The Associated Press reports that Vice President Kamala Harris has secured enough support among Democratic delegates to become the party’s presidential nominee. The vice president’s strong support comes after President Joe Biden departed from the race.
According to Bloomberg, Harris’ campaign raised a record $81 million in the 24 hours since President Biden dropped out of the 2024 race. Experts say it is a new presidential donation record. The figure includes money raised across the campaign, Democratic National Committee and joint fundraising committees. Her campaign said over 888,000 grassroots donors contributed in those 24 hours.
The campaign said 60% of those donors made their first contribution of the 2024 cycle, while 43,000 people committed as new recurring donors, adding that over half of them will be making weekly donations, according to Axios.
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For more than two decades in public life, Harris has achieved a lot of firsts: the first black woman to serve as San Francisco’s district attorney, the first woman to be California’s attorney general, the first Indian American senator, and the first woman vice president of the U.S., working by President Joe Biden’s side.
In 2020, she became the first woman vice president-elect in United States history and the first woman of color to make it to the second-highest office as Joe Biden won the presidency. Prior to that, she was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016.
If Harris becomes the Democratic nominee and defeats Republican candidate Donald Trump in November, she will not only be the first woman to serve as president but also the first black woman and first person of South Asian descent to be president, thanks to her roots.
Harris was born in Oakland, California, on October 20, 1964, to Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher from India, and Donald Harris, an economist from Jamaica. Her parents met at UC Berkley while pursuing graduate degrees, and the two were active in the civil rights movement right from their day on campus. When Kamala was born, they often took her along to protests in a stroller.
Harris, the eldest of two children, grew up embracing both her black and South Asian identities. She once traveled to India when she was young, where her grandmother, an activist who traveled the countryside teaching impoverished women about birth control, and her grandfather, a high-ranking government official who fought for Indian independence, had a significant influence on her.
Attending middle school and high school in Montreal, Harris studied political science and economics (B.A., 1986) at Howard University and then earned a law degree in 1989 from Hastings College.
She subsequently worked as a deputy district attorney from 1990–98 in Oakland, prosecuting cases of drug trafficking, gang violence, and sexual abuse. Despite her parents not being too comfortable with her career choice, Harris said she wanted to change the system from the inside, and with that determination, she moved up the ladder, becoming a district attorney in 2004.
