Kamala In La La Land

When Kamala Harris landed in Los Angeles on Jan. 20, 2025, after flying from Washington across a country that had so recently rejected her, she said she would remain a vocal leader for a nation that had lost its way. It was not in her nature, she said, to go “quietly into the night”.

Instead, the former vice president almost entirely disappeared from public view, spending the first half of 2025 cloistered in the high-security 3,500-square-foot Brentwood mansion that became her home a decade earlier.

Even as her adopted city of Los Angeles was beset by a series of crises, Harris made few public appearances and turned down entreaties to seek California’s governorship. By the time the summer rolled around, many Democrats, including former fans and supporters, concluded Harris might simply fade away — another has-been celebrity slipping into the sunny serpentine enclaves of Southern California.

Now as she begins her first full year outside government in more than three decades, Harris is finally delivering on the promise she made when she departed Washington. In the past few weeks, she’s addressed the Democratic National Committee, weighed in on the Trump administration’s intervention in Venezuela, and spoke glowingly of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz after his decision to end his reelection campaign. Her political voice, quite suddenly, has returned.

That turn has some wondering what happened in those six months in self-imposed exile, and what it might portend for her willingness to ever fully return to the electoral fray.

“It's hard to move on when the entire world around you is still talking about the campaign,” said Mike Trujillo, a Los Angeles strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. “There's a sense that you got the air knocked out of you … and some people catch their breath quicker than others.”

Failed candidates have reacted to defeat in a number ways. Hillary Clinton went on walks in the woods and wrote a campaign memoir bluntly titled What Happened. Beto O’Rourke set off across the southwest, livestreaming dental visits and writing an angstily soul-searching blog. Al Gore grew a beard and pivoted to climate change advocacy. Donald Trump challenged the result, by any means necessary, and then returned to the campaign trail almost immediately.

Harris appeared ready to carve out a different post-electoral life, that of a semi-anonymous celebrity in a city brimming with them. In February, she signed on as a client of the Creative Arts Agency talent powerhouse, and launched a new website for the “Office of Kamala D. Harris” that memorialized her term as vice president.

Harris arrived in Los Angeles as the wildfires ravaging the region — including the Pacific Palisades neighborhood just three miles west of Harris’s home in the hills of Brentwood — still smoldered. She and her husband, Doug Emhoff, toured a fire station in Altadena and handed out food with World Central Kitchen volunteers. Later, the couple made a celebrity appearance at the FireAid benefit concert,posting a picture of their evening on Instagram.

Otherwise Harris enjoyed a privacy that had eluded her since she ran to be San Francisco’s district attorney in 2002. She had no obligation to be anywhere. There was no public schedule. For the first time in decades, no one was keeping tabs on Kamala Harris.

So she spent days at the Hillcrest Country Club, where her husband is a member, and hosted get-togethers with friends at the home where she and Emhoff settled after their 2014 marriage. She did a lot of cooking, at least for a time, organizing weekly Sunday night dinners with her extended family. She made shopping trips to the Brentwood Country Market — a high-end open-air bazaar replete with luxury eyeglass stores, Goop, and $25 ancient-grain bowls — and patronized such a limited rotation of fancy Brentwood restaurants that members of her security detail started to jokingly grumble about the lack of variety, according to someone who heard the complaints.

The base of a Democratic Party that had rallied around Harris, raising a billion dollars to fund her short sprint of a presidential campaign, rarely heard from her even as some in California politics suggested she seek the state’s governorship.

In April, Harris made her first public comments about Trump since his return to office, in a San Francisco speech at a 20th anniversary dinner for Emerge America, an organization that recruits Democratic women for office.

“Right now I know a lot of folks are wondering what’s going to guide us through this moment,” Harris said. “How are we all going to figure out how to chart the course? But that’s not a reason to throw up our hands.”

Two months later, Los Angeles found itself under siege from federal immigration raids across a city where half the population is Latino. Protests erupted against immigrant detentions and deportations, some escalating into small-scale riots. Trump deployed federal troops in response, leading to further clashes and arrests. Harris put out a social-media statement opposing the National Guard’s arrival, calling Los Angeles her “home” and describing Trump’s move as a “dangerous escalation,” but unlike many of the region’s prominent Democrats she did not take a leading role at rallies or demonstrations.

Many in Los Angeles progressive circles seemed increasingly resentful of Harris’s conscious lack of connection with a community beyond an unrepresentative corner of the city that one Democratic consultant in her orbit dismissively characterized as “Kamala’s Los Angeles.”

"It’s not like she has time to walk around the parks all the time,” said the consultant, granted anonymity to speak candidly for fear of professional retribution. “But if I were advising her I would have been all over L.A. the last few months, just checking it out, feeling it, for the good and the bad."

Some of the decisions to stay ensconced in Brentwood, it seems, can be ascribed to concerns over security. When she departed Washington, Harris brought with her a Secret Service detail but lacked the ability to blow through stoplights in a motorcade — a particular complication in Los Angeles for a dignitary unaccustomed to the indignity of sitting in traffic.

On Sept. 1, Trump pulled Harris’s Secret Service detail. State and local officials decided to extend their own protection, with Los Angeles Police Department officers working in conjunction with the California Highway Patrol, a move criticized by the city’s police union.

“Pulling police officers from protecting everyday Angelenos to protect a failed presidential candidate who also happens to be a multi-millionaire, with multiple homes and who can easily afford to pay for her own security, is nuts,” the Los Angeles Police Protective League board of directors told the Los Angeles Times.

While security concerns have contributed to Harris’s reclusive approach to life in Los Angeles, it also seemed to fit her preferences. (A spokesperson for Harris did not reply to requests to comment for this story.) Harris and Emhoff recently purchased an $8 million home in an even more isolated oceanfront neighborhood in Malibu, the New York Post reported last week.

“She’s not someone who likes being out and about. She doesn’t really want to engage with people in a way that isn’t already orchestrated,” said the Democratic consultant in her orbit. “But her absence has been really notable. And to some people, very offensive.”

In late July, Harris announced she would not, in fact, be running for governor. To some California politicians, including current and potential gubernatorial candidates waiting on her decision, it was a surprise — but not to another career public servant who was unceremoniously dispatched to private life in Los Angeles.

“She spent the last four years meeting kings and prime ministers all over the world, I'm sure that's a pretty heady experience,” said former California Gov. Gray Davis, who was recalled from office in 2003. “I can understand why she didn’t want to run.”

Harris’ decision to detach herself from California politics appears to be less a continued retreat than evidence that she is setting herself higher. In September, she released a book, 107 Days, detailing her abbreviated and high-stakes presidential campaign alongside some targeted score-settling against potential 2028 rivals.

After a fall book tour that initially brought her through major media markets, Harris in December expanded her reach to include southern cities like Memphis, Tennessee; Montgomery, Alabama; and Columbia, South Carolina, a crucial early primary state.

Harris appeared eager to present herself as a notably different figure than the ladder-climbing establishmentarian who had lost two straight presidential races due to what many supporters conceded was a surfeit of both strategic and personal caution. Now she was railing against a “broken” political environment to Stephen Colbert, and in an interview with the New York Times claimed she was embarking on a looser, less scripted “freedom tour.”

When the Democratic National Committee met last month at a downtown Los Angeles hotel, Harris took the opportunity to address party officials — claiming not the mantle of the party’s standard bearer but an angry outsider.

"Both parties have failed to hold the public's trust," Harris told party officials. "Government is viewed as fundamentally unable to meet the needs of its people ... People are done with the status quo and they're ready to break things to force change."

As she began her book tour, Harris told reporters she was done grieving her loss. It had been, she said, a level of pain akin to the death of her mother. Her period of rest was a necessary move to recharge and recuperate, even if it ruffled feathers in Los Angeles.

“When you get into office, they tell you you’ll never get a day off,” said Davis, who joined a Los Angeles law firm after leaving the governor’s office. “You need some downtime. And you will never get it unless you put it on your schedule.”

There had been one notable exception to Harris’ half-year idyll in “Kamala’s Los Angeles,” removed from the public eye and the glare of cameras and the media. It wasn’t at an ice cream shop in Santa Monica, or a restaurant in Little Armenia. Instead, it was at the high school graduation of an 18-year-old senior named MyShay Causey in Compton.

The unlikely visit began with a handwritten letter. Causey, a current student representative on the district school board was working as a host at a downtown Los Angeles restaurant when she saw Emhoff enter. Quickly writing a note, she asked if there was a possibility to connect with Harris. Emhoff promised he would get it to her, but Causey expected the story would likely end there.

Instead, a few weeks later, a number with a blocked caller ID showed up on her phone at the end of the school day. On the line was the former vice president. They talked about family and career choices. By the end of an hour-long call that day, followed by a series of conversations with a Harris aides, they had made arrangements to meet in person.

On June 5, Harris arrived at Compton High School for Causey’s graduation, spending time with her family in a private room separate from the ceremony. Then Harris escorted Causey, who will be attending Cornell University, up to the stage where she would receive her diploma.

For all the criticism of Harris’s elite bubble, or lack of desire to go beyond her comfort zone, or enter into unpredictable environments, here she was, walking down a high-school football field, hand in hand with a young woman getting ready to head out into the world — only one of them sure exactly what she would do next with their life.

“There's a way that Black aunties and grandmas talk, where they’re about their business, but they’re also super, super sweet,” Causey said. “She’s like that. And the good part is she agreed to still be part of my life. That won’t be the last time I see her.”