Kamala Harris aims to shatter America’s last glass ceiling

59-year-old Harris has already broken many barriers on his political path. Not least by becoming America’s first female vice president. Now she can break the last and biggest – after she will, by all indications, become the Democrats’ new presidential candidate ahead of the election this autumn.

But the goal of becoming America’s first female president will be anything but simple. Not only has challenger Donald Trump strengthened his position in recent times – the Democratic Party is splitting in different directions. At the same time, the Republican Party is more united than in a long time.

The question is whether Harris is able to seem unifying and emerge as a leader in whom new voters will place their trust.

Got a lot of criticism

During her time as vice president, Harris has apparently struggled to define her own role, and she has been criticized for being low on visibility.

Biden, for his part, has been criticized for not letting Harris “shine”: He gave her, among other things, the very thankless job of finding solutions to the country’s big problem with illegal immigration, and Harris quickly became a favorite chopping block among the Republicans.

Harris has also been criticized for being a difficult leader and struggling with an unusually high turnover of staff associated with the vice president’s office.

However, she has made a positive mark on the issue of abortion rights. Many believe she can capture more young voters and voters of color.

She herself has no doubt that she is now the right person to fight for the top job in the United States.

Already in February, Harris told the Wall Street Journal that she was ready to run the country if necessary.

Resigned

After President Joe Biden chose to withdraw his candidacy on Sunday, he pointed to Harris as his heir and gave her his full support.

Harris has already secured support from some of the party’s biggest contributors, including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, the Soros family and several key Wall Street donors, according to The Financial Times.

Several of those who could have become Harris’s main challengers have already backed her, including governors Josh Shapiro and Gavin Newsom.

Harris herself says that she “is honored to have the president’s support, and that her intention is to serve the country and win the nomination.”

Harris has described Biden’s decision to step aside as a “selfless and patriotic act,” stating that he “put the American people and our country above everything else.”

She herself has received both respect and praise for her loyalty to Biden at a time when the age-infirm president experienced a hard drive against her.

Opinion poll

A recent poll by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about six in 10 Democrats think Harris would do a good job as president. Nearly two in ten Democrats do not think she will do a good job, while two in ten say they do not know enough to have an opinion about it.

The survey also showed that around four out of ten adults in the US have a positive opinion of Harris, while around half have a negative opinion.

Activist background

Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, to parents of South Asian descent. The mother is from India and the father from Jamaica. The parents met as civil rights activists.

Oakland and nearby Berkeley were considered the center of the struggle for social rights and racial settlement of the time, and her parents actively participated in the struggle for equal rights.

Her parents divorced when she was young, and she was raised by her mother with her younger sister, Maya. She attended Howard University, a private university in Washington, founded in 1867 as one of the so-called traditionally black institutions of learning in the United States.

Studied law

After graduating, Harris returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to study law and chose a career as a prosecutor, a choice that surprised her activist family.

Harris explained the choice by saying that she believed it was just as important to work for change from within the system as to protest against it from the outside. In 2003, she ran for her first political office.

First woman

She became the first female attorney general in California, the US’s most populous state, in 2011. In 2017, she was elected to the Senate – as the second black woman in history.

She was long regarded as a star in the Democratic Party, but as vice-president she has received a lot of criticism. The question is whether she can now appear as a unifying, strong leader who can stand up to Trump.

She herself has promised to do everything in her power to unite the Democratic Party – unite the nation – and to defeat Donald Trump.

It will undoubtedly be a brutal battle. Trump once defeated Hillary Clinton in her bid to become the first female president in 2016, and he has already stated that it will be easier to beat Harris than it would have been to beat Biden.