Revelations of marital infidelity are never good news for a politician’s image. But when the Daily Mail disclosed last week that Kamala Harris‘s husband had cheated on his first wife by impregnating their children’s blonde nanny, it could hardly have been less helpful to the Democrat nominee.
When you’re trying to win over the progressive young voters who might decide this year’s presidential election by showing them you’ve got the wokest family in America, that sort of cliched patriarchal behaviour is, as they say, highly problematic.
Desperate to make up ground against Donald Trump in key swing states, the Harris campaign and its media allies are busting a gut to enthuse teenage and twentysomething voters who felt no connection to the uncool octogenarian Joe Biden.
While only months away from turning 60, the Democrat presidential contender cannot stop saying how much she ‘loves’ the first-time voters of ‘Gen Z’.
Harris, who once said – supposedly jokingly – that people aged 18 to 24 are ‘stupid’ and ‘make really bad decisions’, recently gushed: ‘I know it’s complicated if you have a Gen Z member in your family. But they’re so spectacular.’ The unspoken message was she knew this from personal experience.
Kamala Harris with her lawyer niece Meena, 39, who she helped raise
This week she tried to soften her reputation for being hard-edged and charmless by choosing an affable and down-to-earth Vice Presidential candidate in Midwesterner Tim Walz. But a presidential contender’s family is also a crucial tool in any campaign and hers is increasingly taking the spotlight.
Interest has been fuelled by the furore generated by the media dredging up a 2021 remark by JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, in which he disparaged Harris as one of the miserable ‘childless cat ladies’.
Only five of 46 US presidents have not had biological children and – even if it does sound desperately antiquated – many Americans still expect their leader to have offspring.
Team Kamala is understandably keen for voters to know she does have a family – including children, albeit stepchildren – and that they’re anything but miserable as they line up to support her presidential bid.
In a domestic set-up which modishly describes itself as a ‘blended family’, Harris has become one of three parents to stepchildren Cole and Ella Emhoff – the other two being her nanny-chasing husband, Doug Emhoff, and his first wife Kerstin.
It’s hardly the most conventional First Family arrangement but, if the Democrats win, America will get not only get its first-ever female president and inaugural ‘first gentleman’ but also a ‘first daughter’ in ultra-quirky Ella who is covered in tattoos, favours armpit hair and unibrows (a single eyebrow when the two brows meet above the nose), and has campaigned earnestly for worthy causes such as transgender black people since the age of nine.
No wonder, Gen Z-ers are salivating with excitement.
While the US mainstream media has been doing its best to pass over the nanny scandal, insiders say that Harris’s family cannot be easily ignored because – as with Biden – they’ve traditionally been some of her closest confidants.
Harris has been married to Emhoff, a former Hollywood entertainment lawyer, since 2014. Younger sister Maya is a lawyer who advised Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and chaired Harris’s ill-fated 2020 White House bid. And then there is Maya’s 39-year-old daughter, Meena – yet another lawyer.
It’s an impressive, feminist powerhouse which Harris – whose record as VP has sadly been anything but impressive – has attributed to the influence of her Indian scientist mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who raised her two daughters largely on her own after splitting up with their father, a Jamaican-born academic, in 1971.
Kamala is one of three parents to stepchild Ella Emhoff. Ultra-quirky Ella who is covered in tattoos, favours armpit hair and unibrows and has campaigned earnestly for worthy causes such as transgender black people since the age of nine
Maya had Meena when she was just 17, and Harris and her mother helped raise Meena while Maya developed her career.
‘A feminist household is all I’ve ever known,’ says Meena, who, as well as being a lawyer, is also an entrepreneur, author and social justice activist. ‘Even the idea of men in power wasn’t something I really learnt about until I got out into the world of work. Our little family unit was just women, fierce women: my grandmother, my mum, my aunt and me.’
Harris spent her adult life focused on her career, becoming California District Attorney and a US senator, before marrying at 50 – a decision some say she made primarily because she had presidential ambitions and voters like a married candidate.
Emhoff, also 59, is cut from a very different cloth to her flash former boyfriends, who include ‘Slick Willie’ Brown, a powerful – and controversial – married black California politician who was almost as old as her father.
Emhoff met Harris on a blind date arranged by a friend five years after he split from his film producer wife of 16 years in 2008 when she discovered his affair.
Harris says she instantly connected with Emhoff, who is white and Jewish, adding: ‘There was no pretence or posing with Doug, no arrogance or boasting.’
As for his children, she said: ‘I was already hooked on Doug, but I believe it was Cole and Ella who reeled me in.’ They agreed calling her ‘stepmom’ sounded too cold so settled on ‘Momala’ instead.
Brooklyn-born Emhoff sings his wife’s praises relentlessly on social media, to the point that he’s been dubbed America’s premier ‘wife guy’, a term for a husband who unselfishly devotes himself to supporting a successful wife.
American liberals have hailed their relationship as ‘monumentally’ significant in showing what a multi-racial couple can be. In 2022, Emhoff piously told an interviewer: ‘Lifting women up so that they can carry out important roles is a very manly thing.’
Emhoff’s enlightened star may have been tarnished by the nanny scandal but younger family members, especially Ella – a huge presence on social media – are also doing their bit to sell the Harris brand to a sceptical electorate.
Ella leapt into action in the row over Vance’s ‘childless cat ladies’ slur aimed at her stepmother.
On Instagram, where the 25-year-old beanpole model/artist/fashion designer posts endless selfies of herself and her tattoo-festooned arms, Ella asked her 344,000 followers: ‘How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like Cole and I?’ She added: ‘I love my three parents.’
Ella with her fashion journalist boyfriend Sam Hine pictured leaving a show during New York Fashion Week in 2021
Meena has two daughters with husband Nikolas Ajagu who is the global head of partnerships at Facebook
Ella, named after Ella Fitzgerald as her father is a huge jazz buff, is a Gen-Z dream. She was only nine when she joined her family in challenging a 2008 California legal amendment banning same-sex marriage.
Although she’s so far stayed out of party politics, Ella has been an activist ever since, and the trendier the cause the better.
In 2020, she announced on social media that she was holding a raffle for a group called For The Gworls, a collective that ‘curates parties to fundraise money to help black transgender people’ pay their rent, travel and ‘gender-affirming surgeries’.
More recently, Ella has controversially weighed in on the issue of Palestine, twice making online pleas for donations to aid organisations that have been accused of being pro-Hamas. Both posts have since been deleted.
After her stepmother became ‘Veep’ in 2021, Ella’s online celebrity soared as she attracted an army of young fans for what NBC News called ‘her androgynous fashion sense and quirky hobbies’.
When a picture of the design-school graduate wearing a £4,000 tweed Miu Miu coat at President Biden’s inauguration went viral, the prestigious model agency IMG offered her a contract.
She has since walked runways, appeared on magazine covers and modelled for Balenciaga and Miu Miu, and was the face of Stella McCartney’s campaign for Adidas. She’s attended New York’s Met Ball, sometimes accompanied by her boyfriend, a fashion journalist named Sam Hine, who occasionally wears a skirt.
‘All of my life, I had really low self-esteem and self-confidence, so this kind of felt like a way for me to take that back,’ Ella has said of her modelling.
In August 2022, fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar declared her an ‘icon’; a month later, she strode down a runway during New York Fashion Week in a daring outfit that bared one breast.
Ella is currently concentrating more on art than modelling, however. On her website, she describes herself as a ‘multidisciplinary artist and creator’. She also runs a knitting club. You could be forgiven for mistaking her for the embodiment of bohemian living. But Harris’s family doesn’t have to slum it.
Property records show that Ella – who was brought up in the smart Los Angeles neighbourhood of Brentwood and went to a ‘progressive’ private school – owns a £1 million apartment in Lower Manhattan.
She has rhapsodised about the Harris-Emhoff marriage, telling the New York Times in 2021 that the relationship is ‘like the honeymoon phase forever’. (Her brother Cole has described it a little more bluntly as ‘almost vomit-inducingly cute and coupley’.)
Still, family get-togethers sound terrifying. Her stepchildren admit Harris can be intense and, especially when she’s with female relatives, there’s no time for small talk in a room full of lawyers shouting over each other about politics. Or about their ambitious plans for the children or visiting friends.
Kamala with her husband Doug and stepchildren Cole and Ella
‘If you don’t have your ten-year plan ready and outlined in a spreadsheet for them, you’re not going to survive that meal,’ said Ella, perhaps only half-jokingly. ‘We would have these real conversations at dinner, almost Socratic, where we would all bounce off each other,’ says her brother.
Cole, 29 – also named after a jazz icon, although reports differ as to whether it’s songwriter Cole Porter or saxophonist John Coltrane – is far more private than his sister and stays off social media.
He works in Hollywood, where he has been an executive assistant on two feature films made by Brad Pitt’s production company and has co-produced a short film, Peacocking. He too seems to be devoted to his stepmother, describing her as ‘completely unique and totally special’, and even asked her to officiate at his wedding last year.
It’s all a far cry from the Trump tribe. Don Jr’s big-game hunting trips, including the slaughter of rare sheep in Mongolia, and Ivanka’s endless haute couture wardrobe displays did little to win over progressive young Americans.
But one area in which the family does resemble the Trumps is its talent for trading off the White House connection, a trait that has already landed Harris’s enterprising niece Meena in trouble.
In 2021, the Los Angeles Times revealed alarmed White House officials had reined in Meena when, five days before her aunt was sworn in as VP, she appeared on US breakfast TV to plug her children’s book, Ambitious Girl, wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the word ‘Ambitious’ which was part of her clothing range.
Pictures of Meena with her famous aunt flashed across the screen as the Harvard-trained lawyer once again exploited the connection to sell her ‘socially conscious’ books, clothes and other products, which often used Harris’s image or quotes.
It was particularly embarrassing given that the Biden administration had rounded on the Trumps for doing much the same.
Meena, who has worked on her aunt’s political campaigns, still regularly cheers for Harris on Instagram, where she has nearly 700,000 followers, but she’s cut back on mentioning her in relation to her business ventures.
The latter remain achingly worthy. On the website of Reductress, a satirical women’s magazine owned by Meena’s company, you can buy mugs with the slogan ‘Don’t Talk To Me Till I’ve Had My Abortion’ and shirts emblazoned with the word ‘Childless’.
Meena is also producing a forthcoming Broadway play celebrating gay identity entitled My Son’s A Queer (But What Can You Do?) and has a one-person show, Faghag, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, staring Dylan Mulvaney, the transgender social media star.
She has two daughters with husband Nikolas Ajagu, global head of partnerships at Facebook, and says that when she reads to her children: ‘We would often change the pronouns from he, to she, to they. We would take a brown marker and colour skin in with brown marker sometimes.’
Harris’s very modern family is predictably giving Gen Z palpitations of excitement. Yet with older voters rolling their eyes at some of the more ridiculous wokery, it remains to be seen if Instagram ‘likes’ can translate into election day votes.
