Kamala Harris has already made history as the first woman, first Black person and first South Asian person to hold the U.S. presidential nomination. If she officially wins the Democratic presidential nomination and defeats former President Donald Trump in November’s election, she will shatter the highest glass ceiling in American history.
Harris garnered overwhelming support from many party leaders and raised $50 million after President Joe Biden abruptly dropped out of the race on Sunday to endorse her, but her rapid rise to the top of Democratic politics was not a given. In recent years, Harris has struggled to define herself on the national stage and has faced intense scrutiny from Republicans.
The dramatically altered presidential election presents a key opportunity for Ms. Harris, 59, to reassert herself at home, telling a story of fierce ambition and meteoric rise to the nation’s power centers.
Kamala Devi Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, to immigrant parents who met as civil rights activists, and she remembers attending political demonstrations at a young age.
“I love to joke,” she tweeted seven years ago. “My sister and I grew up surrounded by adults who marched and shouted all day for this thing called justice.”
Harris’ parents, Jamaican-born economist Donald J. Harris and Indian-born scientist Shyamala Gopalan Harris, divorced when Harris was a child. She and her sister Maya were raised primarily by their mother, a breast cancer scientist who moved from India to the United States at age 19 and earned her doctorate the same year Harris was born, according to a White House profile. (Gopalan died in 2009.)
Harris attended Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C., graduating with degrees in political science and economics in 1986. She then returned to California to attend what was then called the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where she earned her Juris Doctor in 1989.
After graduating, Harris became a prosecutor, serving as an assistant district attorney in Alameda County, specializing in prosecuting child sexual assault cases, and then as an assistant district attorney in San Francisco, one of the pillars of American progressivism. She built a reputation for her ruthless toughness and quickly sought to parlay her public persona into public office.
Political rise
Harris became the first person of color elected to the office in 2003, when she challenged incumbent San Francisco District Attorney Terrence Hallinan and won an overwhelming 56.5% of the vote in the runoff election. In that position, she established herself as a champion for LGBTQ rights and other progressive social causes, refusing to support Proposition 8, a same-sex marriage ban that was overturned in 2010.
Harris faced criticism from local police early in her term after she declined to seek the death penalty for a man who killed a police officer in 2004. She ran unopposed for re-election in 2007.
Three years later, Harris won election as California’s attorney general, earning a key endorsement from former President Barack Obama, who a year earlier had become America’s first Black chief executive officer. (She narrowly defeated Republican candidate Steve Cooley.) She has been called the “female Obama” by some political analysts, a moniker that has led some observers to speculate about her national ambitions.
In 2014, Harris married Southern California attorney Doug Emhoff. She is the stepmother to her husband’s two children, Cole and Ella Emhoff, from a previous marriage.
As California’s attorney general, Harris oversaw the nation’s largest state justice department. She won $20 billion in settlements for Californians whose homes had been foreclosed, as well as $1.1 billion in settlements for students and veterans who were allegedly exploited by for-profit education companies. Harris would go on to point to these accomplishments to shore up her record as a champion for workers.
The Path to Power
Harris announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate in early 2015 after Democratic heavyweight Barbara Boxer announced she was retiring from the Senate after nearly 25 years in the position. Harris proved to be a dynamic campaigner and fundraiser, garnering endorsements from President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
Harris handily won her U.S. Senate race, defeating her Democratic colleague Loretta Sanchez with 61.6% of the vote, becoming the second black woman elected to the Senate. She was sworn into the Senate by Biden on January 3, 2017, and immediately found herself faced with a national political climate shaken by Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
Harris quickly positioned herself as one of the Trump White House’s toughest congressional critics, using her legal skills to rhetorically prosecute cases against the new administration’s policies and political appointments. She gained attention for her tough questioning of Brett Kavanaugh during his 2018 Supreme Court confirmation hearings and for former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Harris frequently posted videos of these tense confrontations on social media, pushing back against Trump and boosting her credibility among Democratic voters hungry for a prominent Democrat to push back against his policies as part of an active “resistance” to the Republican president.
With the 2020 Democratic presidential primary looming, the freshman lawmaker has a chance to take the fight to the next level.
She announced her presidential bid in front of 20,000 cheering fans in Oakland in January 2019. She was widely seen as the Democratic frontrunner, pitching herself as a centrist alternative to self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders and a younger alternative to Biden, who was in his late 70s at the time.
In the early months of her candidacy, Harris was dogged by questions from progressive activists about her years of experience as a prosecutor and whether she had been too eager to crack down on crime, including marijuana cases. She defended her record and tried to assure voters that she would champion racial justice.
But despite a strong start, including a debate with Biden over his opposition to school busing, Harris’ campaign ultimately fell apart. She was quickly out of money, struggled to run a cohesive campaign and lacked a clear message. She dropped out in December 2019, before any primary votes were cast.
But of course, that wasn’t the end of the story.
Vice President
Biden, who had publicly pledged to choose a woman as his running mate in early August 2020, announced that he had chosen Harris, making her the first Black person in US history, the first South Asian person, and the third woman to be selected as a major party’s vice presidential nominee.
Biden introduced Harris to the nation and spoke about what her historic nomination represents for “black and brown girls who often feel overlooked and undervalued in their communities.”
“Today, maybe for the first time, they’re looking at themselves with fresh eyes as people with the caliber of being president and vice president,” Biden said.
In a presidential election marked by the coronavirus pandemic and calls for racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd, Harris sought to rally Democrats determined to retake the White House, facing off against former Vice President Mike Pence in a televised debate.
Biden and Harris won the election and were sworn in as president in the shadow of the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Harris has stood by Biden’s side through all of the triumphs and crises of the past three years, from bipartisan legislative victories and the appointment of the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, to the messy U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli-Hamas war.
Ms. Harris has sometimes struggled to stand out on the national stage and been derided for speeches and impromptu remarks that critics find awkward. But those moments have also helped make her more likable among younger voters, who spread memes and short video clips featuring the vice president.
She has also faced intense criticism from Republicans who say there is a link to illegal border crossings after President Biden tasked her with leading the administration’s efforts to address the “root causes” of migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Republican critics have dubbed the vice president a “border czar.”
Biden’s decision to drop out of the race and endorse Harris catapulted the vice president into the international spotlight, and he quickly demonstrated his potential to energize the Democratic base with his huge fundraising and expand a voter base that had been lukewarm on the possibility of a Biden-Trump rematch.
The twists and turns were surprising following Biden’s disastrous debate performance last month, but Harris has previously suggested the issue of succession was not far from her mind.
“Every vice president understands that when they take the oath of office, they must be very clear about the responsibilities that come with assuming the presidency,” Harris told The Associated Press in September. “And I do too.”
