On Monday, Vice President Kamala Harris formally won the Democratic nomination for president. She is the daughter of immigrants and rose up the ranks of California’s political and law enforcement to become the nation’s first female vice-president.

Harris’ coronation, more than four years after Harris’ first bid at the presidency failed, caps a turbulent and frenetic time for Democrats sparked by President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June that destroyed his supporters’ confidence in reelection prospects. This sparked extraordinary intraparty wars about whether Biden should remain in the race.

Harris and her team acted quickly as soon as Biden ended his candidacy. They needed 1,976 delegates to win the nomination by a formal vote. Harris reached this milestone in record time. An Associated Press poll of delegates across the country showed that she had secured all the commitments necessary just 32 hours after Biden announced his candidacy.

Harris’ nomination was made official Monday night after the Democratic National Convention delegate round ended. The party said in a press release released shortly before midnight that 99 percent of those who cast ballots for Harris had done so. It had been long in the planning that the party would conduct an early virtual vote to make sure Biden was on every state’s ballot. The party said it would then formally certify all votes before holding a celebratory vote at its convention in Chicago later this month.

A poll by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research conducted after Biden’s withdrawal found that 46% of Americans had a positive view of Harris. Nearly an equal share of Americans held a negative view. More Democrats are happy with Harris’ candidacy than with Biden’s, which has energized a party who had been resigned for years to having the 81-year old Biden as its nominee against Donald Trump, whom they see as an existential danger.

Harris has already telegraphed her intention to stick with the themes and policies of Biden’s campaign, including democracy, gun violence prevention, and abortion rights. Her delivery, however, can be much more fiery. She uses her experience as a prosecutor to slam Trump for his 34 felony convictions in connection with a scheme to falsify business records.

It’s almost like the stars are aligned in her favor at this time in history, said Democratic Senator Alex Padilla from California, who succeeded Harris as vice president in the Senate.

A splash in Washington, before the collapse of the 2020 primary elections

Kamala Devi Harris is a U.S. native who was born in Oakland, California on October 20, 1964. She was the daughter of Shyamala Harris Gopalan (a breast cancer researcher from India) and Donald Harris (a Stanford University emeritus faculty member originally from Jamaica). She described her parents’ activism for civil rights as giving her a “stroller-s-eye” view of the movement.

She worked as a prosecutor for many years in the Bay Area, before being appointed as state attorney general in 2010. In 2016, she was elected as U.S. Senator.

Harris was a senator in Washington at the beginning of the turbulent Trump era. She quickly established herself as an ardent liberal critic of Trump’s policies and personnel, and fueled speculation that she would run for president. She was able to use her position on the Judiciary Committee, which is highly coveted in Washington, as a platform from which she could question prominent Trump nominees such as Brett Kavanaugh.

“I can’t be rushed so fast,” said Sessions, then Attorney General, during a hearing in 2017, as Harris repeatedly pressed on him about possible conversations with Russian citizens. It makes me nervous.”

Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign began with great promise. She drew parallels to the former president Barack Obama, and attracted more than 20,000 to a launch rally in her hometown. Harris, however, withdrew before the Iowa primary due to staff dissension that was made public and her inability raise enough money.

Harris was unable to make a consistent argument to Democratic voters, and stumbled on important issues like health care. She said she supported a government-run health care system, “Medicare For All”, before releasing her plan to preserve private insurance. Harris, who is just beginning her general election campaign has already reversed many of her liberal positions from earlier in her career, including a ban on the fracking she supported in 2019.

Harris’s attempt to use her background in law enforcement as an asset for her 2020 presidential bid failed because the party could not reconcile her tough-on crime positions in an era of increased focus on police violence.

Biden’s Team: A new evolution in vice presidency

Harris was still at the top when Biden considered his running mate after he had pledged in early 2020 to choose a Black female as his No. 2. Harris was a favorite of his, and he had formed a close relationship with Beau, now deceased, when Beau was Delaware’s Attorney General. Beau was also California’s Attorney General at the time.

Her first few months as vice-president were not smooth. Biden asked Harris to lead the administration’s diplomatic efforts in Central America to address the root causes of immigration to the United States. This triggered Republican attacks on border security, and she remains a political weakness. Harris’s stumbles in major interviews didn’t help. For example, in a 2021 interview with Lester Holt of NBC News when she said dismissively “I haven’t been to Europe”, when Holt pointed out that she had not visited the U.S. Mexico border.

Harris was also often tied to Washington during her first two Senate years so that she could break ties in an evenly divided Senate. This gave Democrats historic wins on climate change and health care, but it also limited her ability to travel across the country to meet voters.

She became a much more visible figure after the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade. As a lifelong Catholic, she was more qualified to be the spokesperson on abortion rights than Biden who, in the past, had supported restrictions on the procedure. She is the only vice president who has visited an abortion clinic to speak about reproductive rights.