On Kamala Harris’ San Francisco home turf, old friends root for her on presidential debate night

On the 32nd floor of a luxury condo skyscraper with panoramic views of San Francisco Bay, Heidi Sieck popped a bottle of champagne Tuesday evening, played “Freedom” by Beyoncé and waited for her fellow “Kamala OGs” to arrive to watch the presidential debate.

“I’m so stressed out,” said Sieck, an abortion rights activist and longtime 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.

By the time Tuesday’s debate between Vice President Harris and former President Trump turned to abortion rights, though, Sieck, whose watch party doubled as a fundraiser for a city ballot measure to strengthen reproductive health access, was feeling good.

“Fix it, Kamala!” Sieck shouted at a big-screen TV from a leather couch as she shared bowls of popcorn and potato chips with friends and fellow Harris supporters. “She’s in the zone. Kick his ass! Kick his 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 supporter of Harris and has volunteered for her campaigns over the years, Tuesday evening’s debate was a win for the home team.

The intimate party was just one of at least a dozen held across the Bay Area, where Harris left her mark decades ago as an Alameda County prosecutor and then San Francisco district attorney before moving on to statewide offices and the White House as vice president.

In a city where political activism courses through the local culture, some parties attracted hundreds of guests as Harris’ friends and former staffers joined with other excited Democrats to make debate night a moment to get motivated and reminisce. Political insiders watched Harris on the big screen and boasted that they knew her way back when. They erupted in cheers when the vice president mentioned Trump’s bankruptcies and laughed alongside her when he alleged without evidence that immigrants had eaten pets.

At Mannys, an event venue in the Mission District, owner Manny Yekutiel greeted guests dressed in drag, wearing a pink wig and a sequined dress.

Partygoers ate ice cream from a local creamery 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 donning a picture of Harris and the flavor name: “MVP,” a moniker that could refer to Most Valuable Player or Madame Vice President.

Downtown, inside the San Francisco Democratic Party’s new campaign headquarters on Market Street, Mayor London Breed, City Atty. David Chiu, state Sen. Scott Wiener and East Bay congressional candidate Lateefah Simon were among hundreds of viewers cheering Harris on.

Breed called Harris’ performance on Tuesday “direct and honest,” and remembered the fellow Democrat she’s known since the 1990s, who first encouraged her to get involved in politics.

“I wouldn’t have thought honestly someone like me could be in this world,” said Breed, who is San Francisco’s first Black female mayor. “And she is very pushy about me being in this world.”

Chiu walked around with a T-shirt that read “Asians for Kamala” — a relic from her 2003 run 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 unsoiled and ready to bloom,” Chiu read from the text on T-shirt. “To me, 21 years later, this speaks to where America is today. We’re being led by our joyful warrior, and we gotta get it done.”

Harris’ Bay Area history is long. She was born in Oakland and spent part of her childhood in Berkeley public schools. She graduated from UC Hastings College of the Law — now UC Law San Francisco — before being elected San Francisco’s top prosecutor.

She has credited San Francisco’s “hard-knock politics” as shaping her ambitions and propelling her all the way to the White House as vice president, and now potentially president. The city is where she got to know powerful people, including Willie Brown, the former mayor and Assembly speaker whom she dated in the 1990s, and where she competed for the spotlight with fellow 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 the Avery cheering for Harris. He called competitive San Francisco politics “a knife fight in a phone booth,” but said Harris always had what it takes.

He met her in 2000 when Brown was facing an uphill battle over ranked-choice voting and tasked him and Harris — his “two toughest political operatives,” Tourk said — to help him get his preferred candidates elected to the Board of Supervisors. They failed, but Tourk looks back on those five weeks with Harris as the real win.

“Then, obviously, I didn’t know she could be president of United States. But we all knew she was somebody special,” Tourk said. “Tonight, this is one of our own.”

But not everyone in the city was cheering for Harris. At a bar in the Haight-Ashbury — the neighborhood famous as the epicenter of Hippie counterculture — nearly 100 Republicans gathered to drink beer and root for Trump, including Jacob Spangler, president of the College Republicans at San Francisco State University.

He said it’s challenging to be a conservative in such a liberal city.

“Being a young person it’s difficult socially to exist here in San Francisco,” he said. “If I meet a new friend, I need to wait a few months and sit them down and tell them I’m a Republican.”

In this crowd, Harris was more of a distant political figure than a hometown compadre.

Kathleen McCrea, 69, who said she is a registered independent who voted for Trump in the last 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 with Harris, whom she called “a stereotypical San Francisco Democrat” that “knows how to woo people in money circles.”

Back at Sieck’s condo with breathtaking views of the bay and city skyline, the hostess teared up recalling her experience at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month.

She had volunteered for the DNC when President Biden was still the candidate, but now it was Harris, who had sat at tables with her many years ago planning how to make her city better, 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’m looking at that podium,” Sieck said, recalling waiting for Harris to come on stage at the DNC, “and all I could think about was that milk crate.”