Harris is the first African American and South Asian American woman to run for vice president for a major party.

Presidential candidate Joe Biden has announced his running mate for vice president in the November presidential election: Kamala Harris, a 55-year-old female senator from California. 

A member of the Democratic party, Harris is a graduate of Howard University and received her law degree from the University of California, Hastings. She served as the District Attorney for San Francisco and then as the California Attorney General, before being elected to the United States Senate in 2017. She was only the second African American woman to the serve in the U.S. Senate in history, as well as the first South Asian American.

Harris's mother was a breast-cancer scientist who immigrated from India in 1960, while her father immigrated from Jamaica in 1961 to study economics. He is now an Emeritus Professor of Economics at Stanford Unversity.  

In the Senate, Harris serves on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the Select Committee on Intelligence, the Committee on the Judiciary, and the Committee on the Budget.

By choosing Harris, Biden is cementing their place in history: Harris is the first African American and South Asian American woman to be chosen as the running mate in a presidential election, representing a major political party. If the pair wins the election in November, Harris would be the first female to serve as vice president.

As far as female candidates in major parties go, most recently, Sarah Palin served as John McCain's Republican running mate in 2008, while Democrat Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2016. The candidates lost in both cases.