As the calls for President Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race grow louder, Vice President Kamala Harris has emerged as the president’s most likely replacement at the top of the Democratic ticket.
Seventy-nine percent of Democrats say they would approve of Harris becoming the nominee if Biden steps aside, according to a poll released yesterday.
Here are a few things to know about the vice president and former California senator.
Harris was born on Oct. 20, 1964. She is 59 years old.
Harris was born in Oakland, California, and spent her childhood in Berkeley before moving to Montreal, Quebec, when she was 12.
Harris graduated from Westmount High School in Quebec in 1981. She earned her bachelor’s degree in political science and economics at Howard University in 1986 and a law degree from the University of California Hastings College of Law in 1989.
Harris identifies as a Baptist. She grew up in an interfaith household, attending services at both a black Baptist church and a Hindu temple. Her husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, is Jewish.
Harris is the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants who met while studying at the University of California, Berkeley. She and her sister Maya were primarily raised by their mother, Shyamala Gopalan, after their parents divorced in 1971.
Harris married Emhoff in 2014 and is stepmother, or ‘Momala,’ to his two adult children, Cole and Ella Emhoff.
Harris represented California in the Senate from 2017-2021 and was the state’s attorney general from 2011-2017. Before that, she was district attorney of San Francisco from 2004-2010 after working in the DA’s office prosecuting three strikes cases and serial felony offenders. She previously served in the Alameda County DA’s office, where she specialized in prosecuting child sexual assault cases.
Harris and Emhoff are currently worth about $8 million, according to Forbes.
Harris is the author of three books: Smart on Crime (2009), The Truths We Hold: An American Journey (2019), and the children’s picture book Superheroes are Everywhere (2019).
During Harris’s time as DA, she led the movement for LGBT rights, officiating the first same-sex wedding after Proposition 8 was overturned.
As attorney general, she won a $20 billion settlement for Californians whose homes had been foreclosed on and a $1.1 billion settlement for students and veterans who were taken advantage of by a for-profit education company, according to her White House biography.
Harris holds the record for the most tiebreaking votes in the Senate cast by a vice president in U.S. history, including her vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act.
She has faced criticism over the Biden administration’s handling of the southern border crisis after the president tasked her with “stemming the migration” across the border in 2021.
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Harris campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination for the 2020 election but dropped out of the race in December 2019, citing a lack of funds.
Once seen as a top contender for the nomination, Harris struggled on the campaign trail to articulate consistent policy stances and failed to gain broad support within her party.