Kamala Harris

Official portrait of Vice President Kamala Harris (5 May 2021)

Kamala Devi Harris (born 20 October 1964) is an American attorney and politician and the 49th U.S. Vice-President. She was elected in 2020 as the running mate of Joe Biden and took office on 20 January 2021. Harris is the Democratic Party's nominee for president in the 2024 election. She is the first woman, the first African American, and the first Asian American to be vice president, the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history. From 2017 to 2021, she represented California in the United States Senate. Before that, she was the attorney general of California.

Born in Oakland, California, to an Indian American mother and Afro-Jamaican father, the family lived in Berkeley for the first few years of her life. Harris graduated from Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of Law. She began her law career in the office of the district attorney of Alameda County. She was elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2003 and attorney general of California in 2010, and reelected as state attorney general in 2014.

Harris was elected to represent California in the U.S. Senate, where she served from 2017 to 2021. She became only the second Black woman and first South Asian American U.S. senator. As a senator, Harris advocated for stricter gun control laws, the DREAM Act, federal legalization of cannabis, and reforms to healthcare and taxation. She gained a national profile for her pointed questioning of Trump administration officials during Senate hearings, including Trump's second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.

Harris sought the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, but withdrew from the race before the primaries. Biden selected her as his running mate, and their ticket defeated the incumbent president and vice president, Donald Trump and Mike Pence, in 2020. Presiding over an evenly split Senate upon entering office, Harris played a crucial role as president of the Senate. She cast more tie-breaking votes than any other vice president, which helped pass bills such as the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 stimulus package and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. After Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential election in the summer of 2024, Harris launched her campaign with Biden's endorsement. On August 6, 2024, she chose Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, as her running mate.