus, the Republicans went full fascist … And here we are, a week before what feels like (another) Most Momentous Election of Our Lifetimes, and—if you believe the polls—no one has a clue who will win. 

Much depends on the outcome of the vote in seven states—the same ones that mattered in 2016 and 2020. This week on Reveal, my Mother Jones colleagues turn their attention to two of the swingest states of this election cycle, while I dig through my reporting archives to unearth a never-before-broadcast interview from 2013 that provides an intriguing glimpse into what makes Harris tick. 

First, national correspondent Tim Murphy goes to Arizona, where flag-waving, gun-toting protesters swarmed outside the Maricopa County election center in 2020, insisting the election had been stolen from Trump. Since then, dozens of court cases across the US have found those claims to be a big fat lie. Yet threats and harassment against Arizona election workers continue to be so common, Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder, told Tim, that top election officials in the state “have been turning over at the rate of a lunch shift at Taco Bell.”

Richer, a Republican who voted for Trump in 2020, has spent much of the past four years trying to dispel the election lies Trump helped create. To see how it’s going, Murphy visits the recently fortified Maricopa County election center, where Richer’s staff are on a mission to demonstrate to voters that the election process is free and fair and deserving of their trust. 

Meanwhile, in Georgia, where Trump and his minions have been indicted for their attempts to find enough votes (11,780, to be exact) to undo Biden’s victory in 2020, new MAGA-friendly members of the State Election Board have been trying to rewrite the rules to favor the former president this time around. Mother Jones national voting rights correspondent Ari Berman explains the fight to control election results in this crucial 2024 battleground and how it mirrors similar efforts in other swing states.

For the show’s final segment, I travel back almost 12 years, to when Harris was California’s attorney general—the first woman and first African American ever elected to that job—and I was an editor and reporter covering San Francisco. By then, Harris was a rising star in national Democratic politics, and editors at New York-based DuJour magazine wanted their readers to understand why. I jumped at the assignment.

I’d written about Harris a couple of times before; I’d even interviewed her mother. So when we reconnected in 2013, Harris was comfortable in my presence—far more so than with some of the journalists who’ve interviewed her in recent years. We spent about an hour together—an unimaginably generous amount of time in the current political climate—talking about many of the same substantive issues (the housing crisis, gun control, prosecuting sex crimes, and tech privacy and regulation) at the center of her campaign today. After my profile was published, I stored the audio on my laptop’s hard drive and forgot about it—until Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket and reporters started complaining about how few interviews she was granting.

Listening back to our conversation, I’m struck by the similarities between Harris then and now—and not just when it comes to policy priorities. When she ran for AG in 2010, very few people—even in her own circle—thought she could win. Her Republican opponent Steve Cooley, the district attorney of Los Angeles County, was extremely popular with the tough-on-crime types who had long dominated California criminal justice circles, not to mention he was older and white. “A lot of people thought it couldn’t happen,” Harris told me then. “What motivated me was I really wanted the job. I felt that I could do it well.” She campaigned hard in communities that were not her obvious constituencies. “I never foreclosed any group or constituency as being off limits,” she explained. “Everything and everybody is on the table, and I’m not going to accept that that door is not open to me.” On Election Night, Cooley declared victory—and many Harris supporters assumed she would concede. But she didn’t.

Three weeks later, in one of the closest elections in California history, Cooley was the one to finally concede, and Harris became the new attorney general.

The big unknown, of course, is whether she can do it again—this time against a Republican opponent who refuses to believe that he will lose and a disinformation machine intent on making sure he doesn’t. Here’s what Harris told me then: “I’m an eternal optimist. I really am. I’m a realist and an optimist. I think that those two can coexist, and they do in me.”