USA. Kamala Harris – who is she? She could become the first woman in the White House

After the announcement resignation from running for a second term President of the United States, Joe Biden declared that he supports the candidacy of his vice president Kamala Harris in November elections“Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be our party's nominee,” Joe Biden wrote on the X platform.

“I am honored to have the president's endorsement and I intend to work hard for this nomination and win it,” she said. Kamala Harris on social media. She assured that she would do everything in her power to unite the Democratic Party and United Statesto overcome Donald Trump

She also praised Biden’s decision to drop out of the race, calling it a “selfless and patriotic act.” She added that Biden puts Americans and his country “above all else.”

Kamala Harris comes from an immigrant family. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, came from India. She is a breast cancer specialist. Her father, Donald Harris, was born in Jamaica and became an economics professor at the prestigious Stanford University, among others. Both were activists in the Civil Rights Movement. Kamala studied law at Hastings College of the Law and before that at Howard University in Washington. It was a school that convinced “you can be anything you want to be, you are young, talented and black, and you should not let anything get in the way of your success,” she noted in one of her statements. As a main reason for taking up a career in law enforcement, she cited “being at the table where decisions are made.” She also claimed that “the world needs more prosecutors who are socially conscious.”

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Harris began her prosecutorial career in 1990 as an assistant district attorney for Alameda County, where she worked for eight years. She initially specialized in child sexual assault cases. From 2004, she served as the district attorney for San Francisco until 2011, when she was appointed attorney general for the state of California, a position she held until 2017.

At the time, she worked closely with Beau Biden, Joe Biden's son, who died of brain cancer and was then Delaware's attorney general. “I watched them take on big banks, support working people, and protect women and children from exploitation. I was proud then and I am proud now to have her as my campaign partner,” Biden wrote.

Harris called herself a “progressive prosecutor.” She argued that it was possible to be tough on criminals while also confronting deep racial inequalities in the justice system and prisons. She became a prosecutor, she said, because she believed the system could be changed from within. That idea became a central theme of her presidential campaign: Voters could trust her to reform the criminal justice system because she knew it inside and out.

Harris has always said she opposes the death penalty, but as California’s attorney general, she has pledged to defend it. In 2014, she appealed a federal judge’s decision to declare the death penalty unconstitutional.

In 2016, she was elected to the Democratic Senate of California. She was the first Black woman to serve in the U.S. Senate in over a decade, and the second African-American woman and first person of South Asian descent to be elected to the Senate.

She quickly became a rising star in the Democratic party, known for her sharp questioning of Trump administration officials and appointees. She served on Senate committees, questioning Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was appointed to the position despite allegations of sexual harassment by two women, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was suspected of having liaised with Russia during Trump's presidential campaign.

In recent years, Kamala Harris has “moved more to the left,” The Economic Times said, including her initial support for the “Medicare for All” bill, authored by progressive Senator Bernie Sanders. Harris also supported the proposal to raise minimum wage at the federal level up to $15 per hour.

During her tenure in the U.S. Senate, she repeatedly raised the issue of systemic racism, serving as an advocate for racial minorities. After the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a black man, she advocated for deep reform of the American police.

She has served on several key Senate committees, including the Intelligence Committee and the Judiciary Committee.

In early 2019, Harris announced her intention to run for the highest office in the land.

When she announced her run in the Democratic primary—which she did on January 15, the 90th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s birth—she presented herself as a candidate who would make history. She recalled Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, who unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1972.

Harris was initially considered a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. After a June debate, her support had topped 10 percent. The 55-year-old senator presented herself as a candidate who could mobilize the party’s young, mostly progressive voters while appealing to more moderate voters.

She was a distinct candidate, not only because of her gender and origin, but also because of her political postulates. Among other things, she advocated for the introduction of a requirement to obtain federal consent for individual states to restrict access to abortion. She also repeatedly raised the issue of racial discrimination in the US. During the debates before the primaries, she sharply criticized Joe Biden, on the one hand for incompetence, on the other for racism. Among other things, she accused him of opposing busing students from their homes to schools many years ago, even though it was supposed to end racial segregation.

In the summer, her support began to fall. In many November opinion polls, she had support below 5 percent. After 11 months of campaigning, due to unfavorable polls and lack of funds, she gave up running for president of the United States. As she said, it was “one of the most difficult decisions of her life.”

“I want to be clear: Since I am no longer running for president, I will do everything in my power to defeat Donald Trump and fight for the future of our country,” Harris said at the time. In March, she threw her support behind Joe Biden “with great enthusiasm.”

– Kamala, as you all know, is smart, tough, experienced. She is also a proven fighter for the soul of this country, for the middle class. (…) Kamala knows how to govern and she knows how to meet difficult challenges – Biden convinced before the previous elections, in which he announced her as a candidate for vice president.

The politician spoke with appreciation of the candidate's professional experience. He recalled her professionalism when she served as a prosecutor and the skills demonstrated during the thorough Senate hearings of President Trump's nominees for important offices in the US administration. “Kamala Harris's story is the story of America,” he said, referring to her background in an immigrant family.