Meet Kamala Harris, Democratic Presidential Candidate

On Friday, I asked whether President Joe Biden would exit the presidential race. Yesterday, we got the answer. In deciding to end his campaign, Biden threw his support to Vice President Kamala Harris. She quickly accepted the challenge. She said that she intends to “earn and win” the Democratic presidential nomination. 

Harris moved quickly to try to turn her nomination into a foregone conclusion by enlisting the support of other leading Democrats. Former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and the New Left Democratic Coalition have all endorsed her candidacy. So have a majority of Democrats on Capitol Hill. She also saw a surge in campaign contributions from Democratic donors. 

None of this guarantees Harris will win the Democratic nomination. But no other prominent Democrat immediately threw their hat into the ring, and potential rivals Pete Buttigieg, Roy Cooper, Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, and Gretchen Whitmer all have endorsed her. That certainly helps her chances. With the Democratic National Convention opening four weeks from today, potential rivals have to decide soon if they want to contest the nomination. 

No presumptive presidential nominee of either political party has ever dropped out of the race this late in the campaign, which means that no new presidential nominee has ever entered the race this close to Election Day. So American politics is now on terra incognita. The rules governing the Democratic Party’s nominating process have become a must-read, as are the laws governing who can access the political contributions to the now-defunct Biden-Harris campaign. As always, the devil is in the details. And the clock is ticking. There are 106 days until Election Day, and early voting starts in some states in just sixty days.

Should Harris win the nomination and the White House, she would be the first president to have had experience as a district attorney since William Howard Taft more than a century ago. Of course, if Harris wins in November, she will be better known for achieving two notable firsts. She would be the first woman president and the first president of Indian and Jamaican descent. She would also hold the distinction of being the first president since Andrew Jackson to be the child of immigrants.

Name: Kamala Devi Harris

Place of Birth: Oakland, California

Religion: Baptist

Political Party: Democratic Party

Marital Status: Married (Douglas Emhoff)

Children: Two stepchildren (Ella and Cole)

Alma Mater: Howard University (BA); University of California, Hastings (JD)

Career: Lawyer; District Attorney of the City and County of San Francisco (2004-2011); Attorney General of California (2011-2017); U.S. Senator (2017-2021); U.S. Vice President (2021-24)

Twitter Handles: @KamalaHarris; @VP

Instagram Handles: @KamalaHarris; @VP

Campaign Website: https://kamalaharris.com

Harris’s Announcement

Harris’s announcement that she is seeking the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination was different from how she announced her 2020 candidacy. Then she rolled out her presidential bid in her hometown of Oakland before twenty thousand cheering supporters. Her announcement yesterday came in a press statement shortly after Biden ended his campaign. She praised his “extraordinary leadership as President of the United States” and went on to say:

With this selfless and patriotic act, President Biden is doing what he has done throughout his life of service: putting the American people and our country above everything else.

I am honored to have the President’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination. Over the past year, I have traveled across the country, talking with Americans about the clear choice in this momentous election. And that is what I will continue to do in the days and weeks ahead. I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party—and unite our nation—to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda.

We have 107 days until Election Day. Together, we will fight. And together, we will win.

When Harris announced her presidential candidacy back in 2019, she caught then-President Donald Trump’s eye. He told the New York Times that among the declared Democratic presidential candidates “the best opening so far would be Kamala Harris." He was less positive this time around.  While acknowledging that he did not know if she would become the Democratic nominee, he said that “I think she is no better than him [Biden]. She could be far less competent, which is hard to believe." Trump has a long record of belittling Harris. He has said that it would be an “insult” to the country if she became president, called her a “monster,” and suggested, as he did with Barack Obama, that she was not born in the United States and, thus, is ineligible to run for president.

Harris’s Story

Harris was born in Oakland and spent her early childhood in Berkeley. Her name comes from the Sanskrit word for “lotus flower.” Her mother was a cancer researcher who emigrated from India and her father was an economics professor born in Jamaica. Her parents divorced when she was seven. When she was a teenager, she moved with her mother to Montreal, where she attended high school.

Harris moved back to the United States in 1981 to attend Howard University. She studied political science and economics, and she became involved in campus politics and the debate team. She returned to California to attend law school. She flunked the California bar on her first attempt in what she has called “the most half-assed performance of my life.” She made it on the second try and became a deputy district attorney.

Harris was elected district attorney of the City and County of San Francisco in 2003. Eight years later she was elected attorney general of California. She was the first African American and the first woman to hold the post. She prosecuted drug traffickers, won a $20 billion settlement for homeowners who faced foreclosure, focused on consumer rights, and fought passage of California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage.

In 2016, Harris ran for an open U.S. Senate seat. She finished first in California’s open primary, and then beat fellow Democrat Loretta Sanchez with 62 percent of the vote in the run-off.

Harris jumped into the 2020 Democratic presidential race in January 2019. She performed well in early polls and famously attacked Biden at the first Democratic presidential debate for opposing school busing in the 1970s. But her campaign eventually sputtered. On December 3, 2019, two months before the Iowa Democratic caucuses, she ended her campaign. The decision worked out for her. On August 11, 2020, Joe Biden selected her as his running mate. Harris became the first woman of color—and just the fourth woman overall—to be named to a major party’s presidential ticket. With the election of the Biden-Harris ticket in November 2020, she became the first woman, the first Indian American, and the first Black woman to hold national office in the United States.

Harris married Douglas Emhoff in 2014. He has two adult children from a previous marriage. They call Harris “Mamala."

Harris’s Message

Harris’s slogan in the 2020 race was “For the People,” which played off her time as a prosecutor. When she addressed the court as a district attorney, she introduced herself as “Kamala Harris, for the people, your honor.” She doesn’t have a new campaign slogan yet. But then, she has been in the race for just a day.

Harris’s campaign message will be a combination of “Joe accomplished a lot” and “Trump threatens America’s democracy.” On the former, Harris will champion Biden’s accomplishments while sketching her own vision for the future. There she confronts the dilemma that all sitting vice presidents face when seeking the presidency. They are expected to be their own person, but it’s politically risky to separate themselves from what their administrations have done, even if they didn’t agree with every decision or have the same priorities. Trying to walk this fine line was something that famously bedeviled Hubert Humphrey in 1968. He demurred on breaking from President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policy and likely lost the presidency as a result. The media will be parsing everything that Harris says looking for daylight between her and Biden.

In terms of portraying Trump as a threat to America’s democracy, Harris can expect the Trump campaign to turn the charge back on her. Last week, senior Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita called the effort to unseat Biden an “attempted coup, and former Trump adviser Stephen Miller tweeted: “Nothing says democracy like holding a fake primary and then having donors handpick a nominee behind closed doors.” Expect more of that in the weeks to come. The Trump campaign will also accuse Harris, as Republican Vice-Presidential nominee J.D. Vance did on X yesterday, of having “lied for nearly four years about Biden's mental capacity—saddling the nation with a president who can't do the job.”

One open question is whether Harris, or whoever wins the Democratic nomination, will get to debate Trump. Back in May he agreed to debate Biden on ABC on September 10. But in the wake of Biden’s departure from the race, Trump took to Truth Social to argue that the debate “should be held on FoxNews, rather than very biased ABC.” No word yet as to whether Harris would agree to the proposed switch.

Harris’s Foreign Policy Views

Harris had little foreign policy experience before becoming vice president. That’s not surprising. Prosecutors and attorneys general seldom are asked to assess trade deals or arms control agreements, and she had been a senator for only four years. During her 2020 campaign, she staked out largely mainstream foreign policy views and criticized a wide range of Trump’s foreign policies. As vice president, she has been loyal in championing Biden’s foreign policies, whether on immigration, trade, China, Ukraine, and even Gaza.  

Will Harris diverge from Biden’s foreign policy positions now that she is seeking to lead the ticket rather than be the loyal sidekick? Expect a lot of speculation on that front. Continuity rather than change is the most likely answer, if only because breaking with the president now will create problems for her campaign. She wants to focus on her differences with Trump, not with Biden.

One area where Harris might diverge from Biden, though possibly more in tone than in substance, will be support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Harris has been the Biden administration official most publicly critical of how Israel has fought the war. Given that Biden faced the prospect of losing the support of Muslim Americans, Arab Americans, and young Americans, especially in critical battleground states like Michigan, she isn’t likely to walk back her criticisms of the Netanyahu government and may even intensify them. However, she doesn’t look inclined to question the overall U.S. commitment to Israel’s security. An immediate question is whether she will attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress on Wednesday. 

More on Harris

Harris wrote a book for her 2020 campaign. It’s entitled, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey. In what may be a first for a presidential candidate, she published a children’s book, called Superheroes Are Everywhere, in 2019. She wrote Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer, which was released in 2009.

San Francisco Magazine profiled Harris in 2007. The piece recounts how she reacted upon seeing the first poll results in her initial run for district attorney. “I was at 6 percent. And that wasn’t good. So I was told what you all have probably heard in your life, and that you will certainly hear in your future. I was told that I should wait my turn. I was told that I should give up. I was told that I had no chance. Well, I didn’t listen. And I’m telling you, don’t you listen either. Don’t listen when they tell you that you can’t do it.”

POLITICO Magazine ran a piece in 2019 that also recounted how Harris won her first election to be district attorney. The takeaway quote comes from the former president of San Francisco’s police union. He said of Harris: “She’s an intelligent person. She is a—let’s see, I better pick this world carefully: Ruthless.”

Abby Aguire profiled Harris for Vogue in 2018. She found that Haris “has an air of celebrity that, under normal circumstances, a freshman senator wouldn’t have had time to acquire.” Aguire also observed that “Harris is a courtroom litigator. This means that, although she is warm and funny, she is also comfortable with confrontation—at home with it, even—and a casual conversation can become a rapid-fire deposition without warning.”

In 2016, the New York Times Magazine‘s Emily Bazelon profiled Harris as she ran for the Senate. Bazelon’s takeaway was that Harris’s law-enforcement career “embodies the party’s ambitions and contradictions on this issue as its leaders try to navigate a swing in the opposite direction.”

In 2019, the New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells reviewed Harris’s campaign book. He wrote: “The phrase ‘no false choices’ recurs throughout the book; at one point, Harris describes it as a mantra. She seems to mean it mostly as a warning against ideological categorization: you may be told that you have to choose between seeing criminals as evildoers or as decent folk who have had bad luck, but that isn’t true—it is possible to take each as it comes.”

In 2019, Kate Zernike recounted Harris’s time as a district attorney for the New York Times. Zernike described Harris as “trying to be all things to all people” and asked whether a self-described “progressive prosecutor” can win the support of Democrats critical of how she handled “the shifting politics of crime and race—and the expectations they bring with them.”

Numerous pieces have been written since Harris became vice president asking whether she has what it takes to be president. As the New York Times Magazine’s Astead W. Herndon wrote last fall, Harris is widely seen as having struggled as vice president: “Three years after she and Biden were presented as a package deal, a two-for-one special that included a younger, nonwhite candidate to counterbalance Biden’s shortcomings, Democrats have not embraced the president in waiting. In interviews with more than 75 people in the vice president’s orbit, there is little agreement about Harris at all, except an acknowledgment that she has a public perception problem, a self-fulfilling spiral of bad press and bad polls, compounded by the realities of racism and sexism. This year, an NBC News poll found that 49 percent of voters have an unfavorable view of Harris, with the lowest net-negative rating for a vice president since the poll began in 1989.”

In 2022, New York Magazine’s Gabriel Debenedetti concluded that the concern about whether Harris can do the job “comes mostly from her occasionally stumbling responses to journalists. She told a CBS interviewer who asked if Democrats had erred in not codifying Roe v. Wade into law, ‘I think that, to be very honest with you, I—I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we certainly believe, that certain issues are just settled. Certain issues are just settled.’ It was one genuinely cringeworthy moment in a straightforward interview, but it was shared far and wide, especially on the left.” 

Elizabeth Nolan Brown argued in Reason Magazine last year that Harris has struggled as vice president because of her own limitations. As Brown put it: “Harris’ problems are her own. But in making this unremarkable candidate an avatar of the party's future, the party has made her problems their own too, embracing box-checking at the expense of political or administrative competence. Some say ‘third time's a charm,’ but a more relevant adage may be ‘fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’ Eventually, Biden will leave politics. When that happens, will Harris fool her party a third time?”

The Atlantic’s Elaina Plott Calabro weighed in last fall to argue that Harris has what it takes. Calabro noted that Harris “has been a successful public servant for more than three decades. She ran the second-largest justice system in America, in a state that is the world’s fifth-largest economy. By virtue of her position, she is among those who represent the future of her party, and she represents its mainstream, not its fringe. Of course Kamala Harris is ready for the presidency, to the extent that anyone can be ready. This should not be hard for her own colleagues to talk about. Not talking about it leaves the subject open for political exploitation—by opponents whose own likely candidate makes the idea of readiness absurd.”

The New York Times’s Guy Trebay explained how what was supposedly a Harris gaffe turned into the Kamala Harris coconut tree piña colada, “the ‘specialty cocktail of the summer’ at Washington bars.” In case you’re wondering, the drink is a blend of pineapple, rum, and coconut juice. More generally, “Kamala Harris coconut tree” has become a popular meme on social media.

Other posts in this series:

Meet Doug Burgum, Republican Presidential Candidate

Meet Chris Christie, Republican Presidential Candidate

Meet Nikki Haley, Republican Presidential Candidate

Meet Will Hurd, Republican Presidential Candidate

Meet Asa Hutchinson, Republican Presidential Candidate

Meet Dean Phillips, Democratic Presidential Candidate

Meet Vivek Ramaswamy, Republican Presidential Candidate

Meet Tim Scott, Republican Presidential Candidate

Meet Francis X. Suarez, Republican Presidential Candidate

Meet Marianne Williamson, Democratic Presidential Candidate

 Aliya Kaisar assisted in the preparation of this post.