Kamala Harris is set to become the Democratic presidential nominee

WASHINGTON – Vice President Kamala Harris, the daughter of immigrants who rose through the ranks of California politics and law enforcement to become the first female vice president in U.S. history, is poised to secure the Democratic presidential nomination on Monday.

More than four years after her first failed bid for the presidency, Harris’s coronation as her party’s standard-bearer will cap a tumultuous and frenetic period for Democrats sparked by President Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the June debate, which shattered his own supporters’ confidence in his reelection prospects and spurred an extraordinary intraparty war over whether he should remain in the race.

As soon as Biden abruptly ended his candidacy, Harris and her team worked quickly to secure the 1,976 party delegates needed to secure the nomination in a formal roll call vote. She achieved that goal with great speed: An Associated Press poll of delegates nationwide showed she secured the necessary commitments just 32 hours after Biden’s announcement.

Harris’ nomination will become official after a five-day round of online voting by Democratic National Convention delegates ends Monday night and the party announces the results. The party had long contemplated early virtual voting to ensure Biden would appear on the ballot in every state.

An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted after Biden dropped out of the race found that 46% of Americans have a favorable view of Harris, while a nearly identical share have an unfavorable view of her. But more Democrats say they are satisfied with her candidacy compared with Biden’s, energizing a party that had long been resigned to having Biden, 81, as its nominee against former President Donald Trump, a Republican they view as an existential threat.

Harris has already made clear that she doesn’t plan to stray far from the themes and policies that framed Biden’s candidacy, such as democracy, gun violence prevention and abortion rights. But her pitch can be far more vehement, particularly when she invokes her experience as a prosecutor to lambast Trump and his 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records in connection with a bribery scheme.

“Given that unique voice of a new generation, of a prosecutor and of a woman at a time when fundamental rights, especially reproductive rights, are at stake, it’s almost as if the stars have aligned for her at this moment in history,” said Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California, who was chosen to succeed Harris in the Senate when she became vice president.

A stir in Washington before the collapse of the 2020 primaries

Kamala Devi Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, to Shyamala Gopalan, a breast cancer scientist who immigrated to the United States from India when she was 19, and Donald Harris, a professor emeritus at Stanford University and a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Jamaica. Her parents’ advocacy for civil rights gave her what she described as a “firsthand view” of the movement.

She spent years as a prosecutor in the Bay Area before her promotion to state attorney general in 2010 and then her election as a U.S. senator in 2016.

Harris arrived in Washington as a senator at the dawn of the volatile Trump era, and quickly established herself as a reliable liberal opponent of the new president’s personnel and policies, fueling speculation about a possible presidential run. Landing a spot on the coveted Judiciary Committee gave her national prominence to question prominent Trump nominees, such as now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

“I can’t be rushed that quickly,” then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said during a hearing in 2017, as Harris repeatedly pressed him on possible conversations with Russian nationals. “It makes me nervous.”

Harris launched her 2020 presidential campaign with plenty of promise, drawing parallels to former President Barack Obama and drawing more than 20,000 people to an inaugural rally in her hometown. But Harris dropped out of the primary race before the first nominating contest in Iowa, plagued by staff dissent that came to light and a failure to attract enough campaign money.

Harris struggled to deliver a coherent pitch to Democratic voters and faltered on key issues like health care. She suggested she supported eliminating private insurance for a fully government-run system — “Medicare for All” coverage — before releasing her own health care plan that preserved private insurance. Now, during her nascent general election campaign, Harris has already reversed some of her earlier, more liberal positions, like the fracking ban she supported in 2019.

And while Harris attempted to use her law enforcement experience as an asset in her 2020 presidential campaign, she never attracted enough support in a party that could not reconcile some of her previous tough-on-crime stances at a time of heightened attention to police brutality.

Joining Biden’s team and an evolution as vice president

Still, Harris was at the top of the list of vice presidential candidates when Biden was considering his running mate, following his pledge in early 2020 that he would choose a Black woman as his No. 2. He was fond of Harris, who had forged a close friendship with his now-deceased son Beau, who had been Delaware’s attorney general when she served in that role in California.

Her first few months as vice president were far from easy. Biden asked her to lead the administration’s diplomatic efforts with Central America on the root causes of migration to the United States, triggering attacks from Republicans over border security and remaining a political vulnerability. It didn’t help that Harris stumbled in high-profile interviews, such as in a 2021 interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt, when she dismissively responded that “I haven’t been to Europe” when the host noted that she hadn’t visited the U.S.-Mexico border.

During her first two years, Harris was also often tied to Washington so she could break ties in the evenly divided Senate, which gave Democrats historic victories on climate and health care but also limited her opportunities to travel the country and meet with voters.

Her visibility became much more prominent after the 2022 Supreme Court ruling dismantling Roe v. Wade, as she became the administration’s leading spokesperson on abortion rights and was a more natural messenger than Biden, a lifelong Catholic who had in the past favored restrictions on the procedure. She is the first vice president to visit an abortion clinic and speak about reproductive rights in the broader context of maternal health, especially for Black women.

Throughout her vice presidency, Harris has been careful to remain loyal to Biden, though she stressed that she would be ready to step in if necessary. That dramatic transition began in late June after the first Biden-Trump debate, where the president’s missteps were so catastrophic that he was never able to reverse the loss of trust from other Democrats.

Aimed at the top of the ticket

After Biden ended his candidacy on July 21, he quickly endorsed Harris. And during the first two weeks of her 2024 presidential campaign, enthusiasm among the Democratic base surged, with donations pouring in, dozens of volunteers showing up at local offices and supporters increasing in number so much that event organizers had to change venues.

Harris’ campaign now believes it has a renewed opportunity to compete in Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia — states that Biden had begun to abandon in favor of shoring up the so-called “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

“The country is getting to see the Kamala Harris that we all know,” said Bakari Sellers, who was a national co-chair of her 2020 campaign. “We didn’t really let the country see her” four years ago. Sellers said: “We had her wrapped in bubble wrap. What people are seeing now is that she is real, that she is talented.”

Democrats, however, expect Harris’s political honeymoon to be over and that she will inevitably come under closer scrutiny over the Biden administration’s positions, the state of the economy and volatile situations abroad, particularly in the Middle East. Harris has also not answered extensive questions from reporters or sat down for a formal interview since her campaign began.

The Trump campaign has been eager to define Harris as she continues to introduce herself to voters across the country, releasing an ad blaming her for the high number of illegal crossings at the southern border during the Biden administration and calling her “failed. Weak. Dangerously liberal.”

Supporters of the Republican candidate have also disparagingly called Harris a “diversity hire,” while Trump himself has engaged in his own ugly racial attacks, wrongly claiming that Harris had in the past only promoted her Indian heritage and only recently highlighted her Black identity.

Her comments foreshadow a season of racist and sexist accusations against the man who would be the first woman and first person of South Asian descent to hold the presidency.

“I didn’t know she was black until a few years ago when she became black and now she wants to be known as black,” Trump said in his speech to the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists. “So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black?”

In her response, Harris called it “the same old show: division and disrespect” and said voters “deserve better.”

“The American people deserve a leader who speaks the truth, a leader who does not respond with hostility or anger when faced with the facts,” Harris said at a Sigma Gamma Rho sorority meeting in Houston. “We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us.”