Former Vice President Joe Biden has announced Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) as his running mate for the fall campaign.
Harris has been a senator from California since 2017.
Earlier this year she sought the Democratic presidential nomination against Biden.
Prior to being elected a senator, she served as district attorney in San Francisco and state attorney general.
Harris, 55, had long been seen as among the likeliest candidates to be chosen.
“Sen. Harris would appear to be a candidate who would be the easiest to sell to all the varied constituencies that make up the Democratic coalition,” said Democratic strategist Joel Payne. “It would also appear that her pick would make the least waves, and in a race where most observers feel like Biden enters the fall with a marked advantage, a Harris selection allows that momentum to continue virtually uninterrupted.”
During her campaign, she proposed cutting middle-class taxes; recently advocated policing reform; pushed a Senate bill to make lynching a federal crime; played a high-profile role in the confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Harris had a friendly relationship with Biden before they competed in the 2020 primaries, and Harris knew his late son, Beau, when they served as attorneys general.
But Harris also attacked Biden more harshly than any other Democrat in the 2020 race, rebuking him in the first televised debate for having worked with segregationist senators to oppose school busing policies in the 1970s.
Harris is among the best-known Black women in American politics, with appeal to both moderates and liberals.
But she has struggled with questions about her law-enforcement record.
The way she and her advisers handled the 2020 primary left some in the Biden campaign with significant reservations.
On being considered for vice president: “I know that conversation is taking place in the press and among the pundits, and I’m honored to even be considered, if that’s the case.”
Harris was born in Oakland, California, to two immigrant parents: an Indian-born mother and Jamaican-born father.
After her parent’s divorce, Ms Harris was raised primarily by her Hindu single mother, a cancer researcher and civil rights activist.
She grew up engaged with her Indian heritage, joining her mother on visits to India, but Harris has said that her mother adopted Oakland’s African-American culture, immersing her two daughters – Kamala and her younger sister Maya – within it.
“My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters,” she wrote in her autobiography The Truths We Hold. “She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.”
She went on to attend Howard University, one of the nation’s preeminent historically black colleges and universities, which she has described as among the most formative experiences of her life.
Harris says she’s always been comfortable with her identity and simply describes herself as “an American”.
In 2019, she said that politicians should not have to fit into compartments because of their color or background.
“My point was: I am who I am. I’m good with it. You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it,” she said.
After four years at Howard, Harris went on to earn her law degree at the University of California, Hastings, and began her career in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office.
She became the district attorney – the top prosecutor – for San Francisco in 2003, before being elected the first woman and the first African American to serve as California’s attorney general, the top lawyer and law enforcement official in America’s most populous state.
In her nearly two terms in office as attorney general, Harris gained a reputation as one of the Democratic party’s rising stars, using this momentum to propel her election as California’s junior US senator in 2017.
Since her election to the US Senate, the former prosecutor gained favour among progressives for her acerbic questioning of then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Attorney General William Barr in key Senate hearings.