Vice President Kamala Harris has won her home state of California, CBS News projects, handily securing the state’s 54 electoral votes. the most of any state.
If Harris were elected president, he would achieve several firsts, becoming the first female president, and the first Black and South Asian woman to be elected president in U.S. history. a political process that started in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Harris was born in Oakland and attended school in Berkeley before attending high school in Montreal, Canada, where her mother worked as a breast cancer researcher. She graduated from Howard University in Washington, DC, and returned to the Bay Area, where she received a law degree from UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco in 1989.
Her political career began in 1990 when she was hired as a deputy district attorney for Alameda County. In 1998, Harris became an assistant district attorney in San Francisco and in 2003 she was elected district attorney, defeating her former boss and becoming the first person of color to be elected the city’s top prosecutor.
Harris was elected California’s first female, Black and South Asian attorney general in 2010 and won the race for California senator against former Rep. Loretta Sanchez in 2016. She briefly ran for president in 2020 and was later selected by eventual Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden as his running mate.
With Biden’s election, Harris also became the first Black and Asian American vice president the highest-ranking female government official in American history.
The last time a Republican presidential candidate won the state of California was in 1988 with the election of George HW Bush.
