Just like her boss Joe Biden, Kamala Harris is also known for gaffes and ‘word salad’ speeches.
From describing AI as a ‘kind of a fancy thing’ that is ‘first of all two letters’ to a recent baffling blunder where she called the 2024 election ‘the most election of our lifetime’, the vice-president’s abilities as an orator have long been in question.
She also once confused North and South Korea, mistakenly said 220million Americans died of Covid-19 and joked that people aged between 18 and 24 are ‘really stupid’.
And the 59-year-old also has a reputation for badly misjudging a social situation and laughing at the wrong moment, including once when she was asked a question about the fate of desperate Ukrainian refugees.
Ms Harris is happily married to LA lawyer Doug Emhoff but there are also claims that her affair with flamboyant California Democrat and San Francisco’s first black mayor Willie Brown in the 1990s – when he was 61 and she was 31 – also gave the presidential hopeful’s career the boost she needed to get to where she is today.
‘Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker. And I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco’, Brown said in 2019 at the ripe age of 86.
The daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, she rose to California’s attorney general before becoming a US senator having originally been a local prosecutor in Alameda County, California, in the early 1990s.
But before he swapped The Apprentice for politics, just over a decade ago Donald Trump himself donated thousands of dollars to Kamala’s re-election campaign while she was California’s attorney general.
Now the Republican nominee insists she will be even easier to defeat than Joe Biden, declaring: ‘She’s so f***ing bad. She’s so pathetic’. He has also called her ‘as crazy as a bed bug’ and has given her the nickname: ‘Laffin’ Kamala Harris’.
Ms Harris, whose left-wing politics were forged by her mother and time at the so-called ‘black Harvard’ in Washington DC, has been at Mr Biden’s side since he was elected in 2020 – and after his decision to reject the democratic nomination she is now aiming to become the first black female to head a major party’s US presidential ticket.
The first attack ad pitting Kamala Harris against Donald Trump was released shortly after President Biden announced he would not seek re-election.
President Joe Biden has announced that he will not seek re-election and has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee (pictured together on the 4th of July)
Donald Trump has given his verdict on Kamala – and says she will be easier to beat than Biden
But Trump did donate to her campaign just over a decade ago
Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California
Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was the daughter of an Indian diplomat and a women’s rights activist, graduated from the University of Delhi at nineteen, and, in order to avoid an arranged marriage, went to the University of California at Berkeley to pursue graduate studies. There, she met another graduate student, Donald Harris (together left), from Jamaica, who was studying for his Ph.D. in economics, during a political protest. Pictured right: Harris and her mother, who died in 2009. Her father Donald is 85
Howard student: Kamala Harris (right) was at the Washington D.C. college known as the ‘black Harvard’ when she and friend Gwen Whitfield (left) took part in an anti-apartheid protest in November 1982
Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris dated San Francisco’s first black mayor Wilile Brown in the 1990s, while he was still married but separated from his wife. Pictured together a dinner in 1995
Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff is a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles. The two married at a small ceremony in Santa Barbara in 2014, after they met on a blind date a year earlier. He has two grown-up children from a previous marriage: Cole and Ella. Harris calls herself ‘Momala,’ the name she says her stepchildren gave her
The key question for Democrats today is whether she is the woman to beat Trump in November – or whether after her gaffes and public speaking struggles she is the liability her rival and his supporters say she is.
Kamala was immediately endorsed by President Joe Biden after he sensationally withdrew from the 2024 presidential race yesterday. And within minutes of his statement released a campaign video bringing the fight to Trump.
The Clintons have said they will give their ‘full endorsement’ to Kamala Harris – but the Obamas are yet to decide publicly.
Ms Harris is viewed as a fighter by her supporters.
Describing her own attitude to life she once said: ‘Sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open, and sometimes they won’t— and then you need to kick that f***ing door down’.
But she may face a fight from rivals, including her old friend Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California.
According to Betfair Exchange, Kamala Harris is now 12/5 to win November’s Presidential Election. Back in February her odds to win the Presidency were as big as 100/1. Donald Trump has been the heavy favourite since April and earlier this week he was as short as 4/7 to win in November, however since the news that Biden is to step down from the race, his odds have drifted slightly to 4/6.
Kamala was born October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, to parents who met as civil rights activists.
Her home town and nearby Berkeley were at the heart of the racial and social justice movements of the time, and Ms Harris was both a product and a beneficiary.
She spoke often about attending demonstrations in a stroller and growing up around adults ‘who spent full 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 into Berkeley’s public education.
Ms Harris has been hailed by supporters as a trailblazer.
The daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, she rose from local prosecutor to California’s attorney general before becoming a US senator.
Kamala’s mother Shyamala died in 2009 aged 70. Her father Donald, an academic, is 85.
Harris’ sister, Maya, is a lawyer and MSNBC political analyst while her brother-in-law, Tony West, is general counsel of Uber.
Kamala, a stepmother-of-two, made history in 2020 by becoming the first black, Asian, and female Vice President.
Critics, however, have attacked her poor public speaking skills.
And some polls have shown her to be less popular than Mr Biden in the vital swing states that are likely to settle the election.
One recent poll gave Ms Harris a 29 per cent favourability rating, with 49 per cent rating her unfavourably.
Her opponents argue that letting her run for high office would amount to admitting defeat. As a result, challengers to a Harris nomination are bound to come forward.
Supporters arrived at the White House yesterday as she put herself forward at the Democrats’ unity candidate
Kamala Harris on a family trip from the west coast to New York in September 1966, where she was photographed in Harlem
Harris is shown as a child, left, with her younger sister Maya, center, and mother Shyamala Gopalan, who was a biomedical scientist. She grew up in Oakland, California
Kamala Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a 25-year-old academic when her first daughter arrived. Kamala Harris has a younger sister, Maya, with whom she was photographed on Christmas Day 1968
Harris, back row at left, in an undated family photo. Next to her, from left, are her grandmother Rajam Gopalan, grandfather P.V. Gopalan and sister, Maya Harris. With them are Maya’s daughter, Meena, left, and Harris’ cousin Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
In 2002, she challenged San Francisco’s incumbent district attorney, the progressive Terence Hallinan, who was her former boss. She quit the office – known for it disorganization and low conviction rates – and launched her campaign against him. Her tenure as the city’s top cop was not without controversy, particularly a case that made national news. In 2004, shortly after she took over in the DA’s office, she declined to pursue the death penalty for a gang member accused of shooting 29-year-old San Francisco cop Isaac Espinoza – despite heavy political pressure from the police union
Beau Biden introduced Harris to his father, who was serving as Barack Obama’s vice president at the time. Joe Biden endorsed Harris early on in her Senate campaign, noting she was a friend of his son. ‘Beau always supported her,’ he said in his endorsement. Pictured: Harris with California Governor Gavin Newsom and President Barack Obama in 2011, when she was California’s Attorney General
Ms Harris’s 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 university in Washington, and joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, which became a source of sisterhood and political support over the years.
After graduating, Ms Harris returned to the San Francisco Bay Area for law school and chose a career as a prosecutor, a move that surprised her activist family.
She said she believed that working for change inside the system was just as important as agitating from outside. By 2003, she was running for her first political office, taking on the longtime San Francisco district attorney.
Few city residents knew her name, and Ms Harris set up an ironing board as a table outside grocery stores to meet people. She won and quickly showed a willingness to chart her own path.
Months into her tenure, Ms Harris declined to seek the death penalty for the killer of a young police officer killed in the line of duty, fraying her relationship with city police.
The episode did not stop her political ascent. In late 2007, while still serving as district attorney, she was knocking on doors in Iowa for then-candidate Barack Obama.
After he became president, Mr Obama endorsed her in her 2010 race for California attorney general.
Once elected to statewide office, she pledged to uphold the death penalty despite her moral opposition to it. She refused to defend Proposition 8, a voter-backed initiative banning same-sex marriage.
Ms Harris also played a key role in a 25 billion-dollar (£19.3 billion) settlement with the nation’s mortgage lenders following the foreclosure crisis.
As killings of young black men by police received more attention, Ms Harris implemented some changes, including tracking racial data in police stops, but did not pursue more aggressive measures such as requiring independent prosecutors to investigate police shootings.
Ms Harris’s record as a prosecutor would dog her when she launched a presidential bid in 2019, as some progressives and younger voters demanded swifter change.
But during her time on the job, she also forged 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 his friendship with Ms Harris figured heavily years later as his father chose Ms Harris to be his running mate.
Ms Harris married entertainment lawyer Douglas Emhoff in 2014, and she became stepmother to Emhoff’s two children, Ella and Cole, who referred to her as ‘Momala’.
Ms Harris had a rare opportunity to advance politically when Senator Barbara Boxer, who had served for more than two decades, announced she would not run again in 2016.
In office, Ms Harris quickly became part of the Democratic resistance to Donald Trump and gained recognition for her pointed questioning of his nominees.
Now happily married to entertainment lawyer Doug Emhoff, Harris has little to say about Brown and does not mention his name once in her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold
Harris and Emhoff have been married since 2014, and he could become the first Second Gentleman if Biden is to win the presidency
In one memorable moment, she pressed now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on whether he knew any laws that gave government the power to regulate a man’s body. He did not, and the line of questioning galvanised women and abortion rights activists.
A little more than two years after becoming a senator, Ms Harris announced her campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. But her campaign was marred by infighting and she failed to gain traction, ultimately dropping out before the Iowa caucuses.
Eight months later, Mr Biden selected Ms Harris as his running mate. As he introduced her to the nation, Mr Biden reflected on what her nomination meant for ‘little black and brown girls who so often feel overlooked and undervalued in their communities’.
‘Today, just maybe, they’re seeing themselves for the first time in a new way, as the stuff of presidents and vice presidents,’ he said.
Once in the job, Ms Harris worked to stem migration from Central America, but her efforts did not stop the movement of people leaving their corrupt and impoverished countries to seek safety and prosperity in the US.
Nor was there much progress to be made on voting rights, another issue that was part of Ms Harris’ portfolio. When Republicans limited ballot access in various states, Democrats lacked the necessary muscle in Congress to push back at the national level.
Ms Harris eventually carved out a role as the administration’s most outspoken advocate for reproductive rights after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, the landmark case that had guaranteed abortion access nationwide.
Much of Ms Harris’s work has focused on bolstering her party’s coalition of women, young people and voters of colour. And in halls of power dominated by men – both in Washington and around the world – she has remained keenly aware of her status as a political pioneer.
She often repeated a line she credited to her mother: ‘Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you’re not the last.’
Ms Harris last night vowed to ‘earn and win’ the Democratic presidential nomination after being endorsed by Joe Biden as his successor.
The Vice President, 59, thanked Mr Biden for his ‘extraordinary leadership’ and for making a ‘selfless and patriotic act’ by stepping aside from the race for the White House.
Ms Harris said: ‘I am honoured to have the President’s endorsement, and my intention is to earn and win this nomination. 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.’
After revealing that he was not accepting the Democratic nomination, Mr Biden, 81, posted on X: ‘My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made.
‘Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats – it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.’
Full-scale internal Democratic election processes cannot take place as Mr Biden has already been chosen as the candidate, so contenders will have to put themselves forward at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month.
If elected, Ms Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, would become America’s first ever First Gentleman, after two and a half centuries of First Ladies. Michelle Obama, wife of former President Barack Obama, has been touted by some as a potential presidential hopeful.
Mrs Obama has given no indication she would consider seeking public office. Neither has Hollywood actor George Clooney, another fantasy pick for the role, who is a prominent fundraiser and donor to the Democratic Party.
Other Democratic contenders include Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan; California governor Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, and Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg.