WASHINGTON — Deputy Director Kamala Harrisa daughter of immigrants who rose through California’s political and law enforcement ranks to eventually become the first female vice president in U.S. history, is poised to become the Democratic presidential nominee on Monday.
More than four years later her first attempt Now that the presidency has collapsed, Harris’s coronation as her party’s standard-bearer will cap a tumultuous and hectic period for Democrats sparked by the defeat of President Joe Biden. disastrous debate performance in June that undermined the confidence of his own supporters in his re-election chances and led to a huge battle within the party over whether he should stay in the race.
As soon as Biden suddenly ended his candidacyHarris and her team worked quickly to secure the support of the 1,976 party delegates needed to secure the nomination in a formal roll call. She reached that milestone at warp speed, with an Associated Press survey among delegates She showed that she had already secured the necessary commitments 32 hours after Biden’s announcement.
Harris’ nomination will become official after a five-day round of online voting by Democratic National Convention delegates ends Monday night and the party announces the results. The party had long considered the early virtual roll call to ensure that Biden would appear on the ballot in every state.
An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted after Biden withdrew found that 46% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Harris, while a nearly identical share have an unfavorable opinion of her. But more Democrats say they are satisfied with her candidacy than Biden’s, energizing a party that had long resigned itself to the idea of the 81-year-old Biden as the nominee against former President Donald Trump, a Republican they see as an existential threat.
Harris has already indicated that she does not plan to deviate much from the themes and policies that shaped Biden’s candidacy, such as democracy, gun violence prevention and abortion rights. But her message could be much more powerful, especially when she uses her background as a prosecutor to undermine Trump and his 34 convictions for crimes for falsifying company information in connection with a hush money scheme.
“Given that unique voice of a new generation, of a prosecutor and a woman when fundamental rights, particularly reproductive rights, are at stake, it’s almost as if the stars are aligned for her at this moment in history,” said Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California, who was tapped to succeed Harris in the Senate when she became vice president.
Kamala Devi Harris was born on October 20, 1964 in Oakland, California, Shyamala Gopalana breast cancer researcher who immigrated to the United States from India at age 19, and Stanford University professor emeritus Donald Harris, a naturalized American citizen originally from Jamaica. Her parents’ advocacy for civil rights gave her what she described as a “walker’s perspective” on the movement.
She served for many years as a prosecutor in the Bay Area before being appointed the state’s attorney general in 2010 and then elected as a United States senator in 2016.
Harris arrived in Washington as a senator at the dawn of the turbulent Trump era, quickly establishing herself as a reliable liberal opponent of the new president’s staff and policies and stoking speculation about a presidential run of her own. Her seat on the coveted Judiciary Committee gave her a national spotlight to question prominent Trump nominees, including current Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
“I can’t be rushed that quickly,” then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said during a 2017 confirmation hearing when Harris repeatedly pressed him about possible conversations with Russian nationals. “It makes me nervous.”
Harris began her 2020 presidential campaign with promise, drawing parallels to former President Barack Obama and drawing more than 20,000 people to an opening rally in her hometown. But Harris withdrew from the primaries before the first Iowa caucuses, plagued by public staff dissension and an inability to raise enough campaign cash.
Harris struggled to make a consistent pitch to Democratic voters and wavered on key issues like health care. She offered to support the elimination of private insurance in favor of a fully government-run system — “Medicare for All” coverage — before rolling out her own health care plan that retained private insurance. Now, in her early general election campaign, Harris has already backed down on some of her earlier, more liberal positions, such as a ban on fracking which she signed in 2019.
And while Harris tried to leverage her law enforcement background into an asset in her 2020 presidential campaign, she never gained enough support to do so in a party that could not reconcile her previously tough-on-crime stance with an era of increasing emphasis on police brutality.
Still, Harris was at the top of the vice presidential shortlist as Biden considered his running mate, after promising in early 2020 that he would pick a Black woman as his No. 2. He was fond of Harris, who had formed a close friendship with his late son Beau, who had been Delaware’s attorney general when she held that position for California.
Her first months as vice president have been anything but smooth. Biden tapped her to lead the administration’s diplomatic efforts with Central America on the root causes of migration to the United States, prompting attacks from Republicans on border security and a political vulnerability that remains. It didn’t help that Harris has stumbled in major interviews, such as in a 2021 exchange with NBC News’ Lester Holt when she dismissively replied that “I haven’t been to Europe” when the host noted that she hadn’t visited the U.S.-Mexico border.
For the first two years of her life, Harris was often tied to Washington, trying to break the evenly divided Senate vote. That gave Democrats important victories on climate and health care, but it also limited her ability to travel the country and meet with voters.
Her visibility became much more prominent after the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling that dismantled Roe v. Wadeas she became the administration’s chief spokesperson on abortion rights and a more natural messenger than Biden, a lifelong Catholic who has advocated restrictions on the procedure in the past. She is the first vice president to tour of an abortion clinic and speaks about reproductive rights in the broader context of maternal health, particularly for Black women.
Throughout her vice presidency, Harris has been careful to remain loyal to Biden, while stressing that she would stand ready to step in if necessary. That dramatic transition began in late June after the first Biden-Trump debate, during which the president’s stumbles were so catastrophic that he was never able to recover the loss of confidence from other Democrats.
After Biden ended his candidacy on July 21, he quickly endorsed Harris. And in the first two weeks of her 2024 presidential bid, enthusiasm among the Democratic base surged, with donations pouring in, dozens of volunteers showing up at field offices and so many supporters that event organizers had to move locations.
Harris’ campaign now believes she has a new chance to compete in Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia — states that Biden has begun abandoning in favor of bolstering the so-called “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
“The country is able to see the Kamala Harris that we all know,” said Bakari Sellers, who served as national co-chair of her 2020 campaign. “We really didn’t allow the country to see her” four years ago. Sellers said: “We had her in bubble wrap. What people are seeing now is that she’s real, she’s talented.”
Still, Democrats expect Harris’s political honeymoon to fizzle out and that she will inevitably come under increased scrutiny due to roles in the Biden administration, the state of the economy and volatile situations abroad, particularly in the Middle East. Harris also has yet to answer extensive questions from reporters or sit for a formal interview since she began her campaign.
The Trump campaign has been eager to define Harris as she continues to introduce herself to voters across the country, releasing an ad blaming her for the Biden administration’s high number of illegal crossings at the southern border and describing her as “Failed. Weak. Dangerous liberal.”
The Republican candidate’s supporters have also mocked Harris as a proponent of diversity, while Trump himself has made ugly racist attacks, falsely claiming that Harris has only promoted her Indian heritage in the past and has only recently emphasized her black identity.
His comments herald a season of racist and sexist accusations against the person who would be the first woman and the first person of South Asian descent to become president.
“I didn’t know she was black until a few years ago when she happened to be black and now she wants to be known as black,” Trump said as give a speech at the annual convention from the National Association of Black Journalists. “So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black?”
In her response, Harris called it “the same old show – the divisiveness and the disrespect” and said voters “deserve better.”
“The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth, a leader who does not react with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts,” Harris said at a meeting of the Sigma Gamma Rho sorority in Houston. “We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us.”