“I never thought about it that way.” These days, Ross Harris ’78, M.B.A.’80 often hears herself say that, whether responding to a political argument or a suggestion for a vacation destination.
But the Greensboro, North Carolina, native wasn’t always so open-minded. It was her five years as executive director of the North Carolina Institute of Political (now Public) Leadership, from 2014 to 2019, that changed her “profoundly politically and personally. I began to listen a lot better,” she says. “Now I’m passionate about public discourse. I don’t have the anger that so many seem to have, and I don’t tolerate people who won’t listen.”
The IOPL is the state’s only nonpartisan leadership development program for aspiring public servants. Classes meet on weekends for two semesters. Participants don’t reveal their party affiliation for several weeks. Until then they only express their views on issues. Listeners begin to form opinions about what side their fellow participants are on. When they finally reveal a party preference, others are often surprised.
“That was the beauty of it,” says Harris, who is now unaffiliated politically. “They listened to each other and found that the two sides are not always so far apart.” She surprised herself by finding commonalities with people she had assumed she’d totally disagree with.
While heading the institute, Harris continued what she had been doing for years: political consulting. You might say she was born into politics. When she was a child, her mother managed campaigns for several men she had grown up with. Harris recalls, “She had roles in those campaigns that women in those days didn’t typically have, because she knew these guys and could be a confidante to them.”
As kids, Harris and her brother routinely went to the courthouse in their bathrobes on election nights. “We thought that was normal,” she says. Politicians’ children were there, too, and they all played together. “That was the place to be every two or four years.”
For college, Harris didn’t ponder where to go. “I came from a Duke family. As kids, my cousins and I used to bet our pencils and milk on Duke-Carolina games. We all went to Duke. It was the absolute right place for me and continues to be. Duke has never let me down.”
And she has given back, serving as president of the Duke Alumni Board of Directors and a member of both the Duke University Board of Trustees and the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy’s Board of Visitors.
Harris majored in public policy at the Institute of Policy, Sciences and Public Affairs, precursor to today’s Sanford School of Public Policy. “I loved every minute of it,” she says. “Learning the story of so many people who had shaped our current affairs, and understanding their thought processes, was fascinating.”
One of her professors brought in guest speakers from the press, such as David Broder of The Washington Post. Harris loved hearing about covering candidates and analyzing issues.
At that time, public policy students did an internship between their junior and senior years. Through a contact she had, Harris felt confident she could land a spot in the Ford administration for the summer of 1977.
“But then Ford got beat by this guy nobody knew about named Jimmy Carter,” she says. “My internship went out the window. I didn’t know anyone connected to Carter.”
Not to worry. A guest speaker, a reporter for Knight Ridder newspapers, offered to ask a deputy of Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell, if she would take Harris on as an intern. She said yes.
“That summer was just amazing,” Harris recalls. “We were in the Old Executive Office Building in Washington, where our balcony overlooked the West Wing. We could see everybody who came and went all day. I was beginning to understand the media and the press and how all that worked.”
Throughout her career, Harris has been sought after again and again, hardly ever looking for a job. People obviously have taken note of her talent and instinct for the game of politics. “Opportunities have been put in my path,” she says modestly, “and I’ve tried to take advantage of them.”
An early break came in the second semester of her senior year. The Greensboro (North Carolina) News and Record wrote about her Washington internship and asked what she wanted to do next. “Well, we’ve got a U.S. Senate campaign coming up, and I’d like to be involved in that,” she responded.
From her mouth to the eyes of Luther Hodges Jr., a candidate, who mailed her a clip of the story with a note: “I read this article. I’d love to have you. Here’s my phone number.”
So she arranged her classes around commutes to Raleigh two days a week to work in Hodges’ campaign. He lost the election, but Carter later appointed him U.S. Deputy Secretary of Commerce.
As graduation approached, Harris set her sights on political advertising but wasn’t sure how to pursue that. To buy more time at a place she loved, she earned an M.B.A. at the Duke University Graduate School of Business Administration, now the Fuqua School of Business.
One day, an instructor said, “Hey, they’re looking for advance people for Vice President Mondale. Want to do it?” Harris jumped at the chance and again worked out a schedule around her classes. “They would call and tell us where an event was going to be, and we’d go there with the Secret Service to ensure everything would go well. I remember being in Philadelphia over Christmas vacation,” she says. “That kept my hand in politics while I was in school.”
With her M.B.A. completed, along with some political experience, Harris was still interested in advertising. After a rigorous application process, she became a trainee at Leo Burnett Company Inc. in Chicago, then a top 10 multinational advertising firm. That summer she watched the political conventions on a color television her parents had given her for graduation. “Sometimes I got a glimpse of somebody I’d worked with at the White House. I thought, ‘How great is that?’”
When the conventions ended and she had been at Burnett less than two months, someone she had worked with in Washington asked her to be North Carolina press secretary for the Carter-Mondale re-election campaign. “That was my dream job, but I couldn’t leave the job I had,” Harris says. “I turned it down.”
The next day, she mentioned the call to her boss and told him she’d said no. Soon she was summoned to the office of the executive vice president. “I was so nervous. I was sure I was in trouble,” she says.
“I heard about your phone call,” he said. “You should take that job for three months. If Carter wins, you’ll go to the White House. If he loses, you can come right back here. We’ll hold your place and pay your health insurance while you’re gone.”
It was an offer she couldn’t refuse. Three days later she drove to Raleigh. “I was 24 years old. I knew I was in over my head,” she says, but with the help of colleagues, she quickly learned much of what she didn’t know.
When Carter lost, she returned to Leo Burnett. She began doing media work and moved on to account management for Kellogg’s, representing pre-sweetened cereals Fruit Loops, Apple Jacks and Frosted Flakes. She stayed with Burnett 14 more years, rising to the position of vice president, working with clients Philip Morris, McDonald’s, Pillsbury and Green Giant, in addition to Kellogg’s. The tobacco business took her to Taiwan for two months, where foreign cigarettes were starting to be imported.
Over the years, life brought change, and when her mother had died and her father’s’ health was failing, Harris found it hard to stay in Chicago but was reluctant to leave. Then she got a call from HR at Burlington Industries in Greensboro. They had received her resume from a colleague who lived next door to her father. She went back home and became Burlington’s divisional vice president, helping steer the Lees Carpet brand.
Then, when Burlington hit hard times, she got laid off for the first time in her life. She returned to the tobacco business with an ad agency in High Point, North Carolina.
Today, she is still with The Harris Partners, the marketing and communications firm she founded in 2007, but she has done mostly political consulting for the last 18 years and has been called a “kingmaker.” She’s often asked to run for office, but declines. “I feel like I can contribute more behind the scenes. The people I’ve admired the most are those in the press corps or press operation of campaigns,” she says.
Asked about the current political climate in the U.S., Harris says, “We’ve never been so polarized. I’m not blaming either side for that, but I find it worrisome. I have to have hope that we will find a better way. Some of the people I taught at IOPL are being elected now. It’s neat to see them apply what they learned. They consult each other even though they’re on different sides politically. They’re making important contributions.
“We all get to these journeys in different ways,” she says, “but far be it from anybody to say your journey is wrong. You don’t have to agree with the person you’re talking to. Listen to them. You might learn something you didn’t know before.”