When Kamala Harris became vice president of the United States on January 20, 2021, she embodied numerous “firsts”: she was the first woman, the first Black, and the first South Asian American to be vice president. As she noted in her acceptance speech during the Democratic National Convention in August 2020, “While I may be the first woman in this office, I won’t be the last,” she vowed. “Because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”

Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California, on October 24, 1964, to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother. Her father, Donald J. Harris, came to the United States from Jamaica, in 1961 and earned a PhD in economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1966. He is a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University. Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, left Tamil Nadu, India, in 1958 at age 19 for graduate studies in nutrition and endocrinology at U.C. Berkeley, earning her PhD in 1964. Gopalan, a breast cancer researcher, died in 2009. Harris’s parents were married in 1963 and divorced in 1971. Harris’s sister, a lawyer, was born in 1967. 

Harris married Douglas Emhoff, a white, Jewish lawyer, in 2014, and she is stepmother to his two children, Cole and Ella. With the victory of the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020, Emhoff became the first second gentleman. 

Harris studied political science and economics at Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, DC, graduating in 1986. At Howard, she majored in economics and political science and was a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, one of the oldest historically African American sororities. She earned her J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 1989 and became deputy district attorney in Alameda County in 1990. She then moved to the San Francisco district attorney’s office and afterward served in the office of the city attorney of San Francisco as a prosecutor focusing on child sexual assault cases. In 2003, she was elected district attorney of San Francisco. In 2010, Harris won election as California attorney general, becoming the first Black and the first Asian American in the job, serving until 2017. 

Through her career, Harris sought to balance criminal justice reform with enforcement of the law. She opposes the death penalty, and in 2004 as district attorney of San Francisco, she refused to seek such punishment against a man who killed a police officer. But as attorney general, she pledged to enforce the death penalty. In 2014, she appealed a federal judge’s ruling that the death penalty was unconstitutional; the judge argued that the long delays that death row inmates faced amounted to cruel or unusual punishment that the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibits. Seeking to portray herself as a progressive on criminal justice issues, Harris pointed to her introduction of racial bias training for police officers. But she also faced criticism because the attorney general’s office during her term argued against the release of a prisoner that the Innocence Project found innocent, arguing the petition came after a legal deadline. During the 2020 presidential election primaries, Harris noted that on some cases, attorneys in her office had not consulted her. “I wish they had,” she said.

In 2016, Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate, becoming the second Black woman to serve in the chamber. As a senator, she was a reliable Democratic vote and broke with the majority of the caucus only on rare occasions. She, along with six other Democrats, voted against passage of a trade pact between the United States, Mexico, and Canada that the Trump administration sought to replace the North America Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA), arguing that the agreement did not adequately address climate change issues. Harris gained attention in the Senate for her prosecutorial questioning during hearings, notably the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh. 

Harris sought the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, but her campaign failed to resonate with voters. In a June 2019 debate, she attracted attention when she drew on her own history of being bused to a school in an affluent, predominately white neighborhood to vigorously attack Joe Biden for his record on school integration. Biden, known for not holding a grudge, ignored Harris’s debate-stage salvo and chose her to join the ticket. Her selection fulfilled Biden’s promise to select a woman running mate and signaled his commitment to diversity at the highest levels of government. Given Biden’s age, the selection of Harris also was nod toward the future, inclusive face of the Democratic Party.

Vice President Harris worked closely with President Biden once in office. She was often the public face of the administration, traveling around the country promoting its agenda on issues such as economic investments, infrastructure improvements, lower prescription drug costs, and expanded broadband internet access. As president of the U.S. Senate with the responsibility to break tie votes, Harris set the record for the vice president who made the highest number of determinative decisions in a closely divided chamber.

The White House deputed Vice President Harris to address several specific policies, including immigration at the southern border and advocating for abortion rights. In 2021, President Biden asked Harris to tackle the root causes in Central and South America that were causing migrants to leave their countries to try to enter the United States. She applied diplomatic methods such as encouraging private investment and coordinated with officials in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to tackle gang violence, natural disasters, and economic hardships. The administration hoped that if issues in these countries improved, fewer migrants would come to the United States; but, without genuine enforcement power, Harris’s efforts were largely unsuccessful.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and returned the issue of abortion access to the states. Vice President Harris became an outspoken advocate for abortion rights. As a pro-choice woman, she was a more effective spokesperson than President Biden. She also became the first vice president or president to visit an abortion clinic when she went to a facility in St. Paul, Minnesota, in March 2024, to highlight the importance of protecting women’s reproductive health.

As the 2024 presidential election race began, Biden announced that he would run for reelection. Despite concerns officials and voters had about his age and abilities, the Biden-Harris ticket faced no serious primary challengers. In June 2024, President Biden participated in a televised debate with former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee. Biden’s disastrous performance led to calls from within the Democratic Party for the president to step down as the nominee. After a several weeks of agonizing deliberation, Biden withdrew from the race, becoming the first eligible sitting president to decline to run for reelection since Lyndon Johnson in 1968.

In July 2024, Biden endorsed Vice President Harris; she consolidated support and raised record amounts of money for the campaign. Harris chose Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, as her vice-presidential running mate. At the Democratic National Convention, held in Chicago, Illinois, in August 2024, delegates officially nominated Harris and Walz as the Democratic candidates for president and vice president.

With an abbreviated presidential election campaign, lasting just over 100 days, the Harris-Walz ticket labored to introduce themselves to the American public, clearly communicate their positions on issues, and try to embrace the Biden legacy while distancing themselves from its unpopular elements. The Trump campaign attacked the Harris-Walz ticket on the issues of the economy (especially inflation), illegal immigration, and transgender rights (particularly in athletic competition).

In September 2024, Vice President Harris met former President Trump in a televised debate. She was roundly considered the winner of the debate, and Trump declined to participate in another one. Still Harris struggled to explain the Biden administration’s approach to immigration, and much of the American public blamed the Biden-Harris administration for economic mismanagement and rising inflation in 2021 and 2022. On election day, November 5, 2024, Trump defeated Harris by approximately 2.5 million votes, winning the Electoral College, 312 to 226, and the popular vote, 49.9 percent to 48.4 percent.

After leaving the vice presidency in January 2025, Harris returned to California. In July 2025, she announced that she would not run for election as the governor of California. She spent much of the fall touring the country to promote her book, 107 Days, about the abbreviated presidential campaign she ran in 2024.