Introduction
Kamala Devi Harris (1964-) became the 49th Vice President of the United States on January 20, 2021. She was the first woman, first Asian-American, and first African-American to hold this position.
In 2024, Harris was the Democrats’ nominee for the presidency, but she lost the election to former President Donald Trump.
Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California. She’s of a mixed-race background: her mother was originally from India and her father from Jamaica. She learned about Hinduism as a young child in Berkeley, surrounded by the civil rights movement. Her parents divorced when she was seven, and she moved to Montreal, Canada, at age 12, but would ultimately come back to the United States for college.
Early Career
Harris studied economics and political science at Howard University and then went on to earn a law degree at the University of California Hastings School of Law in 1989. She worked as a prosecutor and then, in 2003, she was elected district attorney of San Francisco. In 2010 she became the first woman and the first African American to be California’s attorney general. In 2014, she married Doug Emhoff.
In the Senate
In 2016, Harris switched fully from law to politics and was elected Senator from California–the first South Asian American and the second black woman to be in the US Senate. She was most notable for her membership in the Judiciary Committee, where she gained fame for the pointed way she questioned witnesses.
The 2020 Election
Sen. Harris ran for President in the 2020 Democratic primaries, but she didn’t get the nomination. Though her 2020 presidential campaign fell short, the eventual Democratic candidate Joe Biden chose Harris as his vice-presidential running mate. Biden and Harris were competing against the incumbent Republican President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
The 2020 Presidential election was notable for taking place during the coronavirus pandemic. Despite the pandemic, a record-breaking number of Americans voted. Biden-Harris won the popular vote, getting more votes than any previous US Presidential ticket (Trump-Pence got the second most votes that any ticket had ever received).
But the President and Vice President are decided by the electoral college vote, not the popular vote. In addition to winning the popular vote, the Biden-Harris ticket also got the most votes in the electoral college, so Biden was elected the next President of the United States, with Harris as his Vice President.
The 2024 Election
In 2024, the Presidential election was apparently going to be between Joe Biden, the current President, for the Democrats and former President Donald Trump for the Republicans. Both had gotten enough delegates in the primaries to be chosen their party’s nominee.
But on June 27, 2024, in a debate between Biden and Trump, Biden’s performance was widely considered unacceptably poor, presumably due to age and/or illness, and many Democrats called on him to withdraw his candidacy. He initially refused, saying that he would stay in the race. Then, on July 21, 2024, less than a month after the debate, Biden announced that he would not run for re-election after all, and he quickly moved to endorse Kamala Harris, his Vice President, as the Democrats’ nominee.
At first it was thought that there might be some opposition within the party, but the Democrats went ahead and nominated Kamala Harris as their candidate for President at their convention, along with her chosen running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, for Vice President. Donald Trump was the Republican nominee, as expected; his running mate was Senator JD Vance of Ohio.
The campaign between Harris and Trump was quite contentious and crossed traditional party lines: former Democrats such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard endorsed Trump, while Republicans Dick and Liz Cheney endorsed Harris.
Election Day was November 5, 2024; many people had already cast their ballot by that day because of extensive mail-in voting. Although a very close race was widely expected, the Trump-Vance ticket ended up winning a clear victory both in the electoral college (with 312 electoral votes to 226 for Harris-Walz) and in the popular vote. Trump won all seven of the so-called battleground states or swing states — those states where polls indicated the results could go either way. Harris conceded her loss in a speech the day after Election Day.