Representative Katherine Harris

Katherine Harris (born April 5, 1957) is an American politician from Florida who served as a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from Florida’s 13th congressional district from January 3, 2003, to January 3, 2007. She emerged as a prominent and controversial national figure through her tenure as Florida’s Secretary of State during the 2000 presidential election recount, and later sought higher office in a 2006 campaign for the United States Senate, which she lost to incumbent Democratic Senator Bill Nelson.

Harris was born in 1957 and grew up in a politically and civically engaged family in Florida. Her father, George W. Harris Jr., was chairman and president of Citrus & Chemical Bank, a prominent financial institution in the state, and her family’s business and community involvement exposed her early to public affairs and Republican politics. Raised in a milieu that combined business leadership with conservative political values, she developed an interest in government and public policy that would shape her later career. Details of her formal education are less frequently highlighted than her political roles, but her subsequent rise in Florida politics reflected both her family background and her own political ambition.

Harris first attained elected office at the state level when she was elected to the Florida Senate, where she served from 1994 to 1998. As a state senator, she participated in the legislative process during a period of Republican ascendancy in Florida, aligning herself with the party’s conservative agenda on fiscal and social issues. Her work in the Florida Senate helped establish her as a rising Republican figure and positioned her for statewide office. In 1998, she successfully ran for Florida Secretary of State, assuming that office in January 1999. In this capacity, she oversaw elections, corporate registrations, and cultural and historical programs, but it was her role in election administration that would bring her international attention.

As Secretary of State of Florida from 1999 to 2002, Harris became a central figure in the 2000 United States presidential election in Florida. Serving simultaneously as Secretary of State and as co-chair of Republican George W. Bush’s election efforts in Florida, she oversaw key aspects of the state’s electoral machinery. Her office was involved in a controversial purge of approximately 173,000 individuals from the state’s voter rolls, the result of hiring the firm ChoicePoint to compile a list of supposed felons. The list, which drew in part on data such as a Texas felons’ list and included many common names, proved to be highly inaccurate and led to the misidentification and disenfranchisement of thousands of voters, including a disproportionate number of Black citizens. When the election between Bush and Democratic nominee Al Gore produced an extraordinarily narrow margin—ultimately 537 votes in Bush’s favor—recounts were demanded and conducted in several counties. After several recount efforts proved inconclusive and amid intense legal and political conflict, Harris halted the recounting process, arguing that Florida law governing recounts was unclear and that statutory deadlines had to be observed. She then certified the Republican slate of electors, reflecting official vote totals that showed Bush as the narrow winner of the statewide popular vote. Her certification was upheld in state circuit court but overturned by the Florida Supreme Court, which ordered further recounts. That decision was in turn reversed by the United States Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore (2000). In a per curiam decision, the Court held by a 7–2 vote that the Florida Supreme Court’s recount method violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and by a 5–4 vote that no constitutionally acceptable recount could be completed within the time limits set by Florida law. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s vote to stop the recount was crucial. The Court’s ruling allowed Harris’s earlier certification of Bush as the winner of Florida’s 25 electoral votes to stand, giving Bush 271 electoral votes to Gore’s 266 (one District of Columbia elector abstained) and thereby deciding the national election. The intense scrutiny of her actions led Harris to publish a memoir, “Center of the Storm,” recounting her role in the 2000 election controversy; it was later reported that the Bush campaign, dissatisfied with her performance in the media spotlight, had assigned a staff member to act as a handler during the crisis.

After leaving the Secretary of State’s office, Harris sought federal office. In the 2002 U.S. House elections, she ran for the open seat in Florida’s 13th congressional district, vacated by retiring Republican Representative Dan Miller. Facing Sarasota attorney Jan Schneider, Harris campaigned in a strongly Republican district and mounted one of the largest first-term fundraising efforts in the district’s history. With substantial financial resources and notable backing from the Bush family, she secured a decisive victory by a margin of about 10 percentage points. She took office on January 3, 2003, beginning the first of two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. During her tenure in Congress from 2003 to 2007, Harris participated in the legislative process and represented the interests of her Gulf Coast Florida constituents at a time marked by the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and significant domestic policy debates. She contributed to the work of the House as a Republican member, voting in line with her party’s positions on national security, economic, and social issues.

Harris considered seeking higher office even while serving in the House. She explored a bid for the U.S. Senate seat that would be vacated by retiring Democratic Senator Bob Graham in 2004, but she was reportedly dissuaded by the Bush White House, which preferred to clear the way for Mel Martinez, then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Martinez ultimately won that race, narrowly defeating Democrat Betty Castor. Harris instead ran for re-election to her House seat in 2004 and was returned to Congress with a margin nearly identical to her 2002 victory. During this period she also attracted attention for her public statements and campaign incidents. In a 2004 speech in Venice, Florida, she claimed that a “Middle Eastern” man had been arrested for attempting to blow up the power grid in Carmel, Indiana, a claim that was publicly contradicted by Carmel Mayor James Brainard and a spokesman for Indiana Governor Joe Kernan, both of whom said they had no knowledge of such a plot and that Brainard had never spoken with Harris. Also in 2004, during a campaign stop in Sarasota, a local resident, Barry Seltzer, drove his automobile toward Harris and her supporters on a sidewalk in what he described as an attempt to “intimidate” them as a form of political expression. Witnesses reported that he swerved off the road toward the group; no one was injured, and Seltzer was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon.

In 2006, Harris gave up her House seat to run for the United States Senate against incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson. Her candidacy quickly became a source of concern for Republican leaders at both the state and national levels. Florida Governor Jeb Bush publicly questioned her ability to win a statewide general election and encouraged other Republicans to challenge her in the primary. Karl Rove, a senior adviser to President George W. Bush, also expressed doubts about her statewide appeal. The National Republican Senatorial Committee, chaired by Senator Elizabeth Dole, attempted to recruit alternative candidates, including Florida House Speaker Allan Bense and former U.S. Representative Joe Scarborough. Bense declined to run in May 2006 despite overtures from Governor Bush and other party leaders, and Scarborough similarly refused to enter the race. Departing Harris aides later claimed that she had called potential Scarborough supporters and raised the death of one of his aides—an incident previously determined to involve no foul play—in an effort to discourage his candidacy, although Scarborough had already informed NRSC staff that he would not run. Scarborough later told Nelson that drawing Harris as an opponent made him “the luckiest man in Washington.” By late July 2006, Harris had gone through three campaign managers, and it was disclosed that state Republican Party leaders had told her they would not support her because they believed she could not win the general election.

Financial and messaging problems further undermined Harris’s 2006 Senate campaign. From the outset, Nelson enjoyed a substantial fundraising advantage. On the March 15, 2006, episode of Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes,” Harris announced that she would invest $10 million of her own inheritance—described as her entire inheritance—into her Senate bid, dedicating the campaign to the memory of her late father, George W. Harris Jr. The promised $10 million, however, never materialized. Reports indicated that she would not directly receive her father’s estate, which had been left to her mother. Harris ultimately contributed about $3 million to her campaign and later withdrew $100,000 of that amount, prompting further speculation about her financial capacity to sustain the race. In October 2006, she stated that she was attempting to sell her Washington, D.C., home to raise additional funds, but the house was not publicly listed for sale and no sale was ever reported. In the general election, Nelson defeated Harris by more than one million votes; she received less than 39 percent of the vote, ending her bid for the Senate and her tenure in elected office at the conclusion of her House term in January 2007.

Harris’s 2006 campaign was also marked by controversy over her public comments on religion and politics. Speaking to a Christian audience, she argued that “we have to have the faithful in government” and described the separation of church and state as a “lie we have been told,” asserting that Christians should be actively involved in politics because “God is the one who chooses our rulers.” She contended that if Christians did not elect “godly men and women,” the nation would be governed by “secular laws,” which she said was contrary to the intentions of both the Founding Fathers and God. She further stated that electing non-Christians would, “in essence,” lead to the legislation of sin, citing abortion and gay marriage as examples of policies that would “take western civilization” and other nations “astray” because “average citizens who are not Christians, because they don’t know better, we are leading them astray and it’s wrong.” These remarks drew sharp criticism. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat from Florida, said she was “disgusted” by the comments and “deeply disappointed in Representative Harris personally,” asserting that Harris’s statement “clearly shows that she does not deserve to be a representative.” Two of Harris’s Republican primary opponents also denounced her remarks. Will McBride, an attorney and son of a pastor, stated, “I’m a Christian, and I’m a Republican, and I don’t share her views. There are people of other faiths and backgrounds of outstanding integrity who know how to tell the truth.” Another GOP primary opponent, real estate developer Peter Monroe, called on her to quit the race and resign from Congress, describing her suggestion that non-Christian voters were ignorant of morality as “contemptible, arrogant and wicked.”

In response to the uproar, Harris’s campaign issued a “Statement of Clarification” on August 26, 2006, asserting that in the interview she had been addressing a Christian audience and a “common misperception that people of faith should not be actively involved in government.” The statement emphasized her “deep grounding in Judeo-Christian values” and cited her past support for Israel. Her Jewish campaign manager, Bryan G. Rudnick, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, was quoted as saying that Harris encouraged “people of all faiths to engage in government so that our country can continue to thrive on the principles set forth by our founding fathers, without malice towards anyone.” That same day, at an appearance at an Orlando gun show, Harris said “it breaks my heart” to think that people understood her comments as bigoted. When asked whether she believed the Founding Fathers intended the nation to have secular laws, she replied that she believed American law originated with “Moses, the Ten Commandments,” asserting, “That’s how all of our laws originated in the United States, period. I think that’s the basis of our rule of law.” On October 3, 2006, she participated in a prayer service via telephone, during which she again called for a diminished separation between church and state, asking that pastors who believed “there’s no place for government” come to understand “kingdom government” and “how they need to be involved in the governance on this earth because God is our governance.” In the same prayer, offered the day after the Jewish New Year and Day of Atonement, she prayed that “the hearts and minds of our Jewish brothers and sisters” would be brought “into alignment,” effectively calling for their conversion to Christianity.

Following her defeat in the 2006 Senate race, Harris left elective office at the end of her second House term in January 2007. Her career remains closely associated with her pivotal and controversial role in the 2000 presidential election, her service in the Florida Senate and as Secretary of State, her two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2003 to 2007, and her unsuccessful 2006 Senate campaign. Her public life has been documented in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, profiled in national media such as The Washington Post, and preserved in appearances on C-SPAN, reflecting both her influence and the enduring debate over her actions and statements in state and national politics.