Beyond the headlines, Ms. Harris has taken ballet, collected Converse sneakers and felt the influence of her grandfather, a diplomat.
Kamala Harris’s long political résumé is well known and expansive: Before becoming vice president, she was a U.S. senator. Before that, she was the California attorney general and the district attorney in San Francisco. Here are some things you might not know about the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.
1. Her name translates to “Lotus Flower” in Sanskrit. It’s a near-mythical symbol in Indian culture, representing beauty, prosperity and fertility.
2. She has broken the most ties in U.S. Senate history. As vice president, she has often been called upon to cast a deciding vote when the Senate is deadlocked. Last year, she cast her 32nd tiebreaker, beating the previous record of 31 set by John C. Calhoun, who was vice president from 1825 to 1832.
3. She’s short (compared to presidents past). Five-foot-four, to be exact. If elected, she would be one of the two shortest presidents in American history. (The other is James Madison.) But her height checks in at just about average for an American woman.
4. She knows how to deliver fries with that. Ms. Harris worked at McDonald’s between her freshman and sophomore years in college. She fried the fries, worked the ice cream machine and staffed the cashier.
5. Her best friend set her up with her future husband, Doug Emhoff. Their first “date” was an hourlong phone call, and they made plans to get dinner that weekend in Los Angeles, where he was based. “I could hardly wait to fly down,” Ms. Harris wrote.
Inside the Democratic National Convention
The convention runs from Aug. 19 to 22 in Chicago.
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3 Delegates, Decades Apart: Among the nearly 4,700 delegates in Chicago, some have well over a dozen conventions under their belts, while others will be voting in their first general election. Here are three of them.
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The Party’s After-Parties: Democrats, once dreary about the election, are remembering how to have fun in Chicago. “This is a group that’s not used to being happy,” one reveler noted.
6. She loves Doritos. In her memoir, she described the night in 2016 that Donald J. Trump won the presidency (which was the same night she got elected to the U.S. Senate). “No one really knew what to say or do,” she wrote. “I sat down on the couch with Doug and ate an entire family-size bag of Classic Doritos. Didn’t share a single chip.”
7. She attended both a Black Baptist church and a Hindu temple as a child. “My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters,” she wrote in her memoir. “And she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud Black women.”
8. Her prosecutorial style left some in Washington flummoxed. When Ms. Harris served in the Senate, she drew attention for her sharp questioning of witnesses. In 2017, as she was grilling then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions about his role as campaign surrogate for Mr. Trump and contact with Russian officials, a visibly flustered Mr. Sessions objected. “I’m not able to be rushed this fast,” he complained at one point. “It makes me nervous.”
9. She spent her high school years in Montreal. “It was a difficult transition,” she wrote, “since the only French I knew was from my ballet classes.”
10. She failed the California bar exam on her first try. “I couldn’t get my head around it,” she wrote. She soon realized her preparation amounted to “the most half-assed performance of my life.” She passed on her second attempt.
11. She tangled with Jamie Dimon. Ms. Harris got into a heated disagreement with Mr. Dimon, J.P. Morgan’s chief executive, when she was the attorney general of California. It happened during the financial crisis, when she was pursuing relief from big banks for homeowners who had faced foreclosure. “We were like dogs in a fight,” Ms. Harris recalled in her memoir.
12. But their most recent encounter was calmer. She eventually secured more than $20 billion in relief from the banks, and despite their history, Ms. Harris and Mr. Dimon had lunch at the White House in March.
13. She likes to cook. Ms. Harris loves food. She has ribbed her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, about his “white guy tacos,” shared her turkey cooking tips and said that she liked to read recipes to unwind. In 2019 Ms. Harris posted a series of cooking videos to YouTube, including one with the actor Mindy Kaling that has been watched more than six million times. “Senator Harris, I say this with respect, you’re kind of a show-off,” Ms. Kaling quipped. “Right?” Ms. Harris replied.
14. She goes way back with Barack Obama. She hosted a San Francisco fund-raiser for his 2004 Senate run, then was the first major office holder in California to endorse his 2008 presidential bid, even as most Democratic heavyweights threw their support behind Hillary Clinton. The endorsement, seen by some as a political risk, paid off. Mr. Obama endorsed her bid for California attorney general in 2010 and on Tuesday praised her as a uniter on a mission to “build a country that is more secure and more just, more equal and more free.”
15. But she once turned down a job offer in his administration. It was 2014, and Eric Holder, Mr. Obama’s attorney general, called her and said he was planning to step down. He asked if she was interested in succeeding him. She considered the offer but ultimately declined.
16. Mr. Obama once publicly opined about Ms. Harris’s looks. The former president called Ms. Harris “by far the best-looking attorney general in the country” — and later apologized. The remark came at a fund-raiser in 2013, right after he also complimented her on her smarts and dedication to the law.
17. Her grandfather was a diplomat. Ms. Harris’s maternal grandfather, P.V. Gopalan, was a civil servant in India. When she was a child, Mr. Gopalan served as a diplomat in Zambia. She has said he was among her “favorite people” and “subconsciously influenced” how she thinks.
18. She was a political activist in college. She spent many weekends during her freshman year at Howard University in Washington, D.C., on the National Mall protesting apartheid in South Africa.
19. She remains close with her line sisters in Alpha Kappa Alpha. At Howard, where she competed on the debate team and graduated in 1986, Ms. Harris joined the Black sorority. In July, she said that she kept a signed copy of a book by one of its founders, Norma Boyd, in her West Wing office “as a testament to our enduring legacy.”
20. She also belongs to a prominent, invite-only nonprofit for Black women. Ms. Harris joined The Links Incorporated in 2018. It’s one of the oldest groups of its kind in America — a service organization focused on Black Americans and other people of African ancestry. Members have included Rosa Parks, Betty Shabazz and the civil rights lawyer Constance Baker Motley.
21. Her footwear is distinct. Ms. Harris has a large collection of Chuck Taylors: a black pair, a white pair, Chucks with and without laces, Chucks for hot and cold weather, and “the platform kind for when I’m wearing a pantsuit.”
22. Her love of dancing has persisted from her childhood to the West Wing. While she was in Montreal, she started a dance group called Midnight Magic. More recently, videos of her dancing in public — to Q-Tip at her 50th birthday party, down an escalator, with a marching band of children — have gone viral on social media.
23. Thursday will be doubly important for Ms. Harris. She is set to formally accept the Democratic nomination on her and Mr. Emhoff’s 10th wedding anniversary.
