On Saturday afternoon, Kamala Harris was on the campaign trail for Joe Biden, telling a room of about 1,000 Democratic donors in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, that the US president would defeat Donald Trump at the ballot box in November.
“We are going to win,” she said to roaring applause. “It’s not going to be easy . . . it takes believing in something and then going for it.”
One day later, Biden announced he was suspending his re-election campaign and putting his faith in Harris. Within hours, the vice-president confirmed her own bid for the White House.
“I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic party — and unite our nation — to defeat Donald Trump,” Harris said. “We have 107 days until Election Day. Together, we will fight. And together, we will win.”
Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, and subsequent endorsement of Harris, ended more than three weeks of Democrats hand-wringing over whether their candidate was up to the job.
But it also marked the latest stage in a meteoric rise for Harris, the 59-year-old daughter of immigrants who, if elected, would be the first female president of the United States.
Biden’s endorsement — and statements of support from former president Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Clinton, as well as several dozen members of Congress and multiple state governors — solidified Harris’s status as the overwhelming frontrunner to be the Democratic party’s nominee for president. But her selection is by no means a done deal.
Several high-profile Democrats, notably former president Barack Obama, did not immediately back her on Sunday. It remains unclear whether she will face challengers, or what rules the Democratic National Committee will put in place to lock in a replacement for Biden ahead of next month’s Democratic National Convention.
Yet Biden’s nod puts Harris in pole position for the nomination and the presidency, setting the vice-president on course to once again make history. If elected in November, she would not only be the first female president, but also the first Asian-American and only the second Black president, after Obama.
The daughter of an Indian-American mother and a Jamaican-American father, Harris spent her early childhood in Oakland, California. Her parents divorced when she was young, and she and sister Maya were raised by their mother, a cancer researcher.
Harris graduated from Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, DC, before earning a law degree from the University of California, Hastings, and becoming a prosecutor.
Harris’s elevation to the vice-presidency capped a rapid rise through the political ranks, which began when she was elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2003. Seven years later, she was elected attorney-general of California. She was re-elected to that position in 2014 and elected to the US Senate two years after that.
When she was attorney-general, Harris met Douglas Emhoff, a corporate lawyer, whom she married in 2015, becoming stepmother to his two grown children. Emhoff has used the title “Second Gentleman” and been a fixture on the Biden campaign trail in recent months.
Harris launched her own bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination to great fanfare and enthusiasm. But her campaign failed to take off — progressives in particular took issue with her time as a “tough on crime” prosecutor — and she suspended her bid before that year’s Iowa caucuses. Eight months later, Biden selected her as his running mate, describing the then-senator as a “fearless fighter for the little guy and one of the country’s finest public servants”.
Harris got off to a rough start as vice-president. She was given the thorny portfolio of tackling the causes of illegal immigration to the US from Latin America. In this way she became associated with one of Biden’s biggest problems: the rising flow of undocumented immigrants to the US from the border with Mexico.
One of her lowest points in the job came during an NBC News interview in June 2021, when she was asked why she had not visited the US southern border. She responded that she would go “at some point” but added she had not been to Europe, either.
Harris’s poll numbers languished throughout Biden’s presidency, and there was even some speculation that Biden might drop her from the ticket to improve his re-election chances. White House officials say he never considered it.
The political circumstances also gave her career a second wind. After the US Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to an abortion in 2022, Harris became the White House’s leading voice in defending reproductive freedoms and other issues, such as gun control, that energise vital parts of the Democratic base, namely women, younger voters and minority groups.
As Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza divided the Democratic party, Harris backed the White House’s policy of supporting Israel, but with a slightly more critical eye.
“Given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate ceasefire,” she said in one of her most emphatic interventions on the crisis in the Middle East in March, during a speech in Selma, Alabama, a landmark of the US civil rights movement.
More recently, amid Democratic party panic over Biden’s age and fitness for office in the wake of his disastrous debate performance last month, many Democratic lawmakers, donors and influential operatives began to give Harris a second look.
With several public and private opinion polls suggesting she would fare better against Trump than Biden in a hypothetical head-to-head match-up, the bet among many party insiders has been that Harris has much more potential to improve her standing than Biden did, both nationwide and in critical battleground states.
Harris still faces a significant uphill battle, both to lock in her party’s nomination and defeat Trump in November. But for now, the vice-president seems to be racking up the support of former and possible future rivals, as Democrats clamour to unite around a candidate.
“The best path forward for the Democratic party is to quickly unite behind vice-president Harris and refocus on winning the presidency,” said Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania who is seen as a possible running mate for Harris should she win the party’s nomination.
Gavin Newsom, the California governor who has been seen as a future presidential candidate, likewise threw his weight behind Harris on Sunday, calling her “tough,” “fearless” and “tenacious”.
“With our democracy at stake and our future on the line, no one is better to prosecute the case against Donald Trump’s dark vision and guide our country in a healthier direction than America’s vice-president,” Newsom said.
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