Joe Biden's chosen successor has had a sometimes rocky path to power, and a campaign against Donald Trump will test her like never before.
ADVERTISEMENTWhen Joe Biden dropped out of the US presidential election after weeks of pressure from his party, he quickly made clear he had only one successor in mind.
"My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President," he wrote in a post on X.
"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."
In her own statement, Harris wrote: "On behalf of the American people, I thank Joe Biden for his extraordinary leadership as president of the United States and for his decades of service to our country.
"I am honoured to have the president’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination."
Harris still has to be formally nominated by the party at its convention in Chicago in a few weeks' time, and it is not yet known if she will face a challenger.
But the combination of her current position, Biden's support and the collective exhaustion from the effort to get him to stand down will make it difficult for other candidates to explain why she should have to fight for the nomination — especially since, if elected, she would be the nation's first woman president and only its second black president.
So how did Harris get to the brink of the presidency?
The daughter of a Jamaican-American father and a Tamil Indian mother, the 59-year-old Harris grew up in Oakland, California. After graduating from university and law school, she became a district attorney, working her way up in California's legal system before being elected the state's attorney general in 2010.
Re-elected in 2014, she was then elected to the US Senate in 2016, replacing outgoing Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer. Once in the Senate, Harris quickly became nationally renowned for bringing her prosecutorial skills to bear in committee hearings, subjecting heavily briefed and experienced witnesses to forensic questioning that several times made news in its own right.
Among these were Trump's only two confirmed attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, and his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
The Kavanaugh confirmation process in 2018, which ultimately saw the judge confirmed to the US' highest court, is now most remembered for serious allegations of sexual assault levelled publicly against him by women who had known him in high school and college.
However, before the allegations were made and then discussed in the Senate, Harris had already used the hearings to exert pressure on Kavanaugh over his restrictive views on abortion, memorably asking him if he could think of "any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?"
Not long after the Kavanaugh hearings, Harris announced she was running for the Democratic presidential nomination — a campaign that would pit her against Biden.
'That little girl was me'
Having built a powerful national brand in a relatively short span of time, Harris launched her presidential campaign in January 2019. Her first campaign rally drew 20,000 supporters, and her first-day fundraising figures indicated she was a force to be reckoned with.
ADVERTISEMENTHowever, the Democratic field soon ballooned to more than 20 candidates, and setting herself apart on policy became hard for Harris, especially against bold left-wingers Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Her most memorable moment, ironically, came when she confronted Biden during a TV debate about his opposition to the "bussing" policies implemented to aid school desegregation after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Calling him out for his "civil" relationship with segregationist senators in the early 1970s, she reminded Biden of the impact desegregation had.
“And you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bussed to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
The exchange turned out to be the high point of Harris' campaign. Come the third quarter of 2019, it was clear that her campaign was internally disorganised, had a high staff turnover, and was struggling to raise money. Even as the Democratic field began to shrink and consolidate around the early frontrunners, her polling numbers did not rise, and she dropped out before the first primaries.
ADVERTISEMENTThen, in the summer of 2020, Biden chose her as his running mate, describing her as "a fearless fighter for the little guy and one of the country’s finest public servants."
The constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic notwithstanding, she proved to be a strong campaigner in the 2020 race, delivering an effective debate performance against Trump's Vice President Mike Pence.
When she and Biden won the election, Harris became the first woman, the first black person and the first person of South Asian background to serve as US vice president in one stroke.
Harris' time as vice president, however, would prove to be difficult.
ADVERTISEMENTTough at the top
The Biden administration began in the shadow of the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol, and with the pandemic still killing Americans in their thousands while the economy struggled to cope.
In this context, Biden assigned Harris a portfolio of towering issues, among them immigration and voting rights — deeply divisive questions that could only be tackled via major legislation, something that in turn demanded the support of a Senate supermajority that the Democrats did not command.
Harris thus found herself trying to make the case for sweeping reforms that never stood much chance of success on Capitol Hill. Her effort to tackle the US' decades-old immigration problems was not helped by an infamous interview in which she visibly bristled when asked why she had not yet visited the US-Mexico border.
There was also a steady stream of negative stories about the atmosphere in Harris' office, which saw strikingly high staff turnover in the administration's early years, and outsiders speculated unflatteringly about just how meaningful her role actually was.
ADVERTISEMENTHowever, as Biden's re-election campaign kicked into gear, Harris once again began appearing on the campaign trail, where she has once again proven she is able to draw and enthuse a crowd even as the ageing president increasingly struggled.
When it became clear that the party was turning against the prospect of Biden running again, speculation that she would be the natural successor immediately began to rise, leading to an explosion of memes riffing on her distinctive laugh and repeated invocation of one of her mother's favourite sayings: "You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?"
It remains to be seen whether Harris can improve upon Biden's anaemic poll numbers and flagging fundraising, and it is still unclear whether she will face a challenge for the nomination.
However, the relief at Biden's withdrawal will send new energy and optimism through her party, at least in the short term — and the Trump campaign's well-honed attacks on the president's age are now suddenly moot.
ADVERTISEMENTMore embarrassingly for her rival, the electorate is already being reminded that before he entered politics himself, he personally donated to both her California campaigns.