People will start sizing up Kamala Harris as a possible presidential candidate here in the next few seconds, and I imagine we’re going to hear some version of this sentence a lot on cable news this week: Well, she ran for president once before, and she ran such a bad race that she didn’t even make it to Iowa, withdrawing before a single vote was even cast.

That is true. She did run a bad race. There are a couple of lessons to be learned from it. For starters, she should make sure her best debate zinger—aimed, remember, at Joe Biden—is not a defense of a deeply unpopular 50-year-old policy (busing) that, a few days after the debate, her aides could not defend. So there’s that.

However, I’d argue today that that race is largely irrelevant to this one, assuming she’s the candidate (which I’ll discuss a bit below, but which I do believe we can assume). There are a couple of key reasons why.

First of all, she doesn’t have to build this campaign from the ground up. The Biden campaign has a staff of thousands in place. Some of them won’t want to work for Harris, but I’d imagine most of them will. Granted, she’ll need to bring in her top people, and that’s an important job. But she won’t have to hire, say, a whole fundraising staff. She won’t have to execute contracts with vendors. All that’s done, and I hope we can presume that the people in those jobs are experienced and reasonably competent.

And second, and actually more important, this is not a primary against 17 like-minded people where you have to strain to stand out. That was a marathon where it was hard to get attention. This is a sprint where the attention is going to be automatic and intense. To the extent that she isn’t now, she’ll be nationally known in a matter of days, and assuming the polls are correct and Harris is as close to Donald Trump as Joe Biden was (or even closer), she already has 75 million votes in her pocket. She just needs to win those final seven or eight million.

So no: She’s not one of 100 senators scrambling to generate buzz in a crowded primary field. She’s the likely Democratic Party standard bearer. And two other things: She’s not 81, and she’s not Trump. For a lot of people, that’s all she needs to be.

But not, of course, for everyone. Here there are two main groups of concern. The first, I wrote about last week: the Biden die-hards who wanted the president to stay in the race. They were as of last week an angry bunch, and they’re probably angrier still this week. It will be largely up to Biden to calm them down and tell them to follow his example and do what’s right for the country here. But it will also be the job of all the leading Democrats to lavish praise on Biden and turn this moment—which, let’s face it, holds great potential for chaos and disarray—into a moment when the party finds a surprising and extraordinary unity.

The next group consists of those who want an open primary process. That includes me, at least in my dream world—one in which Biden had made his decision in time for a six-week mini-primary before the convention, which starts on August 19. But Biden demurred, and now it’s too late for that.

And Biden has endorsed Harris. Can anyone else still get in? Sure, of course. And maybe some will. There may be statement candidacies of some sort from both the center and the left. But it’s unlikely that any of the big governors are going to jump in. So the open-process devotees are just going to have to come to terms with this. It’s going to be Harris.

It’s going to be Harris, and it’s going to have to be a galvanized and unified effort like none we’ve ever seen. I have my reservations about her. So do you. So do we all. She has pretty high negatives. She might prove to be a bad campaigner. She doesn’t, as I’ve written, appear to have a natural passion for economic policy. I could go on.

But we just need to wrap our heads around this right now. It seems 90 percent likely that she’s going to be the Democratic nominee. And the Democrats need to embrace it and line up and move heaven and earth to make her a winner.

And the man who can be the Leonard Bernstein of that orchestra is of course the man who just became the second American Cincinnatus. Joe Biden stepped forward to save the country from Trump in 2020, and now, in 2024, he steps back, willingly giving up power, to save the country from Trump again. Tuesday at the Democratic convention had better be Joe Biden Day, and they better put on the show that the man deserves. His decision Sunday will go down in American history, and, if Harris (or a different Democrat) ends up winning in November, it’ll be worthy of a painting in the Capitol Rotunda someday. Perhaps unveiled by the first Black woman president.

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What to know about Kamala Harris

As President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he will not seek reelection in November against former President Donald Trump, he shared his “full support and endorsement” for his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, as the Democratic candidate.

As Biden’s performance in the first presidential debate led to a host of Democrats calling for him to be replaced as the party’s official candidate, one of the most popular suggestions for a replacement has been Harris.

While she is not the formal Democratic nominee for president yet, Harris said in a statement Sunday that she intends “to earn and win [the party’s] nomination.”

Who is Kamala Harris?

Harris currently serves as the Vice President of the United States. She is the first woman, first Black person, and first Asian American person to hold this position.

Harris graduated from Howard University before attending law school at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law.

She was admitted to the California State Bar in 1990 and then served as a deputy and assistant district attorney before being elected District Attorney of San Francisco.

Kamala Harris road to the White House

Harris was elected the District Attorney of San Francisco in 2004 and served until 2011.  As district attorney, Harris prioritized cracking down on student truancy and creating a reentry program for low-level drug offenders.

In 2011, Harris was elected the California Attorney General. In this role, she declined to defend Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage.

In 2017, Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate. In this position, she advocated for healthcare reform, gun control and a path to citizenship for immigrants.

In 2020, Biden announced that Harris would be his running mate in the presidential election.

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s relationship

After the first presidential debate, many expressed that Harris should replace Biden as the Democratic party’s nominee. Major reasons include that she is much younger than him and has worked closely with him.

Before Biden announced Harris as his vice president pick during the 2020 election, the two had clashed over Biden’s past policies. Harris had called out his past collaborations with segregationist senators and his opposition to mandated bussing to promote school desegregation in the 1970s.

However, Biden and Harris have bonded because of her closeness with his late son, Beau Biden. The president’s son served as the attorney general of Delaware during Harris’s tenure as California attorney general, and the pair worked closely together.

Biden said he considered his son, who died of brain cancer in 2015, when choosing Harris as his running mate.

At an event this weekend in Las Vegas, Nevada, she continued to support Biden while attacking former President Donald Trump.

“In a real leader, character matters more than style, and Donald Trump simply does not have the character to be president of the United States,” Harris said.

Kamala Harris’s political views

Harris has long supported gun control, equality for women and the LGBTQ community, and voting rights, but was criticized in her tenure as California’s attorney general for not investigating shootings by police.

Harris has called for policies such as the decriminalization of marijuana and cutting defense spending. She also released a climate equity plan with NY Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that would consider the impact of new climate policies on low-income communities.

Harris has previously referred to herself as a “progressive prosecutor,” and was endorsed by the police union when she was elected San Francisco district attorney. In this election, she beat her former boss, Terence Hallinan, who was viewed as one of the most progressive district attorneys in the nation.

During the Biden-Harris administration’s tenure, Harris has worked to fight for abortion rights and gun control. The administration has also approved billions of dollars in student debt relief.

Kamala Harris’s net worth

According to reports, a significant part of Harris’s earnings came from publishing three books, including a memoir. According to her 2015 Congressional finance disclosure, her net worth was roughly $3.31 million. Her annual salary as vice president is reported to be $235,100.

However, the vast majority of her net worth is attributable to her marriage to attorney Doug Emhoff in 2014. The couple have reported combined assets worth about $6 million.

Kamala Harris controversies

Harris has one of the lowest approval ratings of any vice president. According to a 538 poll, as of mid-July, almost 50% of Americans disapprove of Harris as vice president, and only 38% approve of her.

Her term has seen lots of turnover in her office, including the resignation of her chief of staff and deputy chief of staff. Politico reported an anonymous source said that they, along with the press secretary and communications director, resigned because they “often feel mistreated.”

During her 2020 presidential campaign, Harris faced criticism about her tenure as California’s attorney general, especially when she did not step in to investigate shootings by police in San Francisco following the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Kamala Harris‘s personal life

Harris married lawyer Douglas Emhoff in 2014 and became the stepmother of his two children, Ella and Cole. She is 59 years old and grew up in California.

Harris graduated from Howard University before attending law school at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law.

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