Kamala Harris, the Democratic senator from California, announced Monday her 2020 White House bid, becoming the first Indian-American woman to run for US presidency and only the second African-American woman to do so.
“I’m running for president,” Harris wrote on Twitter Monday, which is also Martin Luther King Day, when she has said she would be announcing her decision. “Let’s do this together.”
The first time senator from California is the daughter of Indian mother, Syamala Gopalan, from Chennai, and Jamaican father, Donald Harris.
“The future of our country depends on you and millions of others lifting our voices to fight for our American values,” she said in a video attached to the twitter announcement. “That’s why I’m running for president of the United States.”
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Harris plans to make a more elaborate announcement on Sunday in Oakland, California, where she grew up with her younger sister Maya. Harris is married to Douglas Emhoff, also a lawyer like Harris, and they have two children.
{{/usCountry}}Harris plans to make a more elaborate announcement on Sunday in Oakland, California, where she grew up with her younger sister Maya. Harris is married to Douglas Emhoff, also a lawyer like Harris, and they have two children.
{{/usCountry}}Harris’s announcement makes her the first Indian American woman to run for US president ever — from either party. The first member of the tiny minority community to run for White House was Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana. He didn’t last the primaries, which were won by President Donald Trump. Harris is also the first Indian American Democrat — of either gender — to try for the job.
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And she is only the first African American woman to run for the presidency. Shirley Chisholm, also a Democrat, was the first, making a an unsuccessful bid in 1972. The list this far has been dominated by men, most famously Barrack Obama who went on to win two terms. Other African Americans to run for the job included Jesse Jackson, who ran twice, in 1984 and 1988.
Harris joined a growing line of Democrats who have either announced their plans to take on President Trump in 2020, such as including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, Congressman Joaquin Castro, or those who are understood to be contemplating a bid such as Tulsi Gabbard, the first Hindu in US congress, former Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Cory Booker and Beto O’Rourke, a former congressman who has been getting rock-star treatment after he nearly topped Ted Cruz, the incumbent Republican senator in the deeply-red state of Texas.
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Harris had been expected to run from around the time she was elected to the US senate in 2016, the year Trump swept into the White House in an upset victory over Hillary Clinton. She had served as attorney general in California before.