President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race Sunday, endorsing his running mate, Vice President Harris, to take his place.
In a statement posted on X, Biden offered his “full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year.” And Harris subsequently said that she intends to pursue the presidential nomination.
The historic move comes after Biden faced growing calls from within the Democratic Party to step aside after his halting performance at his first presidential debate against former president Donald Trump last month.
Harris is the first woman, first Black person and first Asian American to ascend to the vice presidency. Now, Biden’s endorsement could put her on track to become the first female president.
Here is what you should know about Harris, including her history of barrier-breaking firsts.
EARLY CHILDHOOD
Harris was born in Oakland, California, in 1964. Her parents, Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher from India, and Donald Harris, an economist from Jamaica, immigrated to the United States and met while pursuing advanced degrees at the University of California at Berkeley. Harris has one sister, Maya.
Her parents were involved in activism, taking Harris to civil rights marches when she was still in a stroller, according to her White House biography. Harris’s parents divorced when she was seven, and she has credited her mother, who became her primary caregiver, for immersing her and her sister in both their Indian and African American cultures while they were growing up.
Credit: Courtesy of Kamala Harris
Credit: Courtesy of Kamala Harris
“My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters,” Harris wrote in her 2019 autobiography, “and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud Black women.”
COLLEGE AND EARLY CAREER
Harris moved to Canada with her mother and sister when she was 12, and after high school in Quebec, she returned to the United States to study at Howard University, a historically Black school in Washington, D.C.
Harris has said that after attending majority-White schools since elementary school, she was ready for a different experience in college.
The “beauty of Howard,” Harris wrote in her memoir, was that “every signal told students that we could be anything — that we were young, gifted, and black, and we shouldn’t let anything get in the way of our success.”
She majored in political science and economics, spending many weekends protesting against apartheid in South Africa on the National Mall. She also participated in a 1983 sit-in of an administration building to protest the expulsion of the student newspaper’s editor.
After graduating from Howard, she earned a law degree in 1989 from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She was admitted to the State Bar of California in 1990, and joined the Alameda County prosecutor’s office in Oakland as an assistant district attorney specializing in prosecuting child sexual assault cases.
Harris has said she became a prosecutor because she wanted to work from the inside to change a criminal justice system that disproportionately affects minorities. She went on to serve in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, where she prosecuted serial felony offenders as the office’s managing attorney for its Career Criminal Unit. She subsequently led the San Francisco City Attorney’s Division on Families and Children.
Harris ran for San Francisco district attorney in 2003 against an incumbent for whom she had worked. During the campaign, her opponents questioned the propriety of her previous acceptance of two state board positions. She had been appointed to the roles by the former speaker of the California State Assembly and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, with whom she previously had a romantic relationship. Candidates in the race also raised doubts about whether she could fairly investigate Brown’s mayoral administration.
She won the race in 2003, becoming the first African American woman and South Asian American woman in California to hold the office. Seven years later, in her second term as district attorney, she earned the same superlatives when she was elected California’s attorney general.
Harris’s tenure as district attorney helped her in her statewide attorney general bid, and her later Senate bid, but some of her record has been controversial. In her 2020 presidential run, her decision as attorney general to threaten criminal charges against parents of truant students was criticized as some jurisdictions sent parents to jail while enforcing the policy. Harris has called those jailings “unintended consequences” and said that she never sent any parents to jail under the policy.
A more liberal policy from her record as a prosecutor is Harris’s challenge of California’s Three Strikes law, which allowed sentences of 25 years to life for a third felony conviction. When she was San Francisco’s chief prosecutor, Harris enforced the sentences only if the third offense was serious or violent. A half-dozen years after Harris began advocating against the law, voters overturned it.
CALIFORNIA ATTORNEY GENERAL
In 2010, Harris defied the odds by winning the race for California attorney general, beating Steve Cooley, a popular Republican Los Angeles County prosecutor, by a narrow margin.
As attorney general, Harris’s track record on criminal justice was also mixed. She preserved, for instance, local jurisdictions’ authority to use police body cameras and investigate police shootings. She supported the use of body cameras, but she did not implement statewide standards for the use of those cameras, and she opposed a bill that would have required the attorney general’s office to investigate police shootings.
Harris, however, opposed capital punishment as district attorney. She refused in San Francisco to prosecute death penalty cases - even in a high-profile case involving the killing of a police officer, a decision that drew the ire of local police unions. But as attorney general, she also appealed a California court ruling that declared the death penalty unconstitutional.
While serving as attorney general in California in 2014, Harris married Doug Emhoff, a lawyer in Los Angeles, at a small ceremony officiated by her sister, Maya. Emhoff’s two children from a prior marriage - Ella and Cole - gave Harris the nickname “Momala.”
U.S. SENATE
In 2016, Harris ran for the U.S. Senate with the backing of then-President Obama and then-Vice President Biden. She handily beat Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D) the other Senate candidate on the general election ballot in California.
Upon her victory - a bright spot for Democrats as they saw Trump secure the presidency — she became only the second Black woman to join the upper chamber.
During her time in the Senate, Harris distinguished herself by applying her prosecutorial skills to grill Trump’s nominees and appointees during committee hearings.
Harris, who served on the Senate Judiciary Committee, pressed then-U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh on whether he knew of any laws that tell a man what to do with his body, as abortion laws do for women, flustering him and prompting him to say he did not. She also pushed him on whether he had discussed the Mueller investigation with anyone at a law firm linked to Trump.
And in May 2019, Attorney General William P. Barr appeared before the Judiciary Committee, and Harris asked whether Trump - or anyone else at the White House - had ever suggested he open an investigation of someone.
Barr hesitated and then asked her to repeat the question. As he searched for an answer, Harris remarked, “Seems you’d remember something like that.”
Ultimately, Barr said he could not answer the question, and Democrats cheered the exchange as revealing potential ethical concerns and what they considered Barr’s inappropriate closeness with the White House.
2020 PRESIDENTIAL RUN
In 2019, two years after being sworn into the Senate, Harris announced her run for president. And during the first Democratic presidential primary debate, Harris’s breakout moment came when she went after Biden.
Harris, the only Black candidate on the stage, called out Biden for comments he had recently made at a fundraiser. Biden suggested that he’s good at bringing people together - citing his relationships with segregationists in the Senate in the 1970s as proof.
Harris said during the debate that Biden’s comments were “hurtful to hear.”
She also criticized Biden over his opposition to busing in the 1970s in personal terms, pointing out that she was part of only the second class of students at her school in California that was racially integrated through a policy that transported Black students to mostly White schools.
While Harris was seen within the Democratic Party as a rising female star, she ultimately struggled to garner sustained support in the polls during her presidential run. Harris dropped out of the presidential race in December 2019 - two months before the first primary votes were cast. In a note to her supporters, Harris stressed her campaign’s financial struggles as the driving force behind her exit.
Credit: The Washington Post
Credit: The Washington Post
VICE PRESIDENT
In the summer of 2020, Biden announced he had selected her to be his running mate, delivering on his promise to put a woman on the ticket.
“This morning, all across this nation, little girls woke up, especially little Black and Brown girls who so often may feel overlooked and undervalued in our society,” Biden said. “But today, maybe, just maybe, they’re seeing themselves for the first time in a new way.”
When Biden declared victory in November 2020, Harris became the first vice president-elect in recent history to deliver a victory speech along with the president-elect. In all white, a tribute to the suffragists who secured the vote for women only a century earlier, Harris acknowledged that she was doing something no one like her had ever done.
“Tonight, I reflect on their struggle, their determination and the strength of their vision - to see what can be, unburdened by what has been. And I stand on their shoulders,” she said. “And what a testament it is to Joe’s character that he had the audacity to break one of the most substantial barriers that exists in our country and select a woman as his vice president.”
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
Early on in her tenure as vice president, Biden assigned Harris a politically thorny portfolio issue for the administration — addressing the underlying causes of immigration. She also took up the mantle of voting rights, an issue that continues to divide Washington along partisan lines and where no major legislation was passed despite multiple attempts. After her first year as vice president, her office also sustained several high-profile departures, with staff churn leading to questions about Harris’s management style.
The Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to overturn the fundamental right to abortion established in 1973 in Roe v. Wade was a turning point for Harris. She had been the administration’s voice on maternal health and then expanded further into reproductive rights. Harris has spoken in more explicit terms about restrictions to abortion access than Biden has. And she made history this year when she visited a health center that provides abortions - marking the first time an American president or vice president has toured such a facility while in office.
In his statement endorsing Harris to be the Democratic Party’s nominee to replace him in 2024, Biden wrote, “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.”
Harris, said in her statement on Sunday that she was “honored to have the President’s endorsement” and that her “intention is to earn and win” the Democratic presidential nomination.
“Over the past year, I have traveled across the country, talking with Americans about the clear choice in this momentous election. And that is what I will continue to do in the days and weeks ahead,” she said. “I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party — and unite our nation — to defeat Donald Trump ... We have 107 days until Election Day. Together, we will fight. And together, we will win.”
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Chelsea Janes and Valerie Strauss contributed to this Washington Post report.
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