Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris is the 49th vice president of the United States. She is the first woman, as well as the first Black American and South Asian American to ever hold the role. Harris is the successor to President Joseph Biden. Previously, she served as California's attorney general from 2011-20172011–2017 and as a California senator from 2017-20212017–2021. She ran as a Democratic candidate for the United States 2020 presidential election, but suspended her campaign in December 2019. In August 2020, she was chosen as Biden's running mate.

Harris was born on October 20, 1964, to parents Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris in Oakland, California. Her father was an economics professor at Stanford University and her mother was a researcher of breast cancer. Her parents were both emigrants, her mother from India and her father from Jamaica. They were strong political activists and brought young Harris along to civil rights demonstrations. The experiences inspired her to pursue a career as a prosecutor. Harris has one sibling, a sister named Maya. Harris's parents divorced in 1972, and she and her sister were raised primarily by their mother in California.

Harris attended religious services as a child at a Hindu temple and a Black Baptist church. She and her sister sang in the church's children's choir. Harris's parents made sure that their daughters were connected to their heritage and felt proud of their ethnicity growing up in a predominantly white area. They visited their parents's' homelands of India and Jamaica, where they met their grandparents and traversed the lands where their parents had walked when they were children.

Harris attended elementary school at Thousand Oaks Elementary School. For her middle and high school years, she lived in Montreal, Quebec due to her mother's job change. There, she attended Notre-Dame-des-Neiges for most of middle school and was a student at F.A.C.E. School for her 8th gradeeighth-grade year. For her high school years, she attended Westmount High School and graduated in 1981.

Harris's first job out of law school was as the deputy district attorney for Alameda County in California. She officially started working there in 1990, but interned at the office in the summer of 1988. At the end of the internship, she was offered the future job of deputy district attorney, set to begin after her graduation and successful completion of the bar exam. During Harris's time as deputy district attorney, she was appointed to both the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the Medical Assistance Commission by her boyfriend at the time, Willie Brown, who was speaker of the state assembly in California.

Harris served as San Francisco's district attorney for two consecutive terms from 2004-20102004–2010. She was the first woman to ever be elected to the role, the first Black American woman and South Asian American woman to hold the role in California, and the first South Asian American district attorney in the United States. In 2007, she ran for her second term unopposed and won 98% percent of the vote. She was sworn into office for the second time in January 2008.

On November 8, 2016, Harris won the race for the United States Senate as California's representative against opponent Loretta Sanchez. Both are Democrats. As Harris's election coincided with Donald Trump's election to the presidency, much of her time as senator was spent pushing back on his policies. She was involved in several high-profile government hearings wherein which she was known as a tough questioner of witnesses, something she has been both criticized and praised for. She was reprimanded by Republican Senators John McCain and Richard Burr during the 2017 hearing regarding the firing of FBI director James Comey when she questioned Jeff Sessions, who stated Harris's "rushed" questions were making him "nervous."

Harris announced her intention to run for president on January 21, 2019. Within twenty-four hours, she had raised $1.5 million for her campaign. Her polling numbers throughout the race fluctuated in response to her performance in the various Democratic presidential debates––she hit a high of fifteen percent support after a successful debate in June, but her polling percentages steadily dropped into the single digits for the remainder of her campaign.

Grievances against Harris during her campaign included her history as a prosecutor and attorney general, something criticized mainly by Democrats and leftists who viewed her judicial decisions as too tough on crime and not progressive enough. While she was called out for specific controversial rulings that she and her office made, Harris also received criticism for merely having been a prosecutor, as some progressives argued that it made her implicit in a flawed and racially biased justice system. For this, Harris became the subject of a series of internet memes called "Kamala Is a Cop," in which various out-of-context photos and videos of her were posted online with disparaging captions alluding to her controversial policy decisions.

Harris was sworn into office on January 20, 2021. Some of her first assignments in office were to figure out the causes of undocumented immigrants from Central America in the United States, and to come up with a plan for national voting reform. The 2020 election resulted in a 50-50 split between party members in the Senate, making Harris the tiebreaker for chamber votes. Harris made fifteen tiebreaking votes in 2021, more than any vice president ever has had in one calendar year.

From 2004 to 2010, Harris served as San Francisco's district attorney for two consecutive terms from 2004-2010. She was the first woman to ever be elected to the role, the first Black American woman and South Asian American woman to hold the role in California, and the first South Asian American district attorney in the United States. In 2007, she ran for aher second term unopposed and won 98% of the vote. She was sworn into office for the second time in January 2008.

After attending Howard University and the University of California's Hastings College of the Law, Kamala Harris embarked on a rise through the California legal system, emerging as state attorney general in 2010. Following the November 2016 elections, Harris became just the second African American woman and the first South Asian American to win a seat in the U.S. Senate. She declared her candidacy for the 2020 U.S. presidential election on Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2019 but dropped out of the race before the end of the year. In August 2020, Joe Biden announced Harris as vice presidential running mate and after a close race, Biden and Harris were elected in November 2020.

Kamala Devi Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California. Reared in a predominantly African American neighborhood of Berkeley, she was brought to civil rights demonstrations as a toddler and sang in a Baptist choir.

Harris' mother, Shyamala, emigrated from India to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where she met Harris' Jamaican-born father, Donald. Shyamala carved out a career as a renowned breast-cancer researcher, while Donald became a Stanford University economics professor. Her mother also ensured that Harris and her younger sister, Maya, maintained ties to their Indian heritage by raising them with Hindu beliefs and taking them to her home country every couple of years.

Harris' parents divorced when she was seven years old, and at age 12 she moved with her mother and sister to Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She learned to speak some French during her time in Quebec and demonstrated her burgeoning political instincts by organizing a protest against a building owner who wouldn't allow neighborhood kids to play on the lawn.

Harris attended Westmount High School in Quebec, where she founded a dance troupe with a friend. Returning to the States to enter Howard University in Washington, D.C., she was elected to the liberal arts student council and joined the debate team, en route to a B.A. in political science and economics. Harris then enrolled at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, earning her J.D. in 1989.

After earning admittance to the State Bar of California in 1990, Harris began her career as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County. She became managing attorney of the Career Criminal Unit in the San Francisco District Attorney's Office in 1998, and in 2000 she was appointed chief of its Community and Neighborhood Division, during which time she established the state's first Bureau of Children’s Justice.

In 2003, Harris defeated incumbent Terence Hallinan, her former boss, to become San Francisco district attorney. Her accomplishments in this role include the launch of the "Back on Track" initiative that cut recidivism by offering job training and other educational programs for low-level offenders.

However, Harris also drew criticism for adhering to a campaign pledge and refusing to seek the death penalty for a gang member convicted of the 2004 killing of police officer Isaac Espinoza.

Harris continued her political ascent by narrowly beating Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley for California attorney general in November 2010, making her both the first African American and the first woman to hold the position.

She quickly made an impact in her role by pulling out of negotiations for a settlement from the country's five largest financial institutions for improper mortgage practices, eventually scoring a $20 million payout in 2012 that was five times the original proposed figure for her state.

The attorney general also made waves for her refusal to defend Proposition 8, a 2008 California ballot measure that was deemed unconstitutional by a federal court. After the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed an attempt to appeal the ruling in 2013, Harris officiated the first same-sex marriage in California since Prop 8 was initially enacted.

Additional accomplishments include a successful lawsuit against the false advertising of the for-profit Corinthian Colleges chain, as well as continued legal pursuit of the classified advertising service Backpage, which led to its CEO pleading guilty to facilitating prostitution and money laundering after Harris moved on to the Senate.

In November 2016, Harris handily defeated Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez for a U.S. Senate seat from California, thereby becoming just the second African American woman and the first South Asian American to enter the Senate.

Harris has since joined the chamber's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Select Committee on Intelligence, Committee on the Judiciary and Committee on the Budget. She has supported a single-payer healthcare system and introduced legislation to increase access to outdoor recreation sites in urban areas and provide financial relief in the face of rising housing costs.

Harris has also made a name for herself from her spot on the Judiciary Committee, particularly for her pointed questioning of Brett Kavanaugh, who faced accusations of sexual assault after being nominated for Supreme Court justice in 2018, and of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions during a 2017 hearing that delved into alleged collusion between the Trump team and Russian agents.

On January 21, 2019, during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day interview on Good Morning America, Harris announced she was running for president in 2020.

One of the top Democratic candidates, Harris joined a field that already included Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in a bid to push President Donald Trump from the White House after one term.

One week after her GMA announcement, Harris formally kicked off her campaign before an estimated 20,000 supporters at Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland, California. She remained near the top of the Democratic polls over the following weeks, withstanding the brouhaha that ensued when she admitted to smoking marijuana in a February interview, and another when an animal rights activist confronted her onstage at a political event in June.

Harris stood out as one of the top performers of the first Democratic primary debate in late June, garnering headlines for taking Joe Biden to task over his history of opposing federal busing for school integration. She found herself a target of attacks during the second debate the following month, with Biden and the rest criticizing her healthcare plan and aspects of her record as California attorney general.

Kamala Harris is the 49th vice president of the United States. She is the first woman, as well as the first Black American and South Asian American to ever hold the role. Harris is the successor to President Joseph Biden. Previously, she served as California's attorney general from 2011-2017 and as a California senator from 2017-2021. She ran as a Democratic candidate for the United States 2020 presidential election, but suspended her campaign in December 2019. In August 2020, she was chosen as Biden's running mate.

From left to right: Kamala, her sister Maya, and their mother, Shyamala.

Harris was born on October 20, 1964 to parents Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris in Oakland, California. Her father was an economics professor at Stanford University and her mother was a researcher of breast cancer. Her parents were both emigrants, her mother from India and her father from Jamaica. They were strong political activists and brought young Harris along to civil rights demonstrations. The experiences inspired her to pursue a career as a prosecutor. Harris has one sibling, a sister named Maya. Harris's parents divorced in 1972, and she and her sister were raised primarily by their mother in California.

Her support in the polls slipping by fall 2019, Harris sought to thrust herself back into the top tier by calling for the impeachment of Trump over his dealings with Ukraine and a focus on women's access to reproductive health care. Meanwhile, her campaign staff reportedly bickered over strategy and the chain of command, the dysfunction noted in a resignation letter from the state operations director that became public via The New York Times.

Harris attended religious services as a child at a Hindu temple and a Black Baptist church. She and her sister sang in the church's children's choir. Harris's parents made sure that their daughters were connected to their heritage and felt proud of their ethnicity growing up in a predominantly white area. They visited their parents's homelands of India and Jamaica where they met their grandparents and traversed the lands where their parents had walked when they were children.

Harris attended elementary school at Thousand Oaks Elementary School. For her middle and high school years she lived in Montreal, Quebec due to her mother's job change. There, she attended Notre-Dame-des-Neiges for most of middle school and was a student at F.A.C.E. School for her 8th grade year. For her high school years she attended Westmount High School and graduated in 1981.

In early December 2019, Harris announced that she was ending her once-promising presidential campaign.

On August 11, 2020, presidential hopeful Biden announced that he chose his former rival Harris as his running mate. "I have the great honor to announce that I’ve picked Kamala Harris — a fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants — as my running mate," Biden said. "Back when Kamala was Attorney General, she worked closely with [my son] Beau. I watched as they took on the big banks, lifted up working people, and protected women and kids from abuse. I was proud then, and I'm proud now to have her as my partner in this campaign."

She studied political science and economics at Howard University, was a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, and was a member of the school's student council as a freshman class representative. She graduated in 1986. Next, Harris went on to law school at University of California, Hastings College of the Law and graduated in 1989 with a Juris Doctor. She took the bar exam that year and failed, but took it a second time and passed the following year, making her part of The State Bar of California.

Harris's first job out of law school was as the deputy district attorney for Alameda County in California. She officially started working there in 1990, but interned at the office in the summer of 1988. At the end of the internship, she was offered the future job of deputy district attorney, set to begin after her graduation and successful completion of the bar exam. During Harris's time as deputy district attorney, she was appointed to both the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the Medical Assistance Commission by her boyfriend at the time, Willie Brown, who was speaker of the state assembly in California.

In 1998, Harris began working at the San Francisco district attorney's office as the managing attorney of the Career Criminal Unit. She focused on prosecuting three-strike cases and repeat offenders.

From 2004 to 2010, Harris served as San Francisco's district attorney. She was the first woman to ever be elected to the role, the first Black American woman and South Asian American woman to hold the role in California, and the first South Asian American district attorney in the United States. In 2007, she ran for a second term unopposed and won 98% of the vote. She was sworn into office in January 2008.

Harris announced her intention to run for California's attorney general in 2008. She was elected in 2010 and was the first Black American and South Asian American to hold the role. Votes were split almost fifty-fifty between Harris and her Republican opponent, Steve Cooley; Harris won by a narrow margin of 0.8%. She served a total of two consecutive terms. She was first sworn into office in January 2011 and again in January 2015. She did not serve a full second term as she was elected to the United States Senate in November 2016. Xavier Becerra replaced her position as California's attorney general in January 2017.

On November 8, 2016, Harris won the race for the United States Senate as California's representative against opponent Loretta Sanchez. Both are Democrats. As Harris's election coincided with Donald Trump's election to the presidency, much of her time as senator was spent pushing back on his policies. She was involved in several high-profile government hearings where she was known as a tough questioner of witnesses, something she has been both criticized and praised for. She was reprimanded by Republican Senators John McCain and Richard Burr during the 2017 hearing regarding the firing of FBI director James Comey when she questioned Jeff Sessions, who stated Harris's "rushed" questions were making him "nervous."

"I'm honored to join him as our party's nominee for Vice President, and do what it takes to make him our Commander-in-Chief," Harris said.

Harris is the first Black woman and person of South Asian descent to be nominated for a national office by a major party. She is also the fourth woman in history to compete on a major party's presidential ticket.

One week after a highly contentious debate between Biden and Trump, Harris and Mike Pence engaged in a far more civil vice presidential debate on October 7, 2020. Still, Harris kept the heat on her opponent by repeatedly attacking his administration's handling of the coronavirus, which had resulted in more than 210,000 American deaths to that point, as well as Republican attempts to ram through the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett shortly before Election Day. Harris also pushed back against Pence's assertions that a President Biden would ban fracking and immediately raise taxes, and defended her own record as California attorney general.

Other Trump administration changes that Harris opposed included the nomination of Betsy DeVos for secretary of education; the confirmation of Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh; and the January 2017 signing of Executive Order 13769, popularly referred to as the "Trump travel ban" or "Muslim ban," which restricted citizens from countries with a majority population of Muslims from entering the United States for ninety days.

On November 7, 2020, four days after election day, Biden was declared as the 46th president-elect after winning Pennsylvania, making Harris the first female vice president and first Black person and Asian American to hold the position.

Harris announced her intention to run for president on January 21, 2019. Within twenty-four hours, she had raised $1.5 million for her campaign. Her polling numbers throughout the race fluctuated in response to her performance in the various Democratic presidential debates––she hit a high of fifteen percent support after a successful debate in June, but her polling percentages steadily dropped into the single digits for the remainder of her campaign.

That evening, a beaming Harris took the stage at a victory rally in Wilmington, Delaware, her suffragette white pantsuit a nod to the efforts of her predecessors. Harris thanked the voters, her running mate and her family, with a special acknowledgment to her mother.

Grievances against Harris during her campaign included her history as a prosecutor and attorney general, something criticized mainly by Democrats and leftists who viewed her judicial decisions as too tough on crime and not progressive enough. While she was called out for specific controversial rulings that she and her office made, Harris also received criticism for merely having been a prosecutor, as some progressives argued that it made her implicit in a flawed and racially biased justice system. For this, Harris became the subject of a series of internet memes called "Kamala Is a Cop," in which various out-of-context photos and videos of her were posted online with disparaging captions alluding to her controversial policy decisions.

"She maybe didn't imagine quite this moment," the vice president said. "But she believed so deeply in America where a moment like this is possible, and so I am thinking about her and about the generations of women, Black women, Asian, white, Latina, Native American women — who throughout our nation's history have paved the way for this moment — women who fought and sacrificed so much for equality and liberty and justice for all."

On December 14, 2020, all 538 electors in the Electoral College cast their vote, formalizing Biden’s victory over President Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Biden received 306 votes and Trump received 232.

Harris published two books in early 2019: The Truths We Hold: An American Journey reflects on her personal relationships and upbringing, and Superheroes Are Everywhere, another memoir rendered in picture-book form for kids.

In early December 2019, Harris suspended her campaign, citing a lack of financial resources. In August 2020, Harris was chosen as Biden's running mate, five months after he publicly stated he would choose a woman to be his vice president.

She first became an author in 2009 with Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer, which explores her philosophy and ideas for criminal-justice reform.

Harris married lawyer Doug Emhoff on August 22, 2014, in Santa Barbara, California. She is the stepmother of his two children, Ella and Cole, who affectionately call her "Mamala."

Kamala Harris being sworn into office as the first female vice president in United States history on January 20, 2021.

Biden won the 2020 presidential race with over 81 million popular votes and 306 electoral votes.

Harris was sworn into office on January 20, 2021. Some of her first assignments in office were to figure out the causes of undocumented immigrants from Central America in the United States, and to come up with a plan for national voting reform. The 2020 election resulted in a 50-50 split between party members in the Senate, making Harris the tiebreaker for chamber votes. Harris made fifteen tiebreaking votes in 2021, more than any vice president ever has in one calendar year.

Tensions between Harris's team and Biden's team of White House aides were reported in November 2021. Harris was said to have told several confidants that she felt politically "constrained," and others have suggested she's being "sidelined." Harris became the first female acting president for a brief time on November 19, 2021, when President Biden was undergoing a medical procedure.

Harris married Douglas Emhoff in 2014 and is the step-mother to Emhoff's daughters from a previous marriage, Ella and Cole.

Harris has written three books: Smart on Crime (2009); Superheroes Are Everywhere (2019); and The Truths We Hold (2019).

After attending Howard University and the University of California's Hastings College of the Law, Kamala Harris embarked on a rise through the California legal system, emerging as state attorney general in 2010. Following the November 2016 elections, Harris became just the second African American woman and the first South Asian American to win a seat in the U.S. Senate. She declared her candidacy for the 2020 U.S. presidential election on Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2019 but dropped out of the race before the end of the year. In August 2020, Joe Biden announced Harris as vice presidential running mate and after a close race, Biden and Harris were elected in November 2020.

Kamala Devi Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California. Reared in a predominantly African American neighborhood of Berkeley, she was brought to civil rights demonstrations as a toddler and sang in a Baptist choir.

Harris' mother, Shyamala, emigrated from India to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where she met Harris' Jamaican-born father, Donald. Shyamala carved out a career as a renowned breast-cancer researcher, while Donald became a Stanford University economics professor. Her mother also ensured that Harris and her younger sister, Maya, maintained ties to their Indian heritage by raising them with Hindu beliefs and taking them to her home country every couple of years.

Harris' parents divorced when she was seven years old, and at age 12 she moved with her mother and sister to Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She learned to speak some French during her time in Quebec and demonstrated her burgeoning political instincts by organizing a protest against a building owner who wouldn't allow neighborhood kids to play on the lawn.

Harris attended Westmount High School in Quebec, where she founded a dance troupe with a friend. Returning to the States to enter Howard University in Washington, D.C., she was elected to the liberal arts student council and joined the debate team, en route to a B.A. in political science and economics. Harris then enrolled at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, earning her J.D. in 1989.

After earning admittance to the State Bar of California in 1990, Harris began her career as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County. She became managing attorney of the Career Criminal Unit in the San Francisco District Attorney's Office in 1998, and in 2000 she was appointed chief of its Community and Neighborhood Division, during which time she established the state's first Bureau of Children’s Justice.

In 2003, Harris defeated incumbent Terence Hallinan, her former boss, to become San Francisco district attorney. Her accomplishments in this role include the launch of the "Back on Track" initiative that cut recidivism by offering job training and other educational programs for low-level offenders.

However, Harris also drew criticism for adhering to a campaign pledge and refusing to seek the death penalty for a gang member convicted of the 2004 killing of police officer Isaac Espinoza.

Harris continued her political ascent by narrowly beating Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley for California attorney general in November 2010, making her both the first African American and the first woman to hold the position.

She quickly made an impact in her role by pulling out of negotiations for a settlement from the country's five largest financial institutions for improper mortgage practices, eventually scoring a $20 million payout in 2012 that was five times the original proposed figure for her state.

The attorney general also made waves for her refusal to defend Proposition 8, a 2008 California ballot measure that was deemed unconstitutional by a federal court. After the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed an attempt to appeal the ruling in 2013, Harris officiated the first same-sex marriage in California since Prop 8 was initially enacted.

Additional accomplishments include a successful lawsuit against the false advertising of the for-profit Corinthian Colleges chain, as well as continued legal pursuit of the classified advertising service Backpage, which led to its CEO pleading guilty to facilitating prostitution and money laundering after Harris moved on to the Senate.

In November 2016, Harris handily defeated Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez for a U.S. Senate seat from California, thereby becoming just the second African American woman and the first South Asian American to enter the Senate.

Harris has since joined the chamber's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Select Committee on Intelligence, Committee on the Judiciary and Committee on the Budget. She has supported a single-payer healthcare system and introduced legislation to increase access to outdoor recreation sites in urban areas and provide financial relief in the face of rising housing costs.

Harris has also made a name for herself from her spot on the Judiciary Committee, particularly for her pointed questioning of Brett Kavanaugh, who faced accusations of sexual assault after being nominated for Supreme Court justice in 2018, and of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions during a 2017 hearing that delved into alleged collusion between the Trump team and Russian agents.

On January 21, 2019, during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day interview on Good Morning America, Harris announced she was running for president in 2020.

One of the top Democratic candidates, Harris joined a field that already included Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in a bid to push President Donald Trump from the White House after one term.

One week after her GMA announcement, Harris formally kicked off her campaign before an estimated 20,000 supporters at Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland, California. She remained near the top of the Democratic polls over the following weeks, withstanding the brouhaha that ensued when she admitted to smoking marijuana in a February interview, and another when an animal rights activist confronted her onstage at a political event in June.

Harris stood out as one of the top performers of the first Democratic primary debate in late June, garnering headlines for taking Joe Biden to task over his history of opposing federal busing for school integration. She found herself a target of attacks during the second debate the following month, with Biden and the rest criticizing her healthcare plan and aspects of her record as California attorney general.

Her support in the polls slipping by fall 2019, Harris sought to thrust herself back into the top tier by calling for the impeachment of Trump over his dealings with Ukraine and a focus on women's access to reproductive health care. Meanwhile, her campaign staff reportedly bickered over strategy and the chain of command, the dysfunction noted in a resignation letter from the state operations director that became public via The New York Times.

In early December 2019, Harris announced that she was ending her once-promising presidential campaign.

On August 11, 2020, presidential hopeful Biden announced that he chose his former rival Harris as his running mate. "I have the great honor to announce that I’ve picked Kamala Harris — a fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants — as my running mate," Biden said. "Back when Kamala was Attorney General, she worked closely with [my son] Beau. I watched as they took on the big banks, lifted up working people, and protected women and kids from abuse. I was proud then, and I'm proud now to have her as my partner in this campaign."

"I'm honored to join him as our party's nominee for Vice President, and do what it takes to make him our Commander-in-Chief," Harris said.

Harris is the first Black woman and person of South Asian descent to be nominated for a national office by a major party. She is also the fourth woman in history to compete on a major party's presidential ticket.

One week after a highly contentious debate between Biden and Trump, Harris and Mike Pence engaged in a far more civil vice presidential debate on October 7, 2020. Still, Harris kept the heat on her opponent by repeatedly attacking his administration's handling of the coronavirus, which had resulted in more than 210,000 American deaths to that point, as well as Republican attempts to ram through the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett shortly before Election Day. Harris also pushed back against Pence's assertions that a President Biden would ban fracking and immediately raise taxes, and defended her own record as California attorney general.

On November 7, 2020, four days after election day, Biden was declared as the 46th president-elect after winning Pennsylvania, making Harris the first female vice president and first Black person and Asian American to hold the position.

That evening, a beaming Harris took the stage at a victory rally in Wilmington, Delaware, her suffragette white pantsuit a nod to the efforts of her predecessors. Harris thanked the voters, her running mate and her family, with a special acknowledgment to her mother.

"She maybe didn't imagine quite this moment," the vice president said. "But she believed so deeply in America where a moment like this is possible, and so I am thinking about her and about the generations of women, Black women, Asian, white, Latina, Native American women — who throughout our nation's history have paved the way for this moment — women who fought and sacrificed so much for equality and liberty and justice for all."

On December 14, 2020, all 538 electors in the Electoral College cast their vote, formalizing Biden’s victory over President Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Biden received 306 votes and Trump received 232.

Harris published two books in early 2019: The Truths We Hold: An American Journey reflects on her personal relationships and upbringing, and Superheroes Are Everywhere, another memoir rendered in picture-book form for kids.

She first became an author in 2009 with Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer, which explores her philosophy and ideas for criminal-justice reform.

Harris married lawyer Doug Emhoff on August 22, 2014, in Santa Barbara, California. She is the stepmother of his two children, Ella and Cole, who affectionately call her "Mamala."