When Hillary Clinton had hopes of becoming America’s first female president, her campaign prepared a faux-glass ceiling that would shatter with confetti at the then-Democratic nominee’s 2016 election night party.
Four years later Kamala Harris is poised to rack up the kind of momentous milestone that Mrs Clinton could not. Now that Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential race has been called, Ms Harris is set to be the first woman, and first woman of colour,elected to executive office in the US.”
It puts the US senator and former California attorney-general a heartbeat away from the top job. She will serve as the official understudy to the oldest president Americans have ever elected and be the odds-on favourite to lead the Democrats in 2024, if, as expected, Mr Biden does not run again.
Though Mr Biden, 77, and Ms Harris, 56, went toe to toe when both were seeking the Democratic presidential nomination last year, they have since begun to function as a team. People who know Ms Harris say Mr Biden has told her he is hoping to have a similar relationship with her to the one he had with Barack Obama as his vice-president. He has promised she will be the last person in the room with him for the major decisions of his presidency.
Daniel Suvor, who served as chief of policy to Ms Harris when she was attorney-general of California, said she was likely to be a “true partner” to Mr Biden and could be expected “to play a very important and influential role” in guiding him across policy areas.
Born in Oakland, California to two academics — an India-born mother and a Jamaica-born father — Ms Harris has credited her interest in politics to her parents’ involvement in the civil rights movement. In elementary school, she was bussed to what had been an overwhelmingly white school in a wealthier neighbourhood as part of Berkeley’s desegregation efforts. She drew on that experience to rap Mr Biden for his early opposition to federally forced busing during a primary debate last year, in one of the few notable moments of her unsuccessful campaign to be the Democratic presidential nominee.
Ms Harris attended the historically black college of Howard University and then law school in California. In 2003, she won her first race for San Francisco district attorney, serving in the job for seven years. She was elected first as California’s attorney-general and, after six years, to the US Senate.
In Washington, Ms Harris became known for using her experience as a prosecutor to deliver TV-friendly grillings of top officials in Donald Trump’s administration. Most notably she rattled his first attorney-general, Jeff Sessions, so badly that he acknowledged in a hearing that Ms Harris’s questioning style made him “nervous”.
When she announced her presidential bid in January 2019, an estimated 20,000 people came to cheer her on at a rally in Oakland. Less than a year later, she was forced to suspend her campaign before the Iowa caucuses after struggling to stand out in the crowded Democratic field.
Mark Leno, a former California state senator who has been friends with Ms Harris for 25 years, says her public profile has shifted since her shortlived presidential bid. “Her presidential campaign clearly struggled in finding its voice and that was compounded with the challenge of finding her position among 20 Democratic colleagues.”
But, as Mr Biden’s running mate, Ms Harris found herself in a more comfortable position: prosecuting Mr Trump and his four-year record, he says. She has also been able to bring the campaign her formidable skills as a fundraiser: in the 48 hours after Mr Biden made her his vice presidential pick, he raised $48m.
While on the campaign trail, Ms Harris has tried to show a more rounded picture of herself, telling and retelling her story as a daughter of immigrants, and leaning in to the less serious side of her personality: her love of cooking and Converse shoes, and role as “mom-ala” to her two stepchildren.
As Mr Biden’s running mate, she battled daily attacks from Mr Trump, who has called her both a “monster” and a “communist” (she is not) and suggested she would indoctrinate Mr Biden with far-left policies. From the left, she has battled accusations of not being progressive enough on criminal justice reform as attorney-general.
She has also been accused of having a softer stance towards big business than some of her more progressive rivals. Her brother-in-law Tony West is a top executive at Uber and her husband, Doug Emhoff, is a former partner at a leading law firm. He would be the first Jewish spouse to a vice-president.
Only the third woman on a major party’s presidential ticket — after Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin — Ms Harris has faced a barrage of attacks that some of her supporters consider sexist and racist. They cite criticisms of the faces she made during the vice-presidential debate with Mike Pence, during which she fought to reclaim her speaking time and fend off interruptions.
Sonya Lockett, a friend of Ms Harris from university, says she is all too aware that opponents try to paint her as an “angry black woman”. “She did an amazing job of not letting herself be pulled into any of the traps they put [her] in,” Ms Lockett says. “It’s a dance black women, women of colour have to do constantly.”