It’s an all too familiar story. A father and daughter who live in the same city but could just as easily be millions of miles apart, and for whatever reason have grown apart.
But this particular domestic divide is now suddenly even more glaring, as the daughter in question is Vice President of the United States – and in the running for the top job.
And while Kamala Harris campaigns from her West Wing office, her 86-year-old father, Donald J. Harris, owns a home less than a mile away.
Despite the proximity, there is no known record of Donald meeting his famous daughter in the White House.
His name does not appear in the publicly available visitor logs from her three and a half years in office.
While Kamala Harris campaigns from her West Wing office, her 86-year-old father, Donald J. Harris (right), owns a home less than a mile away.
Despite the proximity, there is no known record of Donald meeting his famous daughter (pictured, one year old, in his arms) at the White House.
There are also no recent public photos of the couple together.
It is of course possible that the vice president received her father privately at her government-provided residence – the United States Naval Observatory in Washington DC – whose visitor records are not public.
But it is more likely that Donald has deliberately kept his distance, determined to stay away from what he described as the “political brouhaha” surrounding his daughter, whose controversial comments he once criticised as “a parody”.
Harris previously described their relationship as “not close.”
And at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week, when Harris formally accepted the party’s nomination, she made a brief but perhaps telling mention of her father.
After telling the crowd that her father encouraged her to be “fearless,” she added: “It was mostly my mother who raised us.”
And while the cameras panned to her self-described “large, blended family” in the audience — including her stepchildren, husband Doug and even Doug’s ex-wife — Donald Harris was noticeably absent.
It was not clear whether he had been invited or whether he had chosen not to come.
But Kamala had good reason to hope he would stay away.
Her father, who turned 86 the day after his daughter gave the biggest speech of her life, is a former economics professor whose political views do little to convince Democratic critics that Kamala does not embrace far-left views.
His aggressive Marxist views, which emerged in the 1960s, make him a lightning rod for Republican attacks.
Donald also used his qualifications later in life to provide economic advice to Jamaica’s systemically corrupt government – something his daughter’s campaign will no doubt view as unfortunate.
But whatever the real reason, Donald Harris is still strangely missing from the public narrative about his daughter’s life.
And even if she wins the election in November and he becomes the “first father,” it is unlikely that their relationship will recover.
The rift between them dates back to Kamala’s early childhood.
Donald used his academic qualifications later in life as an economic advisor to the systemically corrupt Jamaican government.
In 1962, he met Shyamala Gopalan (pictured left), a 19-year-old cancer researcher from India. They married the following year and had Kamala in 1964 while living in Oakland.
Donald was born in 1938 in Browns Town, Saint Ann parish, Jamaica, the birthplace of Bob Marley. He subsequently studied in London, before completing his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley.
There, in 1962, he met Shyamala Gopalan, a 19-year-old cancer researcher from India. They married the following year and had Kamala in 1964 while living in Oakland (her sister Maya arrived three years later).
Donald held prestigious teaching positions at two colleges in Illinois, where the family moved.
But while he was successful professionally, his family life began to fall apart.
According to Kamala’s 2019 memoir, her parents “stopped being nice to each other” around this time and separated when she was just five.
Donald remained in Illinois while Shyamala and the two girls moved back to California. They officially divorced when Kamala was seven.
According to Donald, he was not happy with the arrangement.
In a 2018 essay for the website Jamaica Global, he recounted how the “early phase of interaction with my children in 1972 ended abruptly.”
He blamed the California justice system, writing, “After a hard-fought custody battle in family court […] the context of the relationship was placed within the arbitrary boundaries imposed by a court-ordered divorce settlement based on the State of California’s erroneous premise that fathers are incapable of parenting.
‘Still, I persevered. I never gave up my love for my children and never shirked my responsibilities as a father.’
Donald also spoke highly of his daughters in another article for Jamaica Global.
Alongside a photo of them together, he wrote: ‘So, here we are now. Kamala is all grown up now and making her way in America, and Meena is doing the same in her own way (just like her mother Maya).’
But this domestic rift is now even more poignant, as the daughter in question is Vice President of the United States and is in the running for the top job.
Donald taught as a professor at Stanford. One of his published communist works was dedicated to his daughters.
But it didn’t take long for those warm feelings to fade.
Later that same year, Donald made his first public intervention in his daughter’s political career, harshly reprimanding her for her comments about marijuana.
While promoting her memoir, the then-senator dismissed the notion that she was against legalizing marijuana, saying in a podcast interview, “That’s not true. And look, I joke about it, half-jokingly — half my family is from Jamaica, are you serious?”
That “half of her family” is her father’s side and Professor Harris did not appreciate the reference to the stereotype of a marijuana smoker.
In a statement to a Jamaican news outlet, he raged: “My dearly departed grandmothers, as well as my late parents, must now be turning in their graves. On behalf of myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically distance ourselves from this parody.”
There was no public reaction from his daughter or her campaign team. But the family was shocked. Prof Harris was soon forced to walk back his anger.
In a statement to Politico, he said: “I have decided to stay out of any political hoopla and not do any interviews with the media.”
Kamala’s true feelings for her father remain murky. In 2021, the vice president told the Washington Post that they were on “good terms.”
Two years later, a statement to the San Francisco Weekly was more nuanced. “My dad is a good guy, but we’re not close,” she said.
Donald, like his daughter, has had professional success.
He taught as a professor at Stanford for more than two decades, where he dedicated one of his published works—Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution—to his daughters.
In 1974, Stanford’s student newspaper described him as a political “radical” and “a magic Pied Piper who distracts students from neoclassical economics.”
In 2009, Kamala suffered a personal blow when her mother (pictured in 1970 with her daughters), to whom she had a particularly close bond, died of colon cancer at the age of 70.
It is not clear whether he was paid for his additional work as an adviser to the Jamaican government on economic policy, but Donald took early retirement in 1998.
In 2009, Kamala suffered a personal blow when her mother, with whom she had a special bond, died of colon cancer at the age of 70.
Although he was Kamala’s only surviving parent at the time, there is no record of Donald being present when Kamala took her oath as vice president during Joe Biden’s 2020 inauguration.
According to public records, Donald’s second wife now lives on the same Washington estate as Professor Harris.
Professor Harris’s surviving family members in Jamaica told DailyMail.com that he no longer has a home on the island, but that he still visits.
Her family were clearly proud of Kamala’s success, telling the Mail they watched her acceptance speech together on their hilltop estate in Browns Town, above Harris Quarry. They have run the estate for two generations, producing crushed limestone and bricks.
Sherman Harris, Donald’s cousin, said: “We are very proud of Kamala and can’t wait for her to come to the White House.”
Whether her father would congratulate her in the same way in November seems unlikely at best.