On paper, Kamala Harris is a solid choice, arguably better qualified than any incoming president since George H.W. Bush.
She has been both attorney general and senator of the nation’s most populous state, California; she has served on the Senate Intelligence Committee and Judiciary Committee. As vice-president, she has presided over the Senate for four years, shepherding though major laws such as the Inflation Reduction Act, and she has met more than 150 world leaders.
Harris is, though, the first Democratic presidential nominee in 50 years to have been selected outside the usual system of primary elections, because of Joe Biden‘s abrupt decision to drop out. And, of course, if she wins the election on 5 November, she will be the first woman, the first black woman and the first Asian American to be the US president – as she has been in so many of her previous roles.
Where did she grow up?
Harris was born in Oakland, California, in October 1964. Her Indian-born mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a breast cancer researcher at Berkeley, University of California; her father, Donald Harris, is a distinguished Marxist economist from Jamaica. Both were civil rights activists: they met at Oakland’s influential AfroAmerican Association, and took Kamala to protests from a young age.
They separated when she was five, and she was largely raised by her mother, who immersed her and her sister in Oakland’s black culture, taking them to a Baptist church as well as a Hindu temple. Harris was bussed from her largely black neighbourhood to a majority white school in a rich part of Berkeley, as part of a controversial desegregation plan.
After high school, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington DC, one of the bastions of black American political and cultural life. She majored in political science and economics before attending law school in California.
What did she achieve in her legal career?
In 1990, Harris took a job at the Alameda County district attorney’s office; she specialised in prosecuting sex crimes. In 2003, at 39, she was elected as San Francisco’s district attorney. Eight years later, she became attorney general of California.
Serving as a prosecutor was controversial in her milieu, because the criminal justice system was seen as oppressive to African Americans. Harris says in her memoir, “The Truths We Hold”, that she thinks the system is “broken”, but wanted to be “on the other side” to effect change.
She was a “progressive” prosecutor who opposed the death penalty and launched rehabilitation initiatives to cut reoffending, but she was also not afraid to be “tough on crime”. As California’s attorney general, she tripled the number of felony offenders sent to state prison.
What explains her political rise?
Harris is said to be an excellent networker, and she has many influential allies. She was an early backer of Barack Obama, and is good friends with Gavin Newsom, California’s governor. She’s also a formidable campaigner: she beat Loretta Sanchez, a congresswoman of 20 years’ standing, to the Democratic Senate nomination in 2016; she won the seat on the night that Donald Trump won the presidency.
On the Senate Judiciary Committee, she became known for her grillings of Trump officials and Supreme Court nominees: “Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?” she asked the conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh, to his clear discomfort. Her performances cemented her status as a rising star of the Democratic Party; before long she was being touted as a possible presidential candidate to take on Trump in 2020.
Why did her first presidential bid fail?
It started well, with a rally 20,000 strong in Oakland in January 2019, and she outshone Joe Biden in the first candidates’ debate in June. But she failed to capitalise on her early momentum, quitting the race in December, before the primary votes began. Pundits agreed that she’d failed to articulate a clear narrative and that, by trying to appeal to both moderates and progressives in her party, she had pleased neither.
Yet she was chosen by Biden in August 2020 to be his presidential running mate; Republican critics often scornfully describe her as a “diversity hire“, because the decision came at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement.
How has she fared as VP?
She got off to a rough start. Biden handed her the thorny portfolio of addressing the “root causes” of illegal immigration to the US from Central America – a vague brief which left her indelibly linked with the administration’s failure to curb the flow of migrants across the Mexican border. At her lowest point, fully 55% of voters had an unfavourable opinion of her; there was even speculation that Biden would drop her from the ticket to improve his re-election chances.
But her standing improved after the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion in 2022: she became the White House’s leading voice in defending reproductive rights, and on gun control. That endeared her to the Democratic base, helping her cruise to the nomination this year.
What does she believe in?
Harris is still seen as something of a political chameleon (not helped by her penchant for rather convoluted “word salad” public statements). Her positions on healthcare funding and immigration have notably hardened in recent years: she now supports a hardline bipartisan border security package put forward by Biden. But on reproductive rights and gay marriage she retains clear liberal positions.
On foreign policy, she has vowed to support Ukraine against Russia “for as long as it takes”. On Israel, she has been a long-term supporter of a two-state solution, and she was one of the first members of the Biden administration to call for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza.
Momala: the co-parent
Harris first stepped into the public eye in 1994, when Clint Eastwood spilt champagne on her at the 60th birthday party of Willie Brown, then the speaker of the California State Assembly, whom Harris was dating at the time. San Francisco Chronicle gossip columnist Herb Caen described Harris, then a 30-year-old deputy district attorney, as “something new in Willie’s love life. She’s a woman, not a girl.” They split after two years.
In 2013, she met Doug Emhoff, an LA-based entertainment lawyer, now her husband. They were set up on a blind date by a mutual friend. “It felt like we had known each other for ever,” Emhoff remembered, but Harris warned him that she was a busy woman. “I didn’t want it to end,” he said. “And so the next morning, I pulled the move of emailing her with my availabilities for the next four months, including long weekends.”
A year later, when Harris was 49, they were married. Harris became a stepmother (or “Momala”) to his son Cole, 30, and daughter Ella, 25. When J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, complained that the Democrats were led by “a bunch of childless cat ladies”, Emhoff’s first wife, Kerstin, retorted that Harris was an excellent “co-parent” to her children: “loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present”.