If Democrats select Harris to replace Biden, as they called for when Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential race on Sunday, she would become the first Black woman and the first South Asian to be nominated for president by a major party. It would mark a stunning comeback for a politician who not long ago appeared destined to join a long list of promising state officials who failed on the national stage.
Harris could be a leader for a party in crisis. Democrats are scrambling over Biden’s unprecedented decision to withdraw his nomination just 15 weeks before the general election, and polls show former President Donald Trump leading in key battleground states. Like Biden, Harris has not had an approval rating below 40% so far this year, a worrying sign that she may still be shouldering the administration’s electoral burden.
It was still unclear Sunday night whether the party would rally around Harris as smoothly or quickly as either she or Biden would like. As Biden’s position has become increasingly untenable in recent days, some Democrats have argued for an open nomination process rather than a vice presidential coronation. “I am honored to receive the president’s endorsement,” Harris said in a statement after Biden’s announcement. “My intention is to seek and win this nomination.”
Time is running out: Democrats will hold their convention in Chicago next month but plan to formally nominate their candidate in a virtual roll call in early August.
If Democrats endorse Harris, they will be making an extraordinary gamble that she is finally ready to follow through on her campaign promises and overcome her slump as a campaigner. In less than four months, she must win what may be one of the most crucial elections in American history, against an opponent who is riding a new wave of admiration within her party after surviving an assassination attempt this month.
No matter how things unfold, Ms. Harris and the Democratic Party are in uncharted territory, said Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.Former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision not to seek reelection in 1968 has been a precedent cited in urging Mr. Biden to drop out, but it was announced just seven months before the general election, setting a loose timeline by comparison.
“As far as I can tell, there are no direct historical parallels,” Riley said.
Historically unprecedented battles are nothing new for Harris, who has defied expectations, for better or worse, since entering politics.
A former prosecutor who rose from San Francisco’s ruthless political circles, Harris was once compared to former President Barack Obama. After her disastrous 2019 presidential election defeat, she was written off but saved by being selected as Biden’s largely successful running mate. After the election, Harris was hit with a series of unflattering headlines for allegedly mismanaging the vice presidential office and awkwardly conveying the president’s policy positions, especially on immigration.
But after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago, Harris appeared to regain her footing on the court and have become the Biden administration’s most effective defender of women’s reproductive rights.
And when Democrats began to panic in June about their 81-year-old candidate’s frail health after her disastrous debate performance against President Trump, many began talking about Ms. Harris as a realistic, perhaps exemplary, alternative: a 59-year-old woman ready to vigorously plead her case against the former president.
Bill Carrick, a veteran Democratic strategist from California who worked for Harris’ main opponent in the 2016 Senate race, said he has watched the vice president travel around the country in recent months as a Biden campaign surrogate and has seen remarkable progress.
“She’s a better candidate now than she was for district attorney or attorney general or even as a presidential candidate in 2019,” he said. “She’s got a lot of personality, she’s got a lot of substance. She’s very dramatic.”
Ashley Etienne, a former communications director for Harris and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), said Harris would “pretty much have a clean slate” if she becomes the nominee and would need to make the most of the coming months to tell her story to voters.
“Think about the people who only watch Fox News,” Etienne said. “She’s going to have to cut some of that off. She’s going to have to introduce herself and really lay out her vision.”
The Trump campaign has already begun efforts to link Harris to Biden, writing in a statement Sunday that “they own each other’s records and there is no separation between them. Harris must defend the failed Biden Administration and her own liberal, soft on crime record in California.”
Harris, whose mother is Indian and father is Jamaican, was born and raised in Berkeley, California, in 1964. After graduating from Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law (now known as the University of California, San Francisco School of Law), he worked as a prosecutor in Alameda County and San Francisco, prosecuting sex crimes, murder and other serious crimes.
It was a fateful turn for her political identity: In 2003, Harris challenged her former boss, San Francisco District Attorney Terrence Hallinan, a left-wing stauncher who, before becoming the city’s top law enforcement officer, had made a name for himself defending counterculture figures like Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey.
In a three-way race, Mr. Hallinan led in the first round, but Ms. Harris came in second and then won handily in the runoff election. Ms. Harris was re-elected unopposed in 2007 and soon began preparing to run for attorney general in 2010, against Republican Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley.
The race was close at the time, when California Republicans’ prospects for the election were less bleak. Ms. Harris fell behind in the final weeks of the campaign, and as votes were counted on election night, Mr. Cooley prematurely declared victory. Ms. Harris took the lead as the count continued the next day, and after weeks of counting mail-in and provisional ballots, she won by less than a percentage point.
Harris served as California’s top law enforcement officer for six years, focusing on both consumer protection issues and complex criminal investigations, both of which are within the purview of the state attorney general. After longtime Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer announced her retirement in 2015, Harris ran to succeed Boxer and won handily against no strong opponents.
As a congresswoman from California, she began to attract national attention, particularly as she channeled Democratic anger at the Trump administration into her questioning of his nominees and administration members. Trump’s then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions memorably said that Harris’ questions “unnerve me.”
Three years after taking office as a senator, Harris joined more than two dozen Democrats vying for the presidential nomination and got off to a strong start, drawing more than 20,000 people to her campaign launch in front of Oakland City Hall in California.
She later drew attention when she scolded Biden during a debate for talking about compromising with racist senators.
“There was a little girl in California who was in the second class when their public schools integrated, and she was bused to school every day,” Harris said, in one of the campaign’s most memorable lines. “And that little girl was me.”
But despite a promising start, her campaign ultimately faltered as she struggled to present a coherent message that resonated with voters, ran out of money and dropped out of the race in December 2019.
Some campaign veterans from that time still harbor deep doubts about Ms. Harris, recalling her as a candidate who refused to organize a campaign, was indecisive and lashed out at her staff.
“It was the most frustrating time of my life as a political staffer,” one former staffer said recently, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss inner-campaign dynamics.
Biden, who ultimately won the primary, had pledged to choose a woman as his running mate, and amid calls for racial equality following the police killing of George Floyd, Biden’s supporters stressed that he should choose a black person, not just a woman.
Eight months after his campaign for the White House ended and amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, Biden announced he had chosen Harris as his running mate. The selection was personal as well as political: Harris was a friend and colleague of Biden’s late son Beau, who served as attorney general.
Despite her successful campaign against Trump, Harris’s start as vice president was rocky, with some interviews struggling, including a cryptic response from NBC’s Lester Holt when she was asked if she would visit the southern border to address illegal immigration.
A year into her term, Ms. Harris’ office was also rocked by a wave of departures from her staff, including her chief of staff, chief press secretary and communications director. The resignations rekindled questions about why Ms. Harris is so reshuffling top-level Democratic staffers, a problem that has dogged her for nearly her entire tenure in public office.
To reset her position, Ms. Harris hired Lorraine Vowles, a former top aide to Vice President Al Gore and Sen. Hillary Clinton, as her chief of staff, and observers began noticing a shift two years ago when Ms. Harris zeroed in on conservative efforts to strip away abortion access in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
Biden, a lifelong Catholic, has struggled to forcefully state his party’s position on abortion. By contrast, Harris has championed abortion rights throughout her career and was well positioned to tackle what many Democrats now see as a win-win issue.
When Biden stepped down as the top contender on Sunday, he implicitly acknowledged his conclusion that Harris was better positioned than he or anyone else in his party to face a crucial showdown with Trump.
“My first decision as my party’s nominee in 2020 was to select Kamala D. Harris as my vice president, and it was the best decision I ever made,” Biden said in a statement on Wednesday. “Today I fully endorse and support Kamala to be this year’s party’s nominee. Fellow Democrats, it’s time to unite and defeat Trump. Let’s do it.”
Ashley Parker and Josh Dorsey contributed to this report.
