A second term for Donald Trump – or a woman as US President for the first time? Kamala Harris is aiming for Joe Biden’s place in the Oval Office.
Prosecutor, Senator, Vice President – President? If Kamala Harris and the Democrats have their way, this will soon be the short version of the lawyer from California’s resume. In the summer of 2024, just a few weeks before the nomination convention, Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy for a second term. The president recommended his deputy Harris as the new candidate.
The party followed Biden and nominated Harris as its presidential candidate in mid-August. In the following weeks, Harris closed Biden’s gap to Trump in polls, and many polls gave her a good chance. The vice president has restored optimism to Democrats, who were already bracing for a tough election campaign between the two oldest presidential candidates in US history. But who is Kamala Harris?
The daughter of an Indian biologist and a Jamaican-American university professor, Kamala Devi Harris was born on October 20, 1964 in Oakland, California. Harris later said that she had already had experiences with racism in her childhood. Even in liberal California, her elementary school year was only the second in which white and non-white children were allowed to ride the bus together.
Harris’ parents divorced early. In a conversation with the “Los Angeles Times” in 2015, the then Senate candidate remembered visits to her father: “The neighborhood kids didn’t play with us because we were black. And that in Palo Alto, the home of Google!”
Harris later studied law and in 2004 became the first black woman to be elected district attorney in San Francisco. During the campaign for office, Harris particularly criticized her opponent’s willingness to make deals with the defense in domestic violence cases instead of seeking convictions.
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Six years later, Harris won her next election campaign, becoming the first woman, the first African American and the first South Asian American to become attorney general of the state of California.
Even today, Harris often talks about how, as a lawyer, she prosecuted sex offenders and murderers and put them in prison. As attorney general, she abolished, among other things, the “gay panic defense.” This defense strategy classified violence against homosexual and trans people as self-defense, effectively making it unpunishable if the attacker stated that he was afraid of non-heterosexual people.
During a blind date, Harris met Douglas Emhoff – set up by a mutual acquaintance who had worked with Emhoff in his job as a Hollywood lawyer.
Emhoff later said in an interview that he was so excited that he sent Harris a long email the next morning with possible dates for further meetings in the following weeks and months. He probably convinced Harris: the following year the two got married. Douglas Emhoff has a son and a daughter from his previous marriage to Hollywood producer Kerstin Mackin. The two are Harris’ stepchildren.
In 2016, Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate. During the election campaign, she sharply criticized then presidential candidate Donald Trump.
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In the Senate, Harris made a name for herself thanks to her consistent behavior towards Trump allies. Harris also campaigned strongly for impeachment proceedings against Trump himself. During an interview with then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Republican said the former prosecutor’s questions “make me nervous.”
Harris was a presidential candidate in the Democratic primary in 2019, but abandoned her campaign before the primaries even began. Biden made her his vice presidential candidate in August 2020. Harris was the first African-American woman and the first American woman with Indian roots to run for vice president and ultimately win. On January 20, 2021, Harris was sworn in as Vice President. Harris is currently the most powerful woman in US political history.
