Kamala Harris wins her home state of California, CBS News projects
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.
The win in California was not nearly enough to defeat former President Donald Trump, who claimed a decisive victory in the election. Harris was vying to become the first woman president, and the first Black and South Asian woman to be elected president in U.S. history, capping a a political trajectory that began in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Harris was born in Oakland and went to 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, D.C., and returned to the Bay Area where she obtained a law degree at 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 assistant district attorney in San Francisco and in 2003, she was elected as district attorney, beating out her former boss and becoming the first person of color elected as 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 ran for president briefly in 2020, and was later selected by the eventual Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden to be his running mate.
With Biden's election, Harris became the first Black and Asian American vice president, as well as the highest-ranking female government official in U.S. history.
The last time a Republican presidential candidate won the state of California was in 1988 with the election of George H.W. Bush.