Kamala Harris is an American politician and lawyer who has served as the junior United States senator from California since 2017. She is the presumptive Democratic nominee for vice president in the 2020 election.
Born in Oakland, California, Harris is a graduate of Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She began her career in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, before being recruited to the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and later the City Attorney of San Francisco’s office. In 2003, she was elected district attorney of San Francisco. She was then elected attorney general of California in 2010; she was re-elected in 2014.
She defeated Loretta Sanchez in the 2016 Senate election to succeed Barbara Boxer, becoming California’s third female senator as well as the second African-American woman and the first South Asian American to serve in the United States Senate. As a senator, she has supported healthcare reform, federal descheduling of cannabis, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, the DREAM Act, a ban on assault weapons, and progressive tax reform. She gained a national profile for her pointed questioning of Trump administration officials during Senate hearings.
Harris ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and attracted national attention before ending her campaign on December 3, 2019. She was announced as former vice president Joe Biden’s running mate for the 2020 United States presidential election on August 11, becoming the first African American and the first Asian American to be chosen as the running mate of a major party’s presidential candidate. She is also the third female U.S. vice presidential nominee of a major party after Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin.
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