WASHINGTON – She has already broken barriers, and now Kamala Harris could become the first Black woman to lead a major party’s presidential ticket, after President Joe Biden abruptly ended his re-election bid and endorsed her.
Biden announced on Sunday that he was stepping aside amid widespread concerns about the viability of your candidacy.
Harris is the first woman of color or South Asian descent to serve as vice president. She joined the Biden ticket after a rocky and abbreviated run on his own for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
Biden said Sunday that deciding on Harris as vice president was “the best decision I made.” He wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, that she had his full support and endorsement to run for president against Donald Trump. “Democrats – it’s time to come together and defeat Trump,” he said. “Lets do this.”
However, his appointment is hardly a certainty. The party is divided over whether Harris should ascend or whether there should be a quick “mini primary.”
A recent survey from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about 6 in 10 Democrats believe Harris would do a good job in the top spot. 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 showed that about 4 in 10 U.S. adults have a favorable opinion of Harris, whose name is pronounced “COMM-a-la,” while about half have an unfavorable opinion.
A former prosecutor and U.S. senator from California, Harris will face questions as she tries to reassure her party that she can win the presidency in November. His first test will be at the Democratic convention in Chicago in August.
Even before Biden’s endorsement, Harris was widely seen as the frontrunner for replace it on the ticket. Actively campaigning in recent weeks, she has had a leg up on 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 as vice president won the Democratic nomination in 1968 after President Lyndon Johnson declined to run for re-election due to national dissatisfaction with the Vietnam War. Humphrey lost that year to Republican Richard Nixon.
Nixon resigned in 1974 during the Watergate scandal and was replaced by Vice President Gerald Ford. Ford never won a mandate of his own.
Vice presidents are always in line to take over the top job if the president dies or becomes incapacitated. However, Harris faced an unusual level of scrutiny due to Biden’s age. He was the oldest president in history, taking office at age 78 and announcing his candidacy for re-election at age 81. Harris is 59 years old.
She addressed the succession issue in an interview with the Associated Press during a trip to Jakarta in September 2023.
“Joe Biden is going to be fine, so this is not going to work,” she said. “But let’s also understand that every vice president — every vice president — understands that when they take the oath of office, they must be very clear about the responsibility that they may have in assuming the office of president.”
“I’m no different.”
Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, to parents who met as civil rights activists. His hometown and nearby Berkeley were at the center of the era’s racial and social justice movements, and Harris was both a product and a beneficiary.
She often spoke about attending demonstrations in a baby stroller and growing up around adults “who spent all their time marching and shouting about this thing called justice.” In first grade, she was bused to school as part of the second class to integrate Berkeley public education.
Harris’ parents divorced when she was young and she was raised by her mother alongside her younger sister Maya. She attended Howard University, a historically black school in Washington, and joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, which has become a source of sisterhood and political support over the years.
After graduating, Harris returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to study law and chose a career as a prosecutor, a decision that surprised her activist family.
She said she believed working for change within the system was just as important as agitating from the outside. In 2003, she was running for her first political office, facing the former San Francisco district attorney.
Few of the city’s residents knew her name, and Harris set up an ironing board as a table outside supermarkets to meet people. She won and quickly showed a desire to chart her own path. Months into her term, 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 police officers.
The episode did not prevent his political rise. In late 2007, while still serving as district attorney, she went door-to-door in Iowa for then-candidate Barack Obama. After becoming president, Obama supported her in her run for California attorney general in 2010.
Once elected to state office, she promised to defend the death penalty despite her moral opposition to it. She refused to defend Proposition 8, a voter-backed initiative that bans same-sex marriage. Harris also played a key role in a $25 billion settlement with the nation’s mortgage lenders following the foreclosure crisis.
As police killings of young black men received more attention, Harris implemented some changes, including tracking racial data in police stops, but did not take more aggressive measures, such as requiring independent prosecutors to investigate police shootings.
Harris’ record as a prosecutor would dog her when she launched a presidential bid in 2019, as some progressives and younger voters demanded faster change. But during her time on the job, she also formed a fortuitous relationship with Beau Biden, Joe Biden’s son, who was then Delaware’s attorney general. Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015, and her friendship with Harris played a major role years later when her father chose Harris to be her running mate.
Harris married entertainment lawyer Douglas Emhoff in 2014 and became stepmother to Emhoff’s two children, Ella and Cole, who referred to her as “Momala.”
Harris got a rare opportunity to advance politically when Senator Barbara Boxer, who served for more than two decades, announced she would not run again in 2016.
In office, Harris quickly became part of the Democratic resistance to Trump and gained recognition for her incisive questioning of his nominees. In one memorable moment, she pressed now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on whether he knew of any law that gave the government the power to regulate a man’s body. He did not, and the line of questioning galvanized 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 marred by infighting and she failed to gain traction, eventually dropping out before the Iowa caucuses.
Eight months later, Biden chose Harris as his running mate. Introducing her to the nation, Biden reflected on what her nomination meant for “the Black and brown girls who so often feel neglected and undervalued in their communities.”
“Today, perhaps, they are seeing each other for the first time in a new way, as if they were president and vice president,” he said.
Once in office, Harris worked to curb migration from Central America, but her efforts did not stop the movement of people leaving their corrupt and impoverished countries in search of safety and prosperity in the United States.
There also wasn’t much progress to be made on voting rights, another issue that was part of Harris’ portfolio. When Republicans limited voting access in several states, Democrats lacked the strength in Congress to respond nationally.
Harris eventually carved out a role as the government’s most outspoken defender of reproductive rights after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Wade, the landmark case that guaranteed access to abortion across the country.
Much of Harris’ work has focused on bolstering her party’s coalition of women, young people and voters of color. And in the male-dominated corridors of power – both in Washington and around the world – she remained keenly aware of her status as a political trailblazer.
She often repeated a phrase she credited to her mother: “Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you are not the last.”
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
