It was November 2002 – the 27^th, to be precise. On this somber day, the Castro, San Francisco's gay neighborhood, paid tribute to Harvey Milk, the city supervisor assassinated in 1978 in the middle of City Hall, who was one of the country's first openly gay elected officials. For the 24^th anniversary of this event that continued to traumatize the city, a few hundred people gathered on Harvey Milk Plaza in the early evening. "Kamala Harris came and stood next to me," said Patrick Cosson, a marketing consultant who took part in the commemoration as he did every year. The future vice president was dressed in a black suit and suede boots; she had just arrived from the City Attorney's Office, where she headed the Family and Children's Services division. "We exchanged a few words," continued the entrepreneur.

Harris was not yet San Francisco's district attorney – an elected position – but she was already thinking about running in the November 2003 election. She had built her networks among high society and was courting representatives of "old money," heirs to banking or oil fortunes – the new tech rich were just starting to pour in. The Nob Hill Gazette regularly published her photo among the local notables of its upmarket neighborhood. One, dated 2000, showed her looking "drop-dead elegant" in a Burberry ensemble.

At Harvey Milk Plaza, Cosson advised his neighbor to move closer to the podium, where well-known figures were campaigning. She turned to him, her index finger threatening, as if furious at being suspected of electoral opportunism. "Listen to me," she began. "I've been a civil rights activist since I was a kid. My mother always told me to participate and be counted. And that's what I'm doing today." Twenty years later, Cosson, a staunch Democrat, was still impressed. Harris "isn't afraid to be scary," he boasted.

The entrepreneur told the story under the huge rainbow flag that has marked the entrance to the Castro district since 1997. It was a sunny August day, but the wind was cool, which didn't stop two men from defying the 2012 municipal ordinance – upheld by the Court of Appeal in 2019 – that prohibited naked strolling on public streets. The Castro is a land of freedom, impervious to convention, emblematic of the San Francisco hated by conservatives, the "radical" San Francisco that the right wants to associate with Harris to discredit her candidacy.

At the center of the chessboard

Not since Ronald Reagan in 1980 has a president emerged from the country's most populous and wealthiest state. No California Democrat has ever made it to the White House. In the view of Donald Trump's camp, California is a place where taxes are unbearable, crime rampant; where the streets are overrun with drug addicts and the schools with transgender people. If Harris is elected, "terrorists will appoint hundreds of extreme far-left judges to forcibly impose crazy San Francisco liberal values on Americans nationwide," Trump fantasized during a speech in Florida on July 27.

You have 73.47% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.