Inside Kamala Harris’ Groundbreaking, Historic Victory

It was a fairly natural step for someone who spent her childhood arguing points—”If you sit at the dining table and you want to say something, you’d better be prepared to defend it, no matter how old or young you are,” she told Elle of the stance in her home—and learning early on that dedicating yourself to fighting for justice was a must.

“I was raised that it is not about charity and benevolence,” she explained, “it’s about your duty. No one’s going to congratulate you for it—it’s what you’re supposed to do.”

She fell short of the presidency, withdrawing her name from the crowded field of nearly 30 Democratic candidates in December 2019 and paving the way for Biden to accept the party’s nomination. But her progressive plans to improve healthcare and reform the criminal justice system, some three decades in public service and a willingness to challenge Biden didn’t go unnoticed.

“He decided that I would be a partner for him,” Harris recently explained in her Vogue cover profile. She envisions herself as someone who “will always speak truth, always give him my opinion, which will be based on fact and knowledge and life experience, and do it in a way that allows him, when he makes a decision, to make it with full information about the impact—and he has asked me to do that.”