WASHINGTON (AP) — She has already broken barriers, and now Kamala Harris could break even more after President Joe Biden abruptly ended his re-election bid and endorsed her.
Biden announced his resignation on Sunday after a disastrous performance at the debate fueled fears that the 81-year-old was too fragile for a second term.
Harris is the first Black or South Asian woman to serve as vice president. If she becomes the Democratic nominee and defeats Republican candidate Donald Trump in November, she would be the first woman to serve as president.
Biden said on Sunday that choosing Harris as his running mate was “the best decision I ever made” and supported her as his successor.
“Democrats – it’s time to come together and defeat Trump,” he wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “Let’s do it.”
Harris called Biden’s decision to resign a “selfless and patriotic act” and said he “put the American people and our country above all else.”
“I am honored by the President’s endorsement, and my intention is to earn and win this nomination,” Harris said. “Over the past year, I have traveled across the country speaking to Americans about the clear choice in this momentous election.”
Prominent Democrats followed Biden’s lead and quickly coalesced around Harris on Sunday. But her nomination is not a foregone conclusion, and there have been suggestions that the party should quickly hold a “mini-primary” to vet other candidates before its convention in Chicago next month.
A recent poll by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about 6 in 10 Democrats believe Harris would do a good job as the front-runner. About 2 in 10 Democrats don’t think she would, and another 2 in 10 say they don’t know enough to tell.
The poll found that about four in 10 American adults have a positive opinion of Harris, whose name is pronounced “COMM-a-la,” while about half have an unfavorable opinion.
Harris, a former prosecutor and U.S. senator from California, failed before a single vote was cast in the primary. She later became Biden’s running mate, but after taking office as vice president, she struggled to gain traction. She was tasked with issues of migration from Central America and was repeatedly blamed by Republicans for problems with illegal border crossings.
But Harris became better known as the most vocal advocate for abortion rights in the White House after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. She also played a key role in reaching out to newborn people and voters of color.
In addition, Harris’ consistent performance following Biden’s debate debacle in recent weeks has cemented her standing among Democrats.
Even before Biden’s endorsement, Harris was widely considered the favorite to succeed him on the ballot. Her foreign policy experience and national name recognition give her a leg up over potential challengers such as California Governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.
Harris will seek to avoid the fate of Hubert Humphrey, who won the Democratic nomination for vice president in 1968 after President Lyndon Johnson declined to seek re-election due to national discontent over 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 term of his own.
Vice presidents are always the candidates for the top job when the president dies or becomes incapacitated. But Harris has faced unusually critical scrutiny because of Biden’s age. He was the oldest president in history, taking office at 78 and announcing his re-election bid at 80. Harris is 59.
In an interview with The Associated Press during a trip to Jakarta in September 2023, she addressed the question of succession.
“Joe Biden is going to be fine, so that’s not going to happen,” she explained. “But we also have to understand that every vice president — every vice president — understands that when they’re sworn in, they have to be clear about the responsibilities they potentially have when they assume the office of president.”
“I am no different.”
Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, to civil rights activists. Her hometown and nearby Berkeley were the centers of the racial and social rights movements of the time, and Harris was both a product and a beneficiary of that movement.
She often spoke of attending demonstrations in a stroller and growing up with adults “who spent all their time marching and screaming for this thing called justice.” In first grade, she was bused to school as part of the second class in an effort to integrate Berkeley’s public education system.
Harris’ parents divorced when she was newborn, and she was raised by her mother along with her younger sister, Maya. She attended Howard University, a historically black school in Washington, and joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, which became a source of sisterhood and political support over the years.
After graduating, Harris returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to study law and decided to pursue a career as a prosecutor – a move that surprised her activist family.
She said she believed it was just as crucial to advocate for change within the system as it was to agitate from outside. In 2003, she ran for her first political office, running against the longtime San Francisco district attorney.
Few townspeople knew her name, and Harris set up an ironing board as a table outside grocery stores to meet people. She won over and quickly showed a willingness to go her own way. Months after taking office, Harris refused to seek the death penalty for the killer of a newborn police officer killed in the line of duty, straining her relationship with the city’s police officers.
This incident did not stop her political rise. In delayed 2007, while still a district attorney, she knocked on doors in Iowa for then-candidate Barack Obama. After he became president, Obama supported her in her 2010 campaign for California Attorney General.
After being 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 to ban 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 newborn black men gained greater attention, Harris made some changes, including collecting racial data on police stops, but she stopped compact of more aggressive measures, such as requiring independent prosecutors to investigate police shootings.
Harris’ record as a prosecutor ultimately proved to be her undoing when she launched a presidential bid in 2019, as some progressives and younger voters demanded faster change. But during her time in office, she also forged a joyful 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 Harris played a large role years later when his father chose Harris as his running mate.
Harris married entertainment attorney Douglas Emhoff in 2014 and became stepmother to Emhoff’s two children, Ella and Cole, whom she called “Momala.”
Harris was presented with a unique opportunity to advance politically when Senator Barbara Boxer, who had served for more than two decades, announced that she would not run for re-election in 2016.
In office, Harris quickly became part of the Democratic resistance to Trump and gained recognition for her pointed questions about his nominations. In one memorable moment, she asked now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh if he knew of any laws giving the government the power to regulate a man’s body. He knew of none, and the questioning mobilized women and abortion rights activists.
Just over two years after becoming a senator, Harris announced her candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. 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. As he introduced her to the nation, Biden reflected on what her nomination means for “little black and brown girls who so often feel overlooked and undervalued in their communities.”
“Today, perhaps for the first time, they see themselves in a new light: as someone who can become president and vice president,” he said.
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Associated Press writer Matthew Daly contributed to this story.
