Who is Kamala Harris and will she be the first woman US president?

When Joe Biden dropped out of the US presidential election after weeks of pressure from his party, he quickly made clear he had only one successor in mind.

"My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President," he wrote in a post on X.

"And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this."

In her own statement, Harris wrote: "On behalf of the American people, I thank Joe Biden for his extraordinary leadership as president of the United States and for his decades of service to our country.

"I am honoured to have the president’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination."

Harris still has to be formally nominated by the party at its convention in Chicago in a few weeks' time, and it is not yet known if she will face a challenger.

But the combination of her current position, Biden's support and the collective exhaustion from the effort to get him to stand down will make it difficult for other candidates to explain why she should have to fight for the nomination — especially since, if elected, she would be the nation's first woman president and only its second black president.

So how did Harris get to the brink of the presidency?

The daughter of a Jamaican-American father and a Tamil Indian mother, the 59-year-old Harris grew up in Oakland, California. After graduating from university and law school, she became a district attorney, working her way up in California's legal system before being elected the state's attorney general in 2010.

Re-elected in 2014, she was then elected to the US Senate in