The 47 Seconds That Saved Kamala Harris’s Political Career

The first thing to know about Kamala Harris’s campaign for California attorney general is that she was not necessarily favored to win.

It was 2010 — the pinnacle of the Tea Party’s power — and Ms. Harris, running statewide for the first time, was struggling to shed the same San Francisco liberal label that Donald J. Trump is wielding as an epithet yet again.

Ms. Harris, then 45, was already seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party. “The female Barack Obama,” Gwen Ifill had memorably tagged her the year before. But plenty of rising stars are snuffed out early, and Ms. Harris was facing a formidable Republican foe in Steve Cooley, the popular and moderate district attorney of Los Angeles County.

Mr. Cooley’s reputation as an evenhanded, corruption-busting prosecutor had put him tied or narrowly ahead of Ms. Harris entering October — largely on the strength of his distinctive popularity for a Republican in Los Angeles. He had won election three times in what is the state’s most populous Democratic stronghold.

Ms. Harris was running out of both time and money when she arrived at their only debate on the first Monday of October. Then, about 45 minutes into the hourlong clash, Mr. Cooley gave an answer that was frank, fateful and foolish.

It was a turning point in the campaign. Ms. Harris would escape a month later with one of the narrowest statewide victories in modern California history — by less than 0.85 percent of the vote. Yet even on election night, Ms. Harris’s chances had appeared so bleak that Mr. Cooley declared victory. The race remained unsettled for three weeks.