Before she was vice president, Kamala Harris was a Wisconsinite

While Vice President Kamala Harris’ official residence is currently Number One Observatory Circle in Washington, D.C. — and could be the White House in a matter of months if she wins the presidential election in November — she used to live in a small home on the shores of Lake Mendota in Madison.

Harris, who is running for president after President Joe Biden announced he was no longer seeking reelection, spent a few years in Wisconsin’s capital city as part of a childhood that she said helped shape her political career.

“It was a brief moment — but for a little while, we called Wisconsin home,” Harris said in an op-ed published in the Wisconsin State Journal when she was campaigning as Biden’s running mate in 2020.

Harris was born in Oakland, California, in 1964. Her family lived in the Bay Area and in Illinois before moving to Madison in 1968, where Harris lived from the ages of 3 to 5 while her parents worked at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her father, Donald Harris, was an associate professor of economics, and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a breast cancer researcher.

The home they lived in, a small two-bedroom house built in 1920, is located on a bluff overlooking Lake Mendota in Madison’s Spring Harbor neighborhood. Harris visited the house in March and said in an interview with the Cap Times that she remembers hearing the sound of jazz music, from Miles Davis to Alice Coltrane, playing throughout the house, and recalled birthday parties and playing with her sister Maya. While standing on the back deck with the home’s current owner, Harris remarked on how beautiful the property was.

“I don’t remember the house as much as I remember the path down to the lake, and we would take walks. But it’s very special, very special,” she said to reporters. “Welcome to my Madison roots.”

Harris has said that her parents’ political activism shaped her as a child. In Wisconsin, her father was one of 14 Black UW faculty members who supported a strike by students protesting the treatment of Black students on campus in 1969, and he was among many teachers who joined protests against the United States’ expansion of bombing operations in Cambodia during the Vietnam War.

Harris’ parents eventually divorced, and she moved back to Berkeley with her mother and sister in 1970, and later to Montreal, where she graduated high school. Her dad left UW-Madison in 1972 to teach at Stanford University.

After high school, Harris attended and graduated from Howard University in Washington, D.C., and the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. She worked as a prosecutor and a district attorney in the Bay Area, and then served as California’s attorney general for six years. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2017 and served for four years until she was elected vice president.

Wisconsin, a battleground state that could help decide the presidential election, has remained top of mind for Harris in her sprint to November. She held the first rally of her presidential campaign in West Allis on July 24, and has another scheduled stop in Eau Claire on Aug. 7.