Opinion | I Was a Kamala Harris Skeptic. Here’s How I Got Coconut-Pilled.

I remember the moment I knew that Kamala Harris was not the candidate for me in the 2020 presidential race. It was just a few days before the second Democratic primary debate, and college student debt had become an issue on the campaign trail. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were promising large-scale, no-strings-attached relief to borrowers.

On July 26, 2019, Harris announced her student loan forgiveness program. I rolled my eyes when I saw the details. It was the kind of overworked, technocratic, means-tested policy I associated with milquetoast Democratic triangulators: $20,000 in relief if you were poor enough in college to be eligible for a Pell Grant and then went on to start a business in an economically disadvantaged community and kept it afloat for at least three years. Hardly anyone would qualify. These kinds of small-ball policies were never going to defeat the faux-populist juggernaut of Donald Trump.

My skepticism about Harris surprised me at the time, because her background is a lot like mine: an ambitious biracial, bicultural Black woman of a certain age in a highly competitive line of work that historically hasn’t been welcoming to people who look like us. I admired her accomplishments. I had no doubt I would enjoy having a cocktail with her. But as a candidate, she just didn’t impress me, and if I had strong feelings about Joe Biden choosing her as his running mate, I have long since forgotten them.

And so it has taken me quite by surprise to find that I have become coconut-pilled. That’s the new nomenclature for converts to the Harris 2024 fold — a phrase that comes from her mother, and that I’ll dig into later. But I want to be candid about something first: I’m a little embarrassed to be rooting for any politician.

I have always voted, but like most journalists, I have tried to keep my political views mostly to myself. I’m not a joiner of causes. I’m a reporter, for most of my career a foreign correspondent, and my orientation toward those in power (as much from personal inclination as professional habit) has always been skeptical if not outright antagonistic. And yet on the morning after the disastrous June debate between Biden and Trump, I wrote with enthusiasm that I believed Harris should take over at the top of the ticket and very much could beat Trump.

Why did I come around to Harris, and why so quickly? A lot of people are now asking themselves how they feel about Harris and whether she can do the job — all understandable questions after five years when many people were meh, at best, on her. The flash flood of endorsements, donations and support for Harris has been astonishing. Be it because of relief that Biden bowed out or fear of Trump’s momentum after the assassination attempt and the Republican convention, there has been a consolidation around Harris that few expected.