Kamala Harris, the former California prosecutor and first female U.S. vice president, now aims to take the next step by winning for the White House.
Harris is the first woman, first black person and first person of South Asian descent to be vice president of the United States. After four years in the second-highest office, she now wants to make history again by holding the top job.
She received President Joe Biden's blessing when he abruptly stepped back from being the Democratic candidate just three months ago, triggering her whirlwind campaign.
Harris was born on Oct. 20, 1964, in Oakland, California. She often touts her middle-class upbringing to voters: Her father Donald immigrated from Jamaica to study economics; her mother Shyamala – a cancer researcher and civil rights activist – came from India. They married in 1963 and separated when Harris was 5 years old.
Harris, 60, has largely played down her gender and race. But she has said that India is an important part of her life. When she and her younger sister Maya were children, their mother traveled with them to India almost every other year to see relatives there – and to instill in them a love of Indian food.
Shyamala died of colon cancer in 2009. Harris rarely speaks of her father, who went on to become a professor at Stanford University. She once told an interviewer that they were not close.
Harris became the first black district attorney of San Francisco in 2002 and later she served for six years as California's attorney general. When she moved to the U.S. Senate in 2017, she used her experience as a prosecutor to make her mark at high-profile hearings by grilling witnesses, from Trump officials to Supreme Court nominees.
Harris met her partner Doug Emhoff, an entertainment lawyer, relatively late in life. A friend set up a blind date for the two of them in California, where they were living at the time, in 2013. They married the following year.
Emhoff has two adult children from his first marriage: Cole and Ella.
As the first husband of a vice president, Emhoff is also the first "Second Gentleman" of the United States. Should Harris win and become the first woman to ever hold the presidency, he would be the very first "First Gentleman."