Harris’s mother hails from India but her father was born in Jamaica in 1938. Donald J. Harris is a retired Stanford economics professor who immigrated to the United States in the 1960s to get his Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley. 

“To this day, I continue to retain the deep social awareness and strong sense of identity which that grassroots Jamaican philosophy fed in me,” he wrote in a 2018 essay. “As a father, I naturally sought to develop the same sensibility in my two daughters.”

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As the vice president stumps on the campaign trail, she’s found a listening ear in Jamaicans from the Peach State who view her as part of their family.

“We are proud of our own,” Evette Taylor-Reynolds, who is the president of the Atlanta Jamaican Association, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “She is a part of our diaspora. We see within her the strength that we are as a nation.”

At roughly 75,000 strong, Jamaicans compose under 1% of Georgia’s population, with the demographic being heavily concentrated in the metro Atlanta area, particularly in Newton County. But in a state that President Joe Biden won by only 12,000 votes during the 2020 presidential election, the tiny voting bloc could have the power to make or break Kamala Harris’s chances of beating former President Donald Trump on Election Day.

Kamala Harris is trailing Trump by more than 2 percentage points in the Peach State, per an aggregate of polling from RealClearPolitics. The news comes as an unprecedented 50% of Georgia voters have already cast their ballots ahead of the election, with turnout being especially high in deep-red counties.

But the vice president’s Jamaican heritage may be the key to winning her the few thousand votes she desperately needs to win the election in Georgia.

“Her multiple identities is actually her superpower in this moment,” Glynda Carr, the CEO of Higher Heights for America, a group focused on supporting black women, told CNN earlier this year. 

“She is the epitome of what the Jamaican brand is — culture, music, and education,” Taylor-Reynolds, the former festival queen of Jamaica who moved to the U.S. decades ago, added. “We brag that we gave the world reggae, jerk chicken, and oxtails. Well, this is another gift to America.”

Kamala Harris hasn’t typically made her ethnicity a cornerstone of her campaign, and she grew up primarily with her Indian mother after her parents divorced in 1972.

Although she often speaks about her mother, who died in 2009, the vice president rarely mentions her Jamaican father. The two have been estranged for years, though he lives just miles from her in Washington, D.C., per a recent New York Times report.

The two had a public spat back in 2019, after the then-2020 Democratic presidential candidate was pressed on if it was true she would oppose the legalization of marijuana.

“That’s not true,” Kamala Harris said. “And look, I joke about it — half joking, half my family is from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?”

Her father accused her of playing “identity politics” with the comments, telling Jamaica Global Online that “speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.”

Yet, while he didn’t attend her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, Kamala Harris reflected onstage, “My father would say, as he smiled, ‘Run, Kamala, run. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you.’”

“From my earliest years, he taught me to be fearless,” she remembered. 

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During another rare comment on her father during an interview with the Washington Post in 2021, the vice president said, “My father, like so many Jamaicans, has immense pride in our Jamaican heritage and instilled that same pride in my sister and me.”

“We love Jamaica. He taught us the history of where we’re from, the struggles and beauty of the Jamaican people and the richness of the culture,” she concluded.