All Your Kamala Harris Questions, Answered
From brat memes to Montel Williams.
Do you hear that? It’s the hypnotic buzz of the KHive growing to a deafening roar now that Kamala Harris is officially running for president. After Joe Biden dropped out from the 2024 race on Sunday, he tapped Harris, his vice-president, to run in his stead. What exactly does this mean? More coconut memes for sure, considering that Harris’s official presidential bid has only intensified the internet’s apparent love for her brand of wine-mom charm. But there’s more than Charli XCX supercuts to Kamala Harris. Here, a primer.
if kamala harris becomes president it’s bc of this edit pic.twitter.com/kyDOhNIUUI
— sophia (@hellopugh) July 21, 2024
my mentally unstable group chat that sends each other coconut memes pic.twitter.com/fh5kfgfKvn
— JP (@jpbrammer) July 21, 2024
“I want $10 million on coconuts.” pic.twitter.com/W1HDTEdnZC
— Siraj Hashmi (@SirajAHashmi) July 21, 2024
I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say we need to crowdfund this video into 30 second TV spots. Incredible.pic.twitter.com/7mxDXNqNdp
— Jeremiah Johnson ???? (@JeremiahDJohns) July 21, 2024
Kamala looking for a VP pic.twitter.com/iV258CuAXY
— Connor Ewing (@ConnorMEwing) July 21, 2024
Maya Rudolph checking her email right now pic.twitter.com/G0tE1Tyxl4
— ali golub really needs a job ???? (@alibrooke4ever) July 21, 2024
Has Biden endorsed her?
I mean, yeah. Although he didn’t name her in his official withdrawal, Biden endorsed his veep in a separate Twitter post shortly afterward, writing, “My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.” Let’s!
My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best… pic.twitter.com/x8DnvuImJV
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 21, 2024
Who else has endorsed Harris?
Since Biden’s announcement on Sunday, Harris has locked in a pretty strong backing from major Establishment Democrats with the exception of a few key players, including Barack Obama. Bill and Hillary Clinton released a joint endorsement. Elizabeth Warren has thrown her support behind her. They were joined by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi later on Monday. Harris has also gotten the nod from a handful of progressive young voices in Congress, too, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, Jamaal Bowman, and Ilhan Omar.
Naturally, Harris also has a few exciting cultural endorsements, including the brat delegation and a lot of Taylor Swift fans. In the 24 hours since Biden endorsed her, her campaign has reportedly raised $81 million, much of it coming from new donors. If your parents are texting you asking what brat is, you have Harris to thank.
Who are Kamala Harris’s parents?
Harris was born in Oakland in 1964 to Shyamala Gopalan, a Tamil Indian biologist, and Donald J. Harris, a Jamaican American economics professor at Stanford. (Her parents met at an off-campus club at UC Berkeley while studying for Ph.D.s there.) Harris, whose parents divorced when she was 7, moved between areas of the Midwest, Berkeley, and then Montreal before heading to Howard University in Washington, D.C., for college.
What’s Kamala Harris’s history as a prosecutor?
Harris spent the first two decades of her career working as a prosecutor in California, where her approach can most vaguely be described as moderate — she took some stances that were progressive for the time, but she has also been criticized for a “tough on crime” attitude that hurt low-income families and contributed to mass incarceration.
She started out in 1990, prosecuting child-sexual-assault cases in the Alameda County prosecutor’s office in Oakland before working her way up the ladder in the Bay Area political scene. By 2003, she had mounted a successful campaign for San Francisco’s district attorney, serving two terms that saw her create an environmental-crimes unit and a hate-crimes unit, come out against the death penalty, and launch Back on Track, a reentry program for nonviolent offenders under 30 years old designed to curb recidivism.
Harris left office in 2010 to run for California’s attorney general, becoming the first woman, the first African American, and the first South Asian American to hold the position in state history. She also served two terms there, during which she secured a hefty deal to give homeowners better mortgage aid and went after Corinthian Colleges for misleading low-income students about the debts they would incur and the schools’ job-placement rates.
Most of the criticisms leveled against Harris’s prosecutionwork argue that there’s a good reason she would later call herself California’s “top cop.” She seems to have avoided prosecuting police shootings. In her second term as AG, she refused to endorse a bill that would have required her office to appoint special prosecutors for deadly police shootings, siding with the police unions. Her anti-truancy efforts culminated in a controversial 2011 law that criminalized parents of children who missed school. (Harris later admitted that particular law had “unintended consequences” that she “regrets.”)
What happened with her first presidential run?
Harris ran for Senate in 2015, taking the open seat of Barbara Boxer, who opted not to run for reelection after over 20 years. Harris was elected with 60 percent of the vote, and three years later, in January 2019, she announced that she would run for president in the 2020 election. During the campaign, she faced increasing scrutiny about her policies as California’s attorney general. Harris defended herself as a self-described “progressive prosecutor,” pointing to her work on police reform — under her guidance, California’s Department of Justice was an early adopter of body cameras and implicit-bias training.
She withdrew from the race in December 2019 and endorsed Biden in March 2020; he officially selected her as his running mate in August of that year.
What’s her record on reproductive rights?
In an administration that has been frustratingly feeble in the face of the systematic dismantling of our reproductive rights, Harris has been an outspoken advocate for abortion. Earlier this year, the White House sent her on a “reproductive-freedoms tour” that included a stop at a Minnesota abortion clinic, a visit that’s believed to be the first of its kind for any president or vice-president. Where Biden seems uncomfortable even uttering the word abortion, Harris hasn’t hesitated to call the fall of Roe a “serious health crisis” and pin the blame on Donald Trump, warning that he could enact a nationwide ban if elected. If she stays this direct and unwavering, reproductive rights might just stand a chance this election cycle.
Sorry to ask this, but what is Kamala Harris’s dating history?
A woman is much more than her dating history, but Harris’s is intriguing. In the mid-’90s, she had a well-publicized relationship with then-Speaker of the California State Assembly Willie Brown, who was 30 years older than her. (He was also married, but he and his wife had been estranged since 1981, and tabloids portrayed him as a notorious playboy.) In 1994, when she was 30 and he was 60, Brown appointed Harris to the state’s Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission, prompting accusations of cronyism. Years later, during her district-attorney campaign, Harris called her connection to Brown an “albatross hanging around my neck.”
Less burdensome: In 2001, while she was making a name for herself at San Francisco City Hall, she briefly dated the talk-show host Montel Williams, a relationship that has naturally resurfaced since she became the front-runner Democratic candidate. To me, there is something inscrutably chic about having a brief but decades-old relationship with a random celebrity. To Williams, not so much. He tweeted Monday morning, “I’ve said what I’m going to say about the thing that keeps trending. My friends in the media should think twice about wasting time on a 20+ year old picture — you will find doing so will earn an unpleasant reaction.” Still, he isn’t opposed to seeing his ex in the Oval Office; the guy retweeted Maryland governor Wes Moore’s endorsement of Harris. Sounds like the breakup was amicable!
Currently, Harris is married to a guy named Doug. His full name is Doug Emhoff, he’s an entertainment lawyer, and they got married in 2014 after being set up on a blind date one year prior. When you know, you know! Through Emhoff, Harris has two stepchildren: 29-year-old Cole, an assistant at an entertainment agency in L.A., and 25-year-old Ella, of Dimes Square fame. You may recognize Ella from her arts-and-crafts-meets-Ssense fashion sensibility, her highly publicized relationship with GQ fashion writer Sam Hine, or her knitting club. Let’s just say there are about to be a lot more Secret Service agents at Fashion Week.
Sooo excited for the Ella Emhoff fits
— Casey Lewis (@caseymlewis) July 21, 2024
What does Harris like to wear?
Speaking of, let’s talk about Kamala Harris’s style for a second. She wears pantsuits, but not in a way that screams “I’m wearing a pantsuit!,” if you know what I mean. (You know what I mean.) She looks amazing in a pussy bow. She famously enjoys wearing Converse, including on the cover of Vogue, and has spoken about wearing pearls — which hold a connection to her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, one of the country’s oldest Black sororities — during special moments in her life.
What is her approval rating?
Harris hasn’t performed much better than Biden in most national polling: In mid-July, their approval ratings were about the same, and both were lower than Trump’s. Generally, polls have been pretty inconclusive in terms of which way the election will go, whether with Biden or Harris as the Democratic nominee. In postdebate polls from CNN and the New York Times–Siena College, Harris was trailing Trump by a smaller amount than Biden was, and in one state she was actually ahead of Trump by more points than Biden was. A Reuters-Ipsos poll taken after the Trump-assassination attempt found both Biden and Harris statistically tied with Trump. I guess we’ll just have to find out whether the context of all in which she lives includes … a presidency???
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