Kamala Harris has served as San Francisco’s first female district attorney. (Archive)
Kamala Harris has made history as the first woman, the first African American, and the first Asian American vice president of the United States.
With Joe Biden, 77, winning a suspense election, much of the attention is on his running mate, who will immediately be in a strong position to run for president four years from now.
Biden is not expected to seek a second term, so Kamala Harris, 56, would be an obvious candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2024.
Kamala Harris, whose mother and father immigrated from India and Jamaica, competed against Biden and others for her party’s nomination in 2020. She dropped out of the race last December.
After a bitter race for the Democratic nomination, Biden named her his running mate in August, an election that especially appealed to women, progressives and voters of color.
The US Senator from California has many firsts in her career.
Kamala Harris, whose mother and father immigrated from India and Jamaica, competed against Biden and others for her party’s nomination in 2020. She dropped out of the race last December.
She served as San Francisco’s first female district attorney and was the first California woman of color to be elected attorney general.
She rose to fame in 2017 after her sharp questioning of Attorney General William Barr and then-Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh in Senate hearings. His sharp questioning of Donald Trump was also noted during Senate hearings.
As the only black woman in the Senate, she emerged as a leading voice in racial justice and police reform after the assassination of George Floyd in May.
Allegations that Kamala Harris did not do enough to investigate police shootings and wrongful conviction cases when she was California attorney general ended her own presidential career, but did not actually surface when she campaigned with Biden.
President Donald Trump has frequently accused Kamala Harris of being part of the hard left. He has also claimed that a Biden victory would mean Harris’ inauguration as president in a month.
“This wonderful woman, she wants to be your first president. I don’t think so. I don’t think so. You know, that’s a good reason not to vote for sleepy Joe as well, right? To do that,” Trump said at a political rally in the state of Wisconsin battlefield last week.
But Kamala Harris has come out of a team player, happy to keep a low profile, laying to rest concerns among some on the field for Biden that she would be too ambitious. Instead, he spoke primarily about what Biden would do for the country. “Joe and I were raised in a very similar way. We were raised with values that have to do with hard work, with the value and dignity of public service and with the importance of fighting for the dignity of all people,” he said at the Vice Presidential Debate last month.
Harris is married to attorney Douglas Emhoff, who has also accompanied her on the campaign. Her two sons refer to her as “Momala”.
Harris was born on October 20, 1964 in Oakland, California. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer biologist, moved to the United States from Tamil Nadu and her father, Donald J. Harris, an economist, moved to the United States from Jamaica.
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