And just like that: a battle between two elderly male politicians just became a race between an almost-assassinated former president and the first-ever female vice president of the United States. Well, if Kamala Harris is nominated as Joe Biden’s successor, as pollsters expect.
“I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party — and unite our nation — to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda,” the former California senator, 59, said last night as she confirmed her bid to be the Democrats’ White House nominee after Joe Biden’s dramatic exit from the 2024 election race.
Harris, a self-described progressive prosecutor and the daughter of two immigrant parents, thanked Biden, 81, for his “extraordinary leadership” and said it was her intention “to earn and win this nomination”, set to be formalised in Chicago from August 19.
If nominated, she could become the first female president of the United States — quite the achievement for a woman who has spent a career smashing glass ceilings (she is already the first female and person of African-American and South Asian-American descent to become vice-president) and the ultimate comeback for a woman who’s made a career out of comebacks.
Commentators say Harris will frame any battle between her and Trump as a battle between a prosecutor and a felon, mounting a courtroom-style evisceration of the first convicted criminal to run for the White House. But can she prove to voters she’ll actually deliver on her promises after a tumultuous tenure as VP? Republicans have been quick to define her as a weak ally of an unpopular president and a “Californian liberal” out of step with Main Street America.
From her hype-man husband to her rollercoaster four years as Biden’s second in command, here’s everything you need to know about the woman who could become America’s first female president.
California via Canada — with Indian and Jamaican roots
Harris and her sister Maya spent their early years in Oakland and Berkeley in California after their parents immigrated to the US and met while undertaking degrees at the University of California. Their mother Shyamala Gopalan was a cancer researcher from India whose own father was a government official and mother was a birth control activist. Their father Donald Harris was an economics professor from Jamaica.
The couple were involved in activism, taking Harris to civil rights marches while she was still in a pram, according to her White House biography.
Harris’ parents divorced when she was seven years old and her mother became her and her sister’s primary caregiver, immersing them into both the Indian and African American cultures and taking them to both a Black Baptist church and a Hindu temple. “My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters,” Harris wrote in her 2019 autobiography. “She was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud Black women.”
My mother always use to say, “Don’t just sit around and complain about things. Do something.” I dearly wish she were here with us this week. pic.twitter.com/RHO2VnlZs4
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) August 13, 2020
When Harris was 12, she, her sister and their mother moved to Canada where their mother took a job a McGill University in Montreal. After attending high school in Quebec, Harris returned to the US to study political science and economics at Howard University in Washington, DC, a historically Black school that she says made a nice contrast after attending majority-White schools growing up.
The “beauty of Howard” was that “every signal told students that we could be anything — that we were young, gifted, and black, and we shouldn’t let anything get in the way of our success,” she has since said of her college experience, where she was known as a “witty” member of the debating team, who’d her deliver her points with that now-notorious laugh she’s become known for as vice-president.
After graduating from Howard, she returned to San Francisco and gained a law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She passed the bar in 1990 and went onto join the Alameda County prosecutor’s office in Oakland as an assistant district attorney specializing in prosecuting domestic violence and child abuse cases.
She has since said she became a prosecutor because she wanted to work to change the criminal justice system — one that disproportionately affects minorities — from the inside.
A career spent smashing glass ceilings
Harris quickly worked her way up through the criminal justice system, serving in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and going onto lead the San Francisco City Attorney’s Division on Families and Children.
In 2003, she ran for San Francisco district attorney against Terence Hallinan, her old boss. She went onto win, becoming the first African American woman and South Asian American woman in California to hold the office, despite critics citing her romantic relationship with San Francisco’s colourful and controversial Mayor Willie Brown — 31 years her senior and once named one of the world's ten sexiest men by Playgirl magazine — as a potential conflict of interest (the pair dated in the mid-1990s after the Democratic kingpin, then a lawyer and speaker of the California assembly, had separated from his wife. He was 60 at the time and she was just 29, with commentators calling him a catapult for her career).
Harris’ career since then has been filled with firsts. She became the first woman to be elected California’s attorney general — the top lawyer and law enforcement official in America's most populous state — seven years later, and went onto become the first person of color to be elected to the U.S. Senate from California, quickly gaining a reputation as one of the Democratic party’s rising stars.
"My point was: I am who I am. I'm good with it. You might need to figure it out, but I'm fine with it," she has said of her identity, describing herself as an “American” who should not have to fit into a certain category because of her colour or background.
Among her notable political moves over the last two decades are her threats to jail parents of chronically-truant schoolchildren; her attempts to uphold California’s death penalty; and her efforts to overturn California’s ban on gay marriage and allow same-sex couples to legally marry.
Records, rough starts and Roe v Wade
Harris’ next first — becoming the first woman elected vice president of the United States in 2020 — came after five years on the national stage in Washington. In 2016, she replaced the retiring Barbara Boxer as US senator and in 2019 she began her campaign for US president, raising $1.5m in just 24 hours and boasting a series of endorsements from Californian politicians.
Her campaign, which involved criticisms of now-president Biden over his opposition to busing in the 1970s, quickly slowed to a halt, stemming “in part from Harris’ failure to present a compelling case for her candidacy beyond her background as a prosecutor, her buoyant personality and a deep contempt — shared by others in the contest — for President Trump,” according to the LA Times.
By December 2019, she’d suspended her campaign citing financial struggles, and Biden locked in the nomination, later selecting her as his running mate after his promise to put a woman on the ticket. “This morning, all across this nation, little girls woke up, especially little Black and Brown girls who so often may feel overlooked and undervalued in our society,” Biden said at the time. “But today, maybe, just maybe, they’re seeing themselves for the first time in a new way.”
Biden declared victory in November 2020 and Harris was selected as the States’ first female vice president (and first person of colour to be vice president). “Tonight, I reflect on their struggle, their determination and the strength of their vision — to see what can be, unburdened by what has been. And I stand on their shoulders,” she said of the suffragists who’d secured the vote for women just a century earlier. “And what a testament it is to Joe’s character that he had the audacity to break one of the most substantial barriers that exists in our country and select a woman as his vice president.”The appointment made history, but most commentators say Harris has largely struggled to find her footing in such a major role, with Republicans quick to point out her supposed gaffes and occasional struggles to communicate in interviews. A series of high-profile staff departures from her office hasn’t helped that image, with questions about Harris’ management style and former aides describing her a tough boss.
She has faced criticisms from all sides of the political spectrum over recent years, with attacks that she is not progressive enough despite her leftward leanings on issues like gay marriage and the death penalty, and criticisms that she has failed in her mandate to address the root causes of migration from Latin America, such as taking six months to plan a trip to the US-Mexico border after entering office. Others point to the fact that there’s been a rise in convictions during her tenure, despite one of her key focuses being on criminal justice reform.
Abortion is one issue that Harris does appear to have made a name for herself over — a nod to the work of her maternal grandmother, who travelled the Indian countryside teaching impoverished women about birth control. While Biden, a lifelong Catholic, has struggled to convincingly articulate the party’s position on the issue, Harris has positioned herself as a fierce defender of women’s rights, the 2022 abortion debate over Roe v Wade giving her a particular moment in the spotlight when she launched a nationwide ‘Fight for Reproductive Freedoms’ tour.
She became the first American president or vice president to visit an abortion facility and famously pressed US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on whether he knew of any laws that tell a man what to do with his body, energising supporters — particularly Black women and young voters. “I love Gen Z,” she regularly tells crowds of cheering young fans.
A modern romance with her hype-man husband
Harris’ love story with her husband, Doug Emhoff — a hot-shot entertainment lawyer and America’s first ever second gentleman (you’ll probably remember a picture of them hugging, still in running kit, after her victory as vice-president in 2021) — began in 2013, when they were set up on a blind date by one of her close friends, PR consultant Chrisette Hudlin.
She and the New York-born father-of-two clicked immediately, when he texted her from an LA Lakers game and she replied “Go Lakers” despite being a Golden State Warriors fan.
He left her a voicemail message the next morning which she still has on her phone because she found it “endearing”. “It sounds corny, I know, but the conversation just flowed,” Harris wrote in her memoir, saying she called him back that day and they spoke for an hour.
“I remember us cracking each other up, joking and laughing at ourselves, just the way we do now.”
The couple — both 59, him exactly a week older than her — married in a private ceremony at the Santa Barbara Courthouse in LA while she was serving as Californian attorney general in 2014.
In line with their Indian and Jewish heritages (he’s the first Jewish spouse of a vice president), she put a flower garland around his neck and he stomped on a glass.
He describes himself in his Twitter bio as “devoted dad. Proud husband to @KamalaHarris. Advocate for justice and equality” and his cover picture on Twitter is a photo of Harris and Biden.
But Emhoff is not without his own following. When Harris was harassed by a protester on stage after her appointment, he jumped onto the platform to drag the man away, and a video of his “dad dance moves” has received thousands of views after he joined his wife in fundraising efforts at the San Francisco Pride. He’s joked he’d like Bradley Cooper to play him in a film about his life.
Making Momola
Emhoff’s two adult children, Ella and Cole, reportedly call Harris Momola because they don’t like the term stepmom.
“They are brilliant, talented, funny kids who have grown to be remarkable adults,” Harris has said. “I was already hooked on Doug, but I believe it was Cole and Ella who reeled me in.”
She says she was careful about how she inserted herself into their lives, and she wore her now Vogue-famous Converse and brought cookies when she first met them.
Harris says she’s even “dear friends” with Emhoff’s ex-wife, the film producer Kerstin Mackin, and that the pair used to attend Ella’s swim meets and basketball games together. “We really hit it off,” Harris has said. “We sometimes joke that our modern family is almost a little too functional.”
The Emhoff-Harris household certainly appears to be the ultimate blended family — and Emhoff has proven himself to be the ultimate hype-man husband.
“I’m not her political adviser. I’m her husband,” he told an reporter after his wife’s decision to drop out of running for president in 2019. Instead, he said he was excited to work alongside Jill Biden as a super-spouse.
After his appointment two years later, he told Marie Claire: “Imagine working from home with Kamala Harris, during a pandemic and all the other issues going on. She just works hard, and she’s relentless… It’s just incredible how much she does.”
Harris says she gets up at around 6am each day, exercising for 30 minutes before breakfast and leaving for work. Converses are her go-to travel shoes.
A career of comebacks — can she do it again?
“My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made,” Biden said in his statement endorsing Harris to replace him last night.
Harris had been struggling to present herself as Biden’s successor before his disastrous debate performance this month. A poll in May found that Harris trailed Trump by seven percentage points in a hypothetical head-to-head match-up — wider than the four-point advantage Trump held over Biden — and she has endured unprecedented levels of hate over her time as vice-president, with research showing she may be the most targeted American politician on the internet. She’s also faced fierce criticism over criminal justice and border control, and some influential voices in the party such as Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi have continued to hold back on endorsements even since Biden’s step-down.
But supporters say Harris is a leading voice on protecting reproductive rights and that criticisms of her achievements as vice president are unfair, largely based on racism and sexism. A Bloomberg poll conducted earlier this month found that 77 per cent of swing-state Democrats support her to take over for Biden if he were unable to continue, and Bill and Hillary Clinton and Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg are among those to have backed her in the last 24 hours.
Harris says she’ll do everything in her power to unite the Democratic Party and unite America to defeat Trump — but she doesn’t have long. If she is nominated next month, she’ll have less than four months to win what could be one of the most consequential elections in American history, and against an opponent who is riding a fresh wave of support after surviving an assassination attempt.“We have 107 days until Election Day. Together, we will fight. And together, we will win,” says Harris. Let the comeback commence.
