On the 32nd floor of a luxury condominium high-rise with panoramic views of San Francisco Bay, Heidi Sieck popped a bottle of Champagne Tuesday night, played Beyoncé’s “Freedom” and waited for her fellow “Kamala OGs” to arrive to watch the presidential debate.
“I’m very stressed,” said Sieck, a longtime abortion rights activist and San Francisco political operative who met Kamala Harris in 2003 at a house party where the first-time candidate stood on a milk crate in her high heels and pearls and urged partygoers to vote for her for district attorney.
But when Tuesday’s debate between Vice President Harris and former President Trump turned to abortion rights, Sieck — whose debate viewing party doubled as a fundraiser for a city ballot measure aimed at strengthening access to reproductive health care — was feeling fine.
“Fix it, Kamala!” Sieck shouted in front of a big-screen TV from a leather couch as she shared bowls of popcorn and chips with friends and other Harris supporters. “She’s in the zone. Kick her ass! Kick her ass!”
Heidi Sieck, left, hosted an intimate presidential debate party at the Avery in San Francisco on Tuesday. Sieck has been a supporter of Kamala Harris for 20 years.
(Mackenzie Mays/Los Angeles Times)
For San Franciscans like Sieck, who was an early Harris supporter and has volunteered for her campaigns over the years, Tuesday night's debate was a victory for the home team.
The intimate party was just one of at least a dozen held in the Bay Area, where Harris made her mark decades ago as an Alameda County prosecutor and then San Francisco district attorney before moving on to statewide office and the White House as vice president.
In a city where political activism is rife in local culture, some parties drew hundreds of guests as Harris’ friends and former staffers joined other excited Democrats to make debate night a time to rally and reminisce. Political insiders watched Harris on the big screen and bragged that they knew her past. They erupted in cheers when the vice president mentioned Trump’s bankruptcies and laughed along with her when she claimed without evidence that immigrants had eaten pets.
At Mannys, an event venue in the Mission District, owner Manny Yekutiel greeted guests dressed in drag, complete with a pink wig and sequined dress.
Partygoers ate ice cream from a local ice cream shop that created a special line of flavors for an election season featuring a hometown presidential candidate. Their scoops of malted salted vanilla ice cream with pecan pralines came in cups with a photo of Harris and the name of the flavor: “MVP,” a nickname that could refer to either the Most Valuable Player or Madam Vice President.
Downtown, inside the San Francisco Democratic Party’s new campaign headquarters on Market Street, Mayor London Breed, City Attorney David Chiu, state Sen. Scott Wiener and East Bay congressional candidate Lateefah Simon were among hundreds of spectators cheering Harris on.
Breed called Harris’ performance Tuesday “straightforward and honest” and recalled the fellow Democrat she has known since the 1990s, who first encouraged her to get involved in politics.
“I honestly never would have thought that someone like me would be in this world,” said Breed, San Francisco’s first black mayor. “And she’s very insistent that I be in this world.”
Chiu walked around wearing a T-shirt that read “Asians for Kamala,” a relic of her 2003 campaign for San Francisco district attorney.
He pointed to a lotus flower emblazoned on the red shirt and explained that “Kamala” means “lotus” in Sanskrit.
“The lotus is found in muddy waters, where it emerges unsullied and ready to bloom,” Chiu read in the text on the shirt. “To me, 21 years later, this speaks to where America is today. We are being led by our joyful warrior and we have to do it.”
Harris has a long history in the Bay Area. She was born in Oakland and spent part of her childhood in Berkeley public schools. She graduated from the University of California, Hastings College of Law. Now UC San Francisco School of Law —before being elected San Francisco's top prosecutor.
She has given credit to St. Francis. “Policy of hard blows” It was the city that shaped her ambitions and propelled her to the White House as vice president and, now, potentially, president. It was there that she met powerful people, including Willie Brown, the former mayor and Assembly speaker she dated in the 1990s, and where she vied for the spotlight with other rising stars, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, also a former mayor.
Alex Tourk, who has worked in San Francisco for 30 years, including on the Brown and Newsom campaigns, was at Avery cheering Harris on. He said San Francisco’s competitive politics were “a knife fight in a phone booth,” but that Harris always had what it takes.
He met her in 2000, when Brown was facing a tough battle over ranked-choice voting and tasked him and Harris — his two “toughest political operatives,” according to Tourk — with helping him get his preferred candidates elected to the Board of Supervisors. They failed, but Tourk remembers those five weeks with Harris as the real victory.
“Of course, I didn’t know she could be president of the United States, but we all knew she was someone special,” Tourk said. “Tonight, it’s about one of ours.”
But not everyone in town was cheering Harris. At a bar in Haight-Ashbury, the neighborhood known for being the epicenter of hippie counterculture, nearly 100 Republicans gathered to drink beer and support Trump, including Jacob Spangler, president of the College Republicans at San Francisco State University.
He said it's a challenge to be a conservative in such a liberal city.
“It’s hard for young people to live socially here in San Francisco,” he said. “If I meet a new friend, I have to wait a few months, sit down with them and tell them I’m a Republican.”
In that crowd, Harris seemed more like a distant political figure than a local crony.
Kathleen McCrea, 69, who said she is a registered independent who voted for Trump in the past two elections, said she plans to vote for him again because of his stances on immigration and the economy.
McCrea said the former president was “very well prepared” compared to Harris, whom he called “a stereotypical Democrat from San Francisco” who “knows how to woo people in money circles.”
Back at Sieck's condo, with stunning views of the bay and the city skyline, the hostess cried as she recalled her experience at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month.
She had volunteered for the DNC when President Biden was still the nominee, but now it was Harris, who had sat at tables with her many years ago planning how to improve her city, how to help more women get elected, a longtime ally who was always willing to write her letters of recommendation, even when life got busy.
“I looked at that podium,” Sieck said, recalling waiting for Harris to take the stage at the Democratic National Convention, “and all I could think about was that milk carton.”
