Harris, endorsed by Biden, could become first woman, second black person to be president
WASHINGTON — She’s already broken barriers, and now Kamala Harris could become the first Black woman to lead a major party’s presidential nomination after President Joe Biden abruptly ended his re-election campaign and endorsed her.
Biden announced Sunday that he would step aside amid widespread concerns about the feasibility of his candidacy.
Harris is the first woman, Black person, or person of South Asian descent to become vice president. She joined the Biden ticket after a rocky and shortened run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
Biden said Sunday that picking Harris as vice president was “the best decision I’ve ever made.” He wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, that she had his full support and endorsement to run against Donald Trump for president. “Democrats — it’s time to come together and defeat Trump,” he said. “Let’s do this.”
Her nomination, however, is far from certain. The party is divided over whether Harris should ascend or whether there should be a quick “mini-primary.”
A recent poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about 6 in 10 Democrats believe Harris would do well in the top job. About 2 in 10 Democrats don’t believe she would, and another 2 in 10 say they don’t know enough to say.
The poll found that about 4 in 10 American adults have a positive opinion of Harris, whose name is pronounced “COMM-a-la,” while about half have a negative opinion.
Harris, a former prosecutor and senator from California, will face doubters as she tries to convince the party she can win the presidency in November. Her first test will be at the Democratic convention in Chicago in August.
Even before Biden’s endorsement, Harris was widely seen as the favorite to win replace him on the ticket. She has been actively campaigning in recent weeks and has built a lead over potential challengers including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
Harris will try to avoid the fate of Hubert Humphrey, who won the Democratic nomination as vice president in 1968 after President Lyndon Johnson declined to run for re-election amid national discontent over the Vietnam War. Humphrey lost that year to Republican Richard Nixon.
Nixon resigned in 1974 amid the Watergate scandal and was replaced by Vice President Gerald Ford. Ford himself never won a term.
Vice presidents are always in line to take over the top job if the president dies or becomes incapacitated. But Harris has faced an unusual degree of scrutiny because of Biden’s age. He was the oldest president in history, taking office at age 78 and announcing his reelection bid at age 81. Harris is 59.
She discussed the succession issue in an interview with The Associated Press during a trip to Jakarta in September 2023.
“Joe Biden is going to do a great job, so that’s not going to happen,” she said. “But let’s also understand that every vice president — every vice president — understands that when they take the oath of office, they have to be very clear about the responsibility that they potentially have to take on the job of president.”
“I’m no different.”
Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, to parents who met as civil rights activists. Her hometown and nearby Berkeley were at the heart of the racial and social justice movements of the era, and Harris was both a product and a beneficiary.
She often spoke of attending protests in a stroller and growing up among adults “who were marching and yelling all the time about this thing called justice.” In first grade, she was bused to school as part of the second-grade class to participate in Berkeley’s public education system.
Harris’s parents divorced when she was young, and she was raised by her mother along with her younger sister, Maya. She attended Howard University, a historically black school in Washington, and joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, which over the years became a source of sisterhood and political support.
After graduating, Harris returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to study law and chose a career as a prosecutor, surprising her activist family.
She said she believed that working for change within the system was just as important as agitating from the outside. In 2003, she ran for her first political office, running against the longtime San Francisco district attorney.
Few city residents knew her name, and Harris set up an ironing board as a table outside grocery stores to meet people. She won and quickly showed a willingness to forge her own path. Months into office, Harris refused to seek the death penalty for the killer of a young police officer killed in the line of duty, straining her relationship with city law enforcement.
The episode did not deter her political rise. In late 2007, while still a district attorney, she knocked on doors in Iowa for then-candidate Barack Obama. After he became president, Obama endorsed her in her race for California attorney general in 2010.
Once elected to state office, she vowed to uphold the death penalty, despite her moral opposition to it. She refused to defend Proposition 8, a voter-backed initiative to ban gay marriage. Harris also played a key role in a $25 billion settlement with the nation’s mortgage lenders following the foreclosure crisis.
As attention grew over the killing of young black men by police, Harris implemented a series of changes, including the collection of racial data in police stops. But he stopped short of more aggressive measures, such as requiring independent prosecutors to investigate police shootings.
Harris’s record as a prosecutor would come back to haunt her when she ran for president in 2019, as some progressives and younger voters demanded faster change. But during her time on the job, she also forged a happy relationship with Beau Biden, the son of Joe Biden, who was then Delaware’s attorney general. Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015, and his friendship with Harris would play a key role in his father’s choice of Harris as his running mate years later.
Harris married entertainment attorney Douglas Emhoff in 2014 and became stepmother to Emhoff’s two children, Ella and Cole, who called her “Momala.”
Harris got a rare chance to advance politically when Sen. Barbara Boxer, who had served as a senator for more than two decades, announced she would not run for re-election in 2016.
In office, Harris quickly became part of the Democratic backlash against Trump, gaining recognition for her pointed questioning of his nominees. In one memorable moment, she asked current Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh if he knew of any laws that gave the government the power to regulate a man’s body. He didn’t, and the series of questions mobilized women and abortion rights activists.
Just over two years after becoming a senator, Harris announced her campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. But her campaign was marked by infighting and she struggled to gain traction, ultimately dropping out of the Iowa caucuses.
Eight months later, Biden chose Harris as his running mate. As he introduced her to the nation, Biden reflected on what her nomination meant to “little black and brown girls who so often feel overlooked and undervalued in their communities.”
“Today, perhaps for the first time, they see themselves in a new way, as the role of president and vice president,” he said.
Once in office, Harris attempted to stem migration from Central America, but her efforts failed to stop the movement of people leaving their corrupt and impoverished countries to seek safety and prosperity in the United States.
Nor was there much progress on voting rights, another issue that was part of Harris’s portfolio. When Republicans restricted ballot access in several states, Democrats in Congress lacked the muscle to push back nationally.
Harris ultimately emerged as the most outspoken advocate for reproductive rights in government after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that had guaranteed abortion coverage nationwide.
Much of Harris’ work has focused on strengthening her party’s coalition of women, young people and voters of color. And in male-dominated power centers — both in Washington and around the world — she has remained acutely aware of her status as a political trailblazer.
She often repeated a phrase she attributed to her mother: “Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you are not the last.”