Kamala Harris

Two immigrant academics made her and then split up. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was an Indian-born biomedical scientist working on breast cancer. Her father, Donald Harris, was a Jamaican economist and the first Black scholar granted tenure in Stanford's economics department. They divorced when Kamala was seven. What followed was a childhood in motion: Berkeley, then Urbana and Evanston and Madison as her parents took posts, then weekdays at her mother's and weekends at her father's in Palo Alto, then Montreal, where Shyamala went to McGill. She finished school there and spent a year at Vanier College before Howard University and then Hastings for law. In 1990 she took a job as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County.

San Francisco elected her district attorney in 2003, the first person of color in the office, and she cleared 27 of 74 backlogged homicide cases in six months. She built a hate crimes unit, a reentry division whose recidivism rate ran under 10 percent, and a truancy program that treated chronic absence as a public safety matter. California made her attorney general in 2010 and again in 2014, and she pushed the Homeowner Bill of Rights through the foreclosure crisis and took settlements out of Quest Diagnostics, JPMorgan Chase and Corinthian Colleges. The Senate followed in 2016 and the vice presidency in 2021, where she cast 33 tie-breaking votes, more than anyone else who has held the office. When Biden withdrew on July 21, 2024, she had 107 days.

The record does not sit still. She called herself a progressive prosecutor and wrote in 2009 that liberals carried biases against law enforcement, and critics on the left read the same career as tough on crime: the reluctance to release prisoners, the truancy law that put parents in front of judges, her office's defense of the California death penalty in court in 2014, its opposition to gender-affirming care for transgender inmates, which her successor reversed. In 2020 she backed a 150-million-dollar cut to the Los Angeles police budget and posted in support of a Minnesota bail fund she did not give money to. Before any of it, in the 1990s, she was appointed to two state boards by Willie Brown, the Assembly speaker she was dating, who was married and long separated.

She lost on November 5, 2024, by 312 electoral votes to 226, conceded at Howard the next day, and left office on January 20, 2025. Trump revoked her security clearance in March and cancelled her Secret Service protection as of September 1. She published 107 Days that same month, one of the decade's best-selling memoirs, and told the BBC she had wondered whether her silence about Biden's candidacy was grace or recklessness. In July 2025 she ruled out the California governor's race. Through 2026 she has endorsed candidates in the midterms and said she might possibly run again in 2028. The reputation is not settled and no honest account can pretend otherwise.

Kamala Harris's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer book
  Where she criticized what she called liberal biases against law enforcement 2009
• California Homeowner Bill of Rights law
  Out of the mortgage settlement she negotiated as attorney general 2012
• Division of Recidivism Reduction and Re-Entry company
  Created inside the California attorney general's office 2013
• The Truths We Hold: An American Journey book
  The memoir written for the 2020 campaign 2019
• 107 Days book
  Her account of the 2024 campaign, published September 23, 2025 2025

• October 20, 1964 aged 0 Born in Oakland, California
• 1972 aged ~8 Her father joins Stanford and the sisters split the week between two houses
• 1981 aged ~17 Enrolls at Vanier College in Montreal Her mother had taken a research position at McGill.
• 1990 aged ~26 Hired as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County
• 2003 aged ~39 Elected district attorney of San Francisco with 56 percent
• August 22, 2014 aged 49 Marries Doug Emhoff in Santa Barbara
• January 20, 2021 aged 56 Sworn in as vice president by Justice Sonia Sotomayor
• November 5, 2024 aged 60 Loses the presidential election to Donald Trump 312 electoral votes to 226, and 49.8 percent to 48.3 in the popular vote.
• September 23, 2025 aged 60 Publishes 107 Days Two months after ruling out a run for governor of California.

• Shirley Chisholm 1924–2005
  First Black woman elected to Congress and first woman to run for a major party's presidential nomination. first to make the run she completed
• Sonia Sotomayor b. 1954
  Supreme Court Justice and former Yale Law professor whose memoir chronicles her rise from the Bronx. administered her oath
• Thurgood Marshall 1908–1993
  First African American Supreme Court Justice and lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education. the lawyer's tradition she claims
• Donald Trump b. 1946
  Businessman, media personality, and 45th and 47th president whose populist movement transformed American politics. defeated by
• Joe Biden b. 1942
  46th president who enacted major infrastructure and climate legislation after decades in the Senate and vice presidency. served as his vice president
• Hillary Clinton b. 1947
  First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, and first woman to win a major party's presidential nomination. earlier woman on a national ticket