She has been slammed by the right-wing news media as a far-left politician, a radical creature of affirmative action whom Democrats had positioned to become “the country’s first D.E.I. president.”
In her home state of California, however, Vice President Kamala Harris has been viewed as center-left by California standards, an ambitious prosecutor with conventional values shaped as much by the state’s tough-on-crime 1990s as by the Bay Area’s progressive politics.
“She’s pretty moderate — more moderate than Newsom,” said David Townsend, a Democratic political consultant in Sacramento, referring to Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democrat of California. “And she’s been a really successful politician. She has been elected district attorney. She has been elected attorney general. That’s a crowd that’s usually controlled by Republicans.”
The daughter of an Indian cancer researcher and a Jamaican economist who met while pursuing advanced degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, Ms. Harris was born in Oakland. When she was 7, her parents divorced and she and her sister moved to Canada, where she attended high school. Then it was on to Washington, D.C., where she attended Howard University, the historically Black school, and belonged to a sorority.
In 1987, she returned to California for law school, earning her degree at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. She then stayed in her home state, where she built a career as a prosecutor, first in the Bay Area and then statewide, ascending to increasingly influential offices.
In her first role, she joined the Alameda County prosecutor’s office in Oakland in 1990, where she specialized in prosecuting child sexual assault cases. Over the next several years, she rose first in that office and then in San Francisco. A brief dating relationship with Willie Brown, then the powerful speaker of the California Assembly who was some 30 years older, elevated and then complicated her already-rising profile before they broke up in 1995. (She later referred to the breathless local publicity around the relationship as “an albatross hanging around my neck.”)
In 2002, she successfully challenged San Francisco’s district attorney, arguing that his office’s conviction rates were paltry, and went on to serve two terms as the first Black woman and the first South Asian American woman in the state to hold that office. In 2010, she won statewide election as California’s attorney general and was re-elected handily four years later. In 2014, she married Doug Emhoff, a Southern California lawyer. Voters sent her to the Senate in a landslide in 2016.
Over the years, she has threaded the needle between California’s often extreme political factions, campaigning sometimes as a “top cop” and other times as a “progressive prosecutor.”
After the 2004 murder of a police officer in San Francisco, her pledge to oppose capital punishment during her first campaign for district attorney — popular in the city then, but not statewide — generated widespread backlash, including from law enforcement unions and from Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California. As attorney general, Ms. Harris was criticized for avoiding legislative battles over sensitive law enforcement issues, such as racial profiling.
When she has picked a fight, however, she has often won, and gotten attention. Many Californians know her as the attorney general who won a judgment of more than $1 billion against for-profit colleges that were targeting vulnerable low-income students. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, she leveraged California’s economic might to win more than $18 billion in debt relief for California homeowners from banks accused of improper foreclosures on mortgages.
And supporters of reproductive rights in her liberal state exulted at the grilling she inflicted as a senator on Brett Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court, demanding to know whether he could “think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body” in the way that abortion restrictions do for women in America.
“The question for any vice president is whether they can rise to the challenge as Harry S. Truman did; we will see whether Vice President Harris can do so,” said Dan Morain, a longtime California journalist and author of “Kamala’s Way: An American Life,” a biography of Ms. Harris. “But opponents who underestimate Harris tend to lose.”
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