When President Joe Biden introduced Kamala Harris as his running mate four years ago, he shared their origin story: He had first learned of her, he said, through his son Beau, who served with her as a state attorney general.
“I know how much Beau respected Kamala and her work,” Biden said of his son, who died in 2015 and was Delaware’s attorney general when Harris held the same job in California. “That mattered a lot to me, to be honest with you, as I made this decision.”
Now it is Vice President Harris who is deciding on a running mate. And as she leans into her law enforcement background, with Democrats framing the race against former President Donald Trump as a choice between a prosecutor and a felon, the path to the Democratic ticket may again run through a class of ambitious former attorneys general who came up alongside her.
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Of the five or six vice-presidential options currently seen as the most serious contenders, two of them — Govs. Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Andy Beshear of Kentucky — directly overlapped with Harris as attorneys general. Now-Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania came into the job as she was leaving her post, and as Trump entered the White House.
Interviews with more than a dozen people who worked with Harris and those men at the time offer a window into her relationships with these possible running mates, and a snapshot of what each might bring — a steady, seasoned hand; political potency in an essential battleground state; or proven appeal in conservative territory. All would offer “balance” to the ticket along the lines of geography, ideology and executive experience.
These three men have also proved their ability to work in a way “that would benefit not only members of their party, but all of the residents in their states,” said Karl Racine, the former attorney general of Washington, D.C., who helped lead the Democratic Attorneys General Association during Harris’ tenure.
“It’s that unquestioned record that not only makes them attractive,” he said, “but demonstrates how they might contribute to a ticket.”
The Wobbly Arrival of a ‘Rising Star’
Harris barely eked out a victory in her 2010 race for California’s attorney general.
“She was the underdog who ended up surprising everybody,” said Brian Brokaw, who was her campaign manager. “Then she took office as somebody who was immediately seen as the most vulnerable of any of the statewide elected officials in California.”
Her challenges had stemmed in part from a rocky relationship with some in the law enforcement community who were angered by her decision, while San Francisco district attorney, to not seek the death penalty in the killing of a police officer.
While she and her team worked to ease that tension at home — with some success, evident in her resounding reelection victory in 2014 — there was no whiff of that political shakiness on the national stage, according to attorneys general who served with her.
“Pretty clearly a rising star,” said George Jepsen, a former attorney general of Connecticut. “When you represent California, you are per se a heavyweight, and in the world of state AGs, she was a major force.”
The attorneys general encountered one another at meetings of the Democratic Attorneys General Association and the National Association of Attorneys General (“whose acronym, NAAG, is appropriate,” Harris quipped in her book “The Truths We Hold”), and they often collaborated on multistate litigation and settlements.
Harris was a significant player and tough negotiator in a national mortgage settlement with big banks, working with other attorneys general including Cooper.
“She and I fought for relief for homeowners who were wrongfully foreclosed upon,” Cooper said in a statement. “I admired her tenacity then as I do now.”
A Solid Relationship with Roy Cooper
Of the former attorneys general turned vice-presidential hopefuls, Cooper, 67, served together the longest with Harris, 59.
“They’ve certainly been to war together,” said Daniel R. Suvor, who served as chief of policy and senior counsel to Harris when she was attorney general, noting that she, Cooper and their counterparts would sometimes dine together in Washington “after a long day of negotiating with the banks.”
“Though they’re not particularly close, they have that good working relationship,” he said.
Among their colleagues, Harris was seen at once as serious — taking on a for-profit education company or clashing with the big banks — and splashy. Few doubted that she was headed for higher office.
“She had the confidence of a prosecutor — she didn’t have to have some staffers sit there and hold her hand,” said Jim Hood, then the attorney general of Mississippi. But he added: “She was always a fun AG. You know, there were some of them that were so buttoned down.”
That description applied in some ways to the low-key Cooper, who served four terms with an emphasis on battling crime and pursuing consumer protections. Hood called him a “gentleman lawyer” who sought to “keep things calm, get things done.”
“He didn’t jump out and try to get all the credit,” Hood said, while Jepsen of Connecticut said Cooper was effective and a strong coalition-builder who never raised his voice.
Cooper harnessed that understated, affable approach into six statewide victories, including in challenging governor’s races in 2016 and 2020, even as his party’s presidential nominees were defeated in North Carolina.
It’s a record that underscores his ability to campaign for Harris across difficult political terrain anywhere in the country, his allies say, with a style that could complement hers without competing.
The ‘Skill and Toughness’ of Josh Shapiro
Harris and Shapiro, 51, have also known each other for years. In 2006, Harris, then the San Francisco district attorney, and Shapiro, a state representative from the Philadelphia suburbs, were tapped for a prestigious program for rising stars in American politics.
Ten years later, Harris was in her last year as attorney general and running for Senate, while Shapiro was seeking the attorney general’s office in Pennsylvania.
He built a broad coalition in that race, securing support from President Barack Obama and key law enforcement leaders. He had also stayed in touch with Harris, asking her for advice over the years, and he spoke with her during that run for attorney general, said Manuel Bonder, a spokesperson for Shapiro.
Shapiro won that fall even as Hillary Clinton lost the state, outperforming her in rural counties and running up his margins in the suburbs, in a preview of how he would win the governor’s race six years later — and, his supporters argue, how he could help Harris carry the battleground state this year.
A Fox News poll released Friday found that 61% of Pennsylvania voters viewed him favorably, a striking number in a closely divided state.
Shapiro quickly made a name for himself as Pennsylvania’s attorney general, joining Democratic colleagues in challenging the Trump administration at a moment when little-known state officials suddenly had growing national stature.
His office also initiated an investigation into the Catholic Church’s cover-up of sexual abuse of more than 1,000 children over decades, and he was a leader of a multistate investigation related to the opioid epidemic, which resulted in billions of dollars in settlement agreements.
“He showed a lot of skill and toughness in those negotiations,” Suvor said, adding that Shapiro’s role in the opioid case was “certainly noted by the Biden-Harris administration.”
After Election Day in 2020, as ballots in Pennsylvania were slowly tallied and Trump fought the results, Shapiro was a fixture on national television, insisting on patience and asserting that every vote would be counted.
Red-State Appeal From Andy Beshear
Harris and Beshear overlapped as attorneys general for about a year. In an interview last week, the governor said he had come to know Harris later, as vice president.
But he signaled that he saw a bond rooted in their previous jobs.
“I know an attorney general when I see one,” Beshear said. Good ones, he said, are “willing to take on tough issues if it means creating a better life for people.”
Beshear, 46, is a rare two-term Democratic governor in a deeply conservative state, skilled at connecting with voters who feel alienated from his national party. He is the most popular Democratic governor in the country, according to a recent analysis from Morning Consult, and he is gleefully challenging the Appalachian credentials of Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio.
Suvor also noted that Doug Emhoff, Harris’ husband, and Britainy Beshear, Andy Beshear’s wife, had both attended the University of Southern California for graduate school. He recalled a bond over that California connection. (“Doug is a big USC fan, and is excited to meet anybody who went to USC as well,” he said.)
On July 20, Harris was already in the intense glare of the national spotlight as the country waited to see whether Biden would bow out of the race.
She spent part of the day at a fundraiser in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with another former state attorney general, Maura Healey, now the governor of Massachusetts. They had worked together in their previous roles, and Healey recalled that Harris had offered her encouragement when she joined the relatively small club of female attorneys general.
Backstage, Healey introduced Harris to a friend’s young daughter, who had been at basketball camp.
“She said, ‘Tell me about basketball camp, and what’s your favorite position?’” Healey, who was a college basketball captain at Harvard University, recalled. “And the little girl says to her, ‘Anything but defense.’ And the VP just burst out laughing and said: ‘Me too. I like offense.’”
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