Kamala Harris’s Anti-Trump Tour
INDIANOLA, Iowa—The 35-year-old white woman is gripping Kamala Harris’s arms, looking right at her.
“Everything that was in my head,” she says, “was coming out of your mouth.”
It’s 3 o’clock on a Monday afternoon, 30 minutes south of Des Moines, on the top floor of a bar that doesn’t start serving drinks for another hour. Obviously, the only reason a senator from California is here is because she’s running for president. They all know that. This is Iowa. That’s why they’re here.
[Read: An Unmistakable Sign Kamala Harris Is Running in 2020]
But for now, Jenny Ostem is still more focused on the Kavanaugh hearings a month ago than the caucuses a year and a half from now. On top of everything else of the past few years, she tells Harris, she feels like giving up.
Harris has been getting a lot of this lately—in Iowa, but also everywhere she’s been, and in the airports in between, from women across ages and races. Crying. Saying thank you. Telling her their own stories.
She puts her hands on Ostem’s shoulders.
“No, no, no,” the senator says. “Keep it going.”
“It’s really difficult to be a woman in this environment,” Ostem says, after letting the next person in the crowd step in for a selfie. She’s there with her mother, who’s 66 and says she’s looking for hope, too, but doubts “they” will elect a woman. “For so many of us that are
