California Senator Kamala Harris endorsed Noah Phillips for Sacramento County District Attorney, according to the Phillips campaign.
This endorsement is a boost for the challenger in his race against incumbent Anne Marie Schubert.
“The support of a person like Senator Harris, someone who is nationally recognized as a leader in law enforcement, shows that our campaign has a lot of momentum,” Phillips said. “She’s a career prosecutor who literally wrote the book ‘Smart on Crime.'”
The Phillips campaign announced the endorsement Monday morning on Twitter:
BREAKING: @SenKamalaHarris Endorses @PhillipsforDA for District Attorney saying “As a prosecutor I know we can trust Democrat Noah Phillips as the next District Attorney for Sacramento.” pic.twitter.com/9tiITEYY5v
— Noah Phillips (@PhillipsforDA) May 14, 2018
Sen. Harris has not responded to a V:RC request for confirmation, but the Phillips campaign say they received word of the endorsement late last week.
Over the last two months, the Sacramento County district attorney race has garnered national attention.
After the March 18 shooting of Sacramento resident Stephon Clark, an unarmed Black man gunned down by two Sacramento Police Department officers in his grandmother’s backyard, activists held demonstrations throughout the region, calling for incumbent D.A. Schubert to prosecute the two cops.
Activist and Real Justice PAC founder Shaun King, who also writes columns for The Intercept, allocated massive resources from his PAC to the Phillips campaign. George Soros’s California Justice & Public Safety PAC contributed as well.
For her part, Schubert has taken in hundreds of thousands of dollars from California’s law enforcement groups and former law enforcement officers. Recent numbers from the Sacramento Bee show the Schubert campaign raising almost $564,000, compared to Phillips’s $295,000.
Schubert’s camp experienced a boost of its own with the April 24 arrest of the man believed to be the Golden State Killer/East Area Rapist. They have since released political ads taking credit for his arrest.
But Monday’s Harris endorsement for Phillips is big, and it comes on the heels of Sacramento City Councilmember Allen Warren rescinding his endorsement for Schubert. The entire Sacramento City Council endorsed Schubert long before the Stephon Clark shooting, but as the race has gained national attention, they’ve faced pressure to pull their support.
Schubert’s campaign did not return to a request for comment by the time of this story’s publishing.
