Big steps for a ‘little girl’: Harris rises to top after climbing again out of political wreckage

CHICAGO — In less than a month, Kamala Harris has gone from being the most unpopular vice president in modern U.S. history to an adored Democratic presidential nominee who reversed the party’s fortunes, opening leads in some battleground states and putting former President Donald Trump on the defensive.

It is the latest twist in the improbable rise of Ms. Harris.

On Thursday, she will stand as a historic figure on the stage at Chicago’s United Center to formally accept the nomination. She will be the first woman of Black and Indian descent to accept a major party’s presidential nomination.

Ms. Harris has risen from a middle-class upbringing in Oakland, California, with a summer job at McDonald’s to an at times invisible and often mocked vice president under President Biden to suddenly find herself cast as the savior of the Democratic Party.

She has repeatedly been on the verge of political oblivion only to find an escape hatch to a higher post.

During a 2020 Democratic presidential debate, Ms. Harris tore into Mr. Biden, her future boss, blaming him for holding back generations of Black children because of his opposition to federal school busing while in the Senate. She told the story of a little Black girl who succeeded because she was bused to school and concluded the story by revealing, “That little girl was me.”

Although some thought the broadside at Mr. Biden was unfair, he rescued her from the wreckage of a political campaign that never gained steam and made her his vice president.

Mr. Biden repeated the favor this summer when he abruptly dropped his reelection run and endorsed her for the top of the Democratic ticket, making her the clear successor to his legacy. She secured the nomination at breakneck speed and remarkable enthusiasm, contradicting her rocky path to this milestone.

Ms. Harris was born on Oct. 20, 1964, to immigrant parents who first met as civil rights activists. She recalls attending political demonstrations and marching for civil rights as a small child.

“I like to joke that my sister and I grew up surrounded by adults who spent their full-time marching and shouting for this thing called justice,” Ms. Harris wrote on social media in 2017.

Ms. Harris’ parents — Jamaican economist Donald J. Harris and Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a breast cancer scientist born in India who came to the U.S. at age 19 — divorced when Ms. Harris was young. She and her sister, Maya, were raised by her mother, whom she credits with “shaping us into the women we would become” and teaching her to be proud of her Indian and Black heritage, according to her 2019 autobiography.

She graduated from Howard University, a historically Black college in the District of Columbia, in 1986 and returned to California to earn a degree in 1989 from the University of California Hastings College of Law.

Ms. Harris became a prosecutor and later an assistant district attorney in San Francisco. She developed a reputation for strictness with her staff and criminals and began transforming that persona into an asset for political campaigns.

In the mid-1990s, Ms. Harris got a career boost from her boyfriend, Willie Brown, who served as a California state Assembly speaker and San Francisco mayor. When the relationship started, she was 29 and he was 60.

As speaker, Mr. Brown appointed Ms. Harris to two plum positions on state regulatory boards: the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission.

“If you were asked to be on a board that regulated medical care, would you say no?” Ms. Harris told SFWeekly magazine a few years later.

She broke off the relationship in 1996, but her connection to Mr. Brown helped open doors to San Francisco high society and California’s political elite.

In 2019, Mr. Brown acknowledged giving her appointments that furthered her career.

“Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to state commissions when I was Assembly speaker,” he wrote in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle that year.

Ms. Harris sought to distance herself from Mr. Brown, who repeatedly faced corruption allegations. In 2003, she told SFWeekly that he was “an albatross hanging around my neck.”

In 2011, Ms. Harris became the first woman, the first Black American and the first Asian American elected as California attorney general.

In that race, she also received the powerful endorsement of President Obama.

As attorney general, Ms. Harris positioned herself as a champion of working-class people exploited by large corporations. She won a $20 billion settlement for Californians who suffered foreclosures and a $1.1 billion settlement with a for-profit college accused of preying on students and veterans.

In 2016, Ms. Harris won election to the U.S. Senate, becoming only the second Black woman to reach the chamber. She used her legal skills to fiercely argue against President Trump’s policies as if she were back in a courtroom prosecuting a case. She garnered headlines with her tough questioning of Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

She tried to parlay her Senate career into a presidential campaign in 2020. As a senator with star power from the country’s largest state who drew comparisons to Mr. Obama, she was seen as an early favorite to take over the race.

Her campaign crashed before the Iowa caucuses, weighed down by reported mismanagement.

On the campaign trail, she struggled to stake out consistent positions. After scoring a viral moment for attacking Mr. Biden’s stance on busing, she struggled to answer whether she believed busing should be federally mandated to integrate schools.

The Biden campaign said she was “tying herself in knots trying not to answer the very questions she posed.”

She was one of two Democratic candidates who raised their hands when moderators asked whether they would abolish private health insurance. After being attacked for her answer, Ms. Harris changed it a day later and insisted she misunderstood the question.

In August 2020, Mr. Biden picked Ms. Harris as his running mate, fulfilling his promise to put a woman on the ticket. He declared Ms. Harris to be the future of the Democratic Party.

Ms. Harris’ transition to vice president was no smoother. Less than 10 months into office, more Americans disapproved of her job performance than approved. As of last week, roughly 50% of Americans disapproved of her handling of the vice presidency and just 38.6% approved, according to aggregate polling compiled by FiveThirtyEight.

Even by Washington’s standards, she gained a reputation for churning through staff at an alarming rate. By the end of Ms. Harris’ first year, a steady stream of high-profile staffers departed, including her chief of staff, chief spokesperson and communications director.

In less than four years, Ms. Harris’ office has had “extraordinarily high” staff turnover of 92%, according to the watchdog group Open The Books. As of March 31, only four of her initial 47 staffers from the first year in office were still serving the vice president “consistently and without interruption,” the group said.

The resignations raised doubts about Ms. Harris’ management style and readiness to succeed Mr. Biden.

Shortly after taking office, Mr. Biden anointed Ms. Harris as the administration’s “border czar,” tasking her with addressing the root causes of migration and reducing the flow of illegal immigrants in the U.S.

Under her watch, the Biden administration set a record for migrant encounters on the southern border for three consecutive years. All told, roughly 10 million illegal immigrants, including 380 people on the terrorist watchlist, crossed into the U.S.

Ms. Harris came under fire for a devastating interview with Lester Holt of NBC News in which she tried to defend the fact that she had not visited the border.

“I haven’t been to Europe,” she said, wondering why visiting the border would be necessary. “And I mean, I don’t understand the point you’re making.”

The answer fueled criticism that the border czar was essentially a do-nothing job.

The NBC News interview was one of several public appearances in which critics lambasted her for talking down to voters.

While appearing on a syndicated radio show in 2022, Ms. Harris explained the war in Ukraine as if she were talking to a child.

“Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a more powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So basically, that’s wrong, and it goes against everything that we stand for,” she said.

A year later, she incoherently tried to explain culture at a New Orleans music festival.

“Culture is — it is a reflection of our moment in our time, right? And in present culture is the way we express how we’re feeling about the moment,” she said.

The unflattering stories amassed, and some Democrats found her tenure as vice president underwhelming. Some even called for Mr. Biden to replace her on the ticket.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Ms. Harris’ profile and reputation shifted. She traveled to dozens of solid Democratic and battleground states and warned of a Republican invasion of voters’ private lives that would intensify unless voters supported Democrats.

During these speeches, Ms. Harris appeared to connect with younger voters and people of color, two groups whose enthusiasm for Mr. Biden had been slipping. It helped partly revive her reputation in the months before Mr. Biden was forced out of the race by Democratic Party heavyweights — again rescuing her from political oblivion.