Originally published 2020-11-08.
Kamala Harris at the launch rally of her presidential campaign at Frank Ogawa Plaza, Oakland, California, on 27 January 2019. Photo: Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group.
On 7 November 2020, when major news organisations projected that Joe Biden had won the US presidential election, Kamala Harris became the first woman ever elected vice president of the United States. She was also the first African American and the first South Asian American to win the office. She was sworn in on 20 January 2021 by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and served the full four-year term.
Here is who she is, how she got there, why the milestone mattered, the criticism she faced along the way, and what happened next.
The history-making win in 2020
The election was held on 3 November 2020, but because several swing states were slow to count a record number of mail-in ballots, the result was not projected until the morning of 7 November. Biden and Harris finished with 306 electoral votes to 232 for Donald Trump and Mike Pence, and won the popular vote by more than seven million, with over 81 million votes.
Three women had appeared on a major-party presidential ticket before. Geraldine Ferraro ran for vice president for the Democrats in 1984, Sarah Palin for the Republicans in 2008, and Hillary Clinton was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016. None of them won. Harris was the first to break through.
One detail is often stated loosely. Harris was not the first person of colour to serve as vice president: Charles Curtis, a member of the Kaw Nation who grew up partly on a reservation in Kansas, held the office under Herbert Hoover from 1929 to 1933. Harris's firsts are as the first woman, the first Black American and the first Asian American in the role.
Who Kamala Harris is
Kamala Devi Harris was born on 20 October 1964 in Oakland, California. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, came from India and became a biomedical scientist whose research on hormone receptors contributed to breast cancer science. Her father, Donald J. Harris, emigrated from Jamaica and became an economist who later taught at Stanford. Her first name is the Sanskrit word for lotus.
She studied political science and economics at Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, graduating in 1986, and earned her law degree from the University of California's Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco in 1989.
A career in law and the Senate
- 2004 to 2011: District Attorney of San Francisco.
- 2011 to 2017: Attorney General of California, the first woman, first African American and first South Asian American in that post.
- 2017 to 2021: US Senator for California. She was only the second Black woman ever elected to the Senate, after Carol Moseley Braun, and the first South Asian American senator.
- 2021 to 2025: Vice President of the United States.
From rival to running mate
Harris launched her own bid for the Democratic presidential nomination on 21 January 2019, with a large rally in Oakland where the photo above was taken. She was briefly one of the front-runners, but her support faded and she withdrew on 3 December 2019, citing a lack of funds.
The most memorable moment of her campaign came at the first Democratic debate in June 2019, when she confronted Biden directly. She said his fond recollections of working with two segregationist senators had been hurtful, and challenged his record on busing, the court-ordered policy of transporting children to schools outside their neighbourhoods in order to desegregate them. Harris told the audience she had been part of only the second class to integrate her public schools in California, "and she was bused to school every day."
Biden replied that she had mischaracterised his position, saying he had not opposed busing in general but busing ordered by the federal Department of Education. The exchange was sharp, yet it did not stop him from choosing her. On 11 August 2020, after he had secured the nomination, Biden announced Harris as his running mate.
Criticism of her record as a prosecutor
Harris called herself a "progressive prosecutor", but critics on the left argued that her record was often tough on crime in ways that fell hardest on poor and Black communities. Points raised during her campaigns included:
- Her office's defence of convictions in some cases where defendants claimed they were wrongly convicted.
- Her opposition, as attorney general, to a death-row inmate's request for further DNA testing, a decision the San Jose Mercury News later judged to be a fair criticism.
- Her office's defence of California's death penalty in court in 2014, even though she personally opposed capital punishment.
- A truancy initiative under which parents of persistently absent children could be prosecuted, although her office's own figures showed no parents were jailed.
Some activists, including California attorney and organiser Nnenna Amuchie in an opinion piece for The Independent, argued that her "top cop" image sat uneasily with the Black Lives Matter era. Supporters pointed to her work on re-entry programmes for young offenders, implicit-bias training for police and an open-data platform on criminal justice. Like most long careers in law enforcement, hers contains material for both sides.
Why the vice presidency matters
The vice president is first in line to the presidency, presides over the Senate and casts the deciding vote when the Senate is tied. With the Senate split 50 to 50 for much of 2021 and 2022, that last power gave Harris an unusually active role, and she went on to cast more tie-breaking votes than any vice president before her.
Biden was 78 when he took office, the oldest person ever inaugurated as president. That made the question of who stood next in line more than a formality, and it was one reason Harris's selection drew such close attention.
What happened next
Harris served as vice president from 20 January 2021 to 20 January 2025. In July 2024, after Biden withdrew from the race, she became the Democratic nominee for president, with Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate. She lost the election on 5 November 2024 to Donald Trump, who won 312 electoral votes to her 226.
Her 2020 victory still stands as a landmark. For the first time, the vice president's official residence in Washington was home to a woman, and to the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, a fact that resonated strongly with many people in the United States and around the world.
Sources: Wikipedia: Kamala Harris; Wikipedia: 2020 United States presidential election; CNBC: Harris attacks Biden's record on busing and working with segregationists; HPPR: The country's first vice president of color was a Native American; The Independent: opinion by Nnenna Amuchie; photo by Jose Carlos Fajardo, Bay Area News Group.
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