Maya has been with Kamala every step along her professional and political road. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post) Together, differently Kamala Harris meets two second graders with Maya, center, during a town hall-style event in Las Vegas in March. When I think about it, all of the joyous moments in our lives, all of the challenging moments, all of the moments of transition, we have always been together.” “We leaned on each other,” Kamala said in an interview last year. They remember the Mayflower truck coming to move their belongings across the continent they remember arriving at their apartment and hiding from the cold in the closet and they remember how their relationship further solidified in a place where no one else spoke their language. When the girls were 12 and 9, Shyamala accepted a job at McGill University, moved the family to Montreal and enrolled Kamala and Maya in a neighborhood school where everyone spoke French except for them.

Other times, Shyamala would travel without them, leaving the girls under the care of neighbors they considered family. When feasible, Kamala and Maya would tag along to their mother’s conferences, getting the run of the place in hotels around the world. The Harris girls pose for a Christmas photo in 1968. They split when the sisters were young, after which it was mostly just “Shyamala and the girls,” and sometimes, when Shyamala had to travel for work, it was just the girls. Their father, Donald, was a Stanford economics professor from Jamaica, and their mother, Shyamala, was a scientist from India. But the sisters share a contagious, body-shaking laugh so similar that strangers often guess they are related. Kamala resembles their father: taller and angular where Maya has the softer features of their late mother, who clocked in at 5-foot-1. The Harris sisters do not look all that much alike. Soon, money grew short and a campaign that began with one of the biggest crowds of the 2020 presidential cycle ended two months before the Iowa caucuses. Donors started showing concern about her ability to distinguish herself from the field and looked elsewhere. Ultimately, Harris tried both strategies as her campaign struggled to forge a clear identity throughout the primary. Harris’s longtime California-based political advisers, meanwhile, believed the former attorney general’s record was a key part of her presidential pitch. When it came time to address Kamala’s prosecutorial record in her presidential campaign, Maya favored acknowledging things her sister would do differently now. Harris, right, is inaugurated as attorney general as her sister, Maya Harris, center, and Chief Justice of California Tani Cantil-Sakauye, left, applaud at the California Museum in Sacramento on Jan.

Aides to the Vice President-elect have gone out of their way to emphasize that Maya will have no official role in the Biden-Harris administration, and Maya hopes to remove herself from the spotlight - in part to avoid even the tiniest semblance of the nepotism that defined the Trump era. She has been far less visible in her sister’s public life since the elder Harris was named to the Democratic ticket in mid-August. Now, Maya Harris is stepping back from her sister’s career - at least officially, at least for now. The partnership, however, did not yield the desired results, and Harris dropped out of the primary months before any votes were cast. It is a job she for which she was uniquely qualified: She had been a senior adviser for Hillary Clinton in 2016, knows her sister better than anyone else and, professionally, is something of a yin to Kamala’s yang. The two are not only extremely close during Kamala’s year-long presidential run, Maya served as her campaign chairwoman. Harris has her younger sister, Maya Harris. Kennedy had Bobby, Joe Biden’s sister, Valerie, once ran his campaigns and Ivanka Trump has been one of the 45th president’s most visible advisers. It is no wonder so many people turn to family members: John F. įinding people to trust in politics - a field full of mercenaries with their own interests at heart - can be a tough thing to do.

This story has been updated from an earlier published version.

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