Kamala Harris‘ family couldn’t predict the future, but Maya Harris is not surprised that her big sister is on track to become the next president of the United States.
Maya has been thrown into the spotlight more recently thanks to supporting Kamala at her campaigns and resurfaced clips that gave online viewers glimpses into their sibling relationship.
“You see today, she’s a force,” Maya said in an exclusive interview with People. “She’s fearless, she’s relentless, she’s tough, she’s courageous. I mean, she really has been that way since we were kids. She’s never backed down from a challenge.”
As the younger sister of the vice president, Maya, 57, has joined the last stretch of her sister’s campaign as a family surrogate.
As Kamala goes on what Maya calls a “long road and long journey,” she says she “wouldn’t be anywhere else,” and their sisterly bond is more “important” than ever. “We are sisters who do the things that sisters do,” she said.
“She is my sister, and I will always support her, stand by her side and have her back the way I know she has mine,” Maya later added.
Maya has been influential in politics and civil rights for over two decades. The accomplished lawyer served as senior policy adviser to Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign, leading policy experts tasked with developing Clinton’s domestic policy agenda. She also served as campaign chairperson for her sister during her 2020 presidential primary campaign.
The Stanford Law graduate acknowledges that while her sister “will never stop seeing me as her younger sister,” Kamala respects her input, which she considers a true testament to her character.
“Kamala welcomes advice not just from me, but from anyone that she encounters with experience and perspective that she may not have. She really listens to people,” Maya explained. “She respects other people’s points of view, even if they are different from hers. She respects what she may not know and that somebody else can help enlighten her about. And that is just who she is.”
The plight of Maya forever being a little sister was evident in a 2012 video that has resurfaced from a joint interview with Newsweek and The Daily Beast at the “Women in the World” conference. Maya and Kamala traded a few playful jabs about Kamala’s proper.
At the time, Harris had made history as her state’s first woman, the first Asian American, and the first African-American to hold the office of California attorney general.
Although she hasn’t claimed it, some believe Maya seemingly anticipated her sister’s future.
“What they call attorney generals when their attorney is general?” she asked the interviewer. “They call them ‘general.’”
Harris interrupted and said, “Yes, they call me General Harris and she hates that.”
“When she was elected attorney general, she actually said, ‘You realize you’re going to have to start calling me General Harris,’” Maya continued.
“So my feeling is that when she’s president of the United States, I will call her ‘Miss President,’ but until then you’re just Kamala.”
“No I’m just big sister General,” Kamala added before the two burst into laughter.
Maya supports her sister’s presidential campaign of building the middle class and supporting the people of America who reflect their upbringing. Kamala and Maya often praise their late mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a breast cancer researcher who immigrated to the United States from Chennai, India.
“We watched our mother work long hours,” Maya said. “She took us to her lab on the weekends. She gave us jobs to do while we were there, filing papers and cleaning beakers and pipettes so that we weren’t idle and that we found some way to contribute.”
Their father, Donald Jasper Harris, an economist and emeritus professor at Stanford University, was born in Browns Town, Jamaica.
She added that the “little girl” who attended a civil rights march with their parents still lives in Kamala, but now she can make an impact, which is all she ever wanted to do.
Although tensions and stakes are high, Maya revealed that the Harris sisters are “content” with what lies ahead in the 2024 election against former President Donald Trump.
