U.S. Election: Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris has transformed rapidly from Vice-President to presidential candidate since Joe Biden withdrew from the race to the White House on 28 July.

Harris, 59, was born in California in 1964. Her parents both came to the U.S.A. to continue their studies. (Her father is from Jamaica and her
mother from India.) They divorced when she was young and she and her sister grew up mainly with their mother, a cancer researcher and civil-rights activist.

Harris became a lawyer and then a District Attorney. She was elected Attorney General of California in 2010, the head of the state’s judicial system. She married another lawyer, Doug Emhoff, in 2014 and became stepmother to his two daughters.

She became one of California’s two senators in 2016. She campaigned for the Presidential nomination in 2020, but dropped out before the primaries.

Endorsements
Since Joe Biden decided to stand down as candidate, Harris has received massive support from within the Democratic party, from financial donors and ordinary supporters. After weeks, not to say months, of doubts about Joe Biden's physical and mental capacity to serve another fours years, which were compounded by his faltering performance in the June televised debate, Democrats seem reassured that they now have a candidate they can get behind. Harris will only officially be invested as candidate at the Democratic convention on 19-22 August in Chicago, Illinois, but she started campaigning the minute Joe Biden endorsed her.

That doesn't mean things will be easy. Beyond the simple fact that she is a woman (and one of colour at that), and there has never been a female president, Harris is also perceived as being further to the left than Biden. The Trump campaign is already seeking to brand her a socialist. She has a lot less experience as an elected politician than Biden did, having served four years as a Senator and four as Vice-President. But she was elected Attorney General for two terms in California, a state with a population of almost 40 million. She is also tackling the unprecedented task of taking on a campaign barely four months before election day.

VP to VP
Traditionally, candidates announce their pick for Vice-President at the convention, but since nothing in this campaign is going the traditional way, it is unclear if a VP will be announced earlier than that. Generally, candidates try to balance the ticket by choosing a running mate who can potentially appeal to a different part of the electorate. In Harris's case that would point to a white man with more political experience than her and perhaps from a battleground state. The elections in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are expected to be disproportionately important this year, so any VP candidate with strong support in one of those states would be an asset.

Mobilising Women
For her victory speech after the Biden-Harris ticket won the 2020 election, Kamala Harris chose to wear white, the colour associated with the suffragists who fought for women’s right to vote in the U.S., and succeeded 100 years before. Since 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that limiting a woman’s right to an abortion was unconstitutional, Harris has led the Democratic campaign to re-establish abortion rights.

In the 2020 victory speech, she told supporters:
"While I may be the first woman in this office, I won't be the last. Because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities."

Who knows if she thought at the time that she really may become the first woman not just as Vice-President but as President. Now she has the chance to make that come true.