Among the avalanche of questions pouring down on the head of presidential hopeful Kamala Harris, one of the most intriguing is this: where’s your sister gone?
Just two years younger than Kamala, 57-year-old Maya Harris has been described as the vice president’s ‘Bobby Kennedy’ – a reference to the late US Attorney General who was an inseparable companion and indispensable advisor to his brother, President John F. Kennedy.
Indeed, the Harris sisters have long experienced working together, collaborating on political victories that saw Kamala become California’s Attorney General, and later a US Senator.
Kamala has called their bond ‘unbreakable’. And, when she received a call from President Joe Biden in July conceding that he would end his re-election campaign and pass the torch to her, Maya was among the first to rush to her sister’s side at the vice presidential residence in Washington.
However, since then, Maya has largely vanished from public view.
Aside from the occasional sighting on the campaign trail, including an on-stage appearance at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this summer, Maya has been nearly nowhere to be seen. Certainly, she has no official campaign title.
‘I feel that Maya has been very low-profile… extremely low-profile,’ one Democrat insider told DailyMail.com.
Perhaps, Maya’s absence is no mere precaution.
After all, as a former policy advisor to Hillary Clinton, Maya served as campaign chairperson on Kamala’s disastrous 2020 presidential bid.
That campaign infamously face-planted in December 2019, two months before voters could even deliver their verdict in the first Iowa caucuses. And the blame was placed squarely on Maya’s shoulders.
Democrat sources have confirmed to the Mail that they still hold Maya responsible, accusing her of pushing her big sister’s political positions even further left than those of proudly socialist senator Bernie Sanders.
Socialized medicine, taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal immigrants, a ban on fracking, decriminalizing prostitution, decriminalizing illegal border crossings and endorsing the ‘Green New Deal’… nothing was apparently too radical for Maya to suggest, or for Harris to consider when it came to earning support from the progressive left in 2019.
As a Politico article about the doomed presidential run concluded at the time, Maya had been ‘involved in virtually every facet of the race’. Or, to put it another way, it was a train wreck of a campaign and Maya was one of the conductors driving it off the rails.
Nonetheless, Kamala’s official campaign manager Juan Rodriguez ended up taking most of the heat, even though it was well reported that he frequently deferred to Maya.
A New York Times report went so far as to say that Maya went ‘unchallenged’, while Kamala seemed unable or unwilling to take control.
It wasn’t just disgruntled campaign staffers who felt this way. Some of the sisters’ relatives also had doubts.
A source familiar with conversations among Harris’s extended family confirmed to DailyMail.com that some had blamed Maya for Kamala’s failure to launch in 2020.
But if Maya was humbled by that abject failure, it was certainly short lived.
A condolence prize for Kamala’s aborted 2020 primary bid was her selection as Biden’s running mate. And no sooner had Kamala begun measuring for drapes in her White House office than Maya was reportedly hard at work behind the scenes promoting her husband, Tony West, for the role of Biden’s Attorney General.
Those efforts were ultimately fruitless, but West, 59, is clearly an ambitious man.
Having previously served as a high-ranking official in President Barack Obama’s Justice Department, West is currently on leave from his role as senior vice president and chief legal officer of Uber, telling staff in an internal email in August that he will be concentrating instead on ‘supporting my family and my sister-in-law on the campaign trail’.
But that perhaps understates it. For he has reportedly emerged as a key adviser to Kamala’s current campaign, is a regular presence on Air Force Two and acts as something of a liaison between the vice president and a wary business community.
‘The campaign leadership is a collaborative effort, but Tony West is probably the most guiding hand there,’ Bakari Sellers, a CNN commentator and former South Carolina legislator close to the Harris campaign, said last week. ‘There’s nothing that happens in the campaign that he’s not part of.’
That description sounds remarkably similar to how Maya Harris’s role in Kamala’s 2020 campaign was described (‘involved in virtually every facet of the race’).
A person close to West told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month that he has no plans to join a future Harris administration, but many in Washington suspect that Kamala will want to keep her brother-in-law close regardless.
All of which appears to suggest that, even though Maya is largely hidden in the shadows, she remains very much in her older sister’s orbit – as a trusted sibling, spouse to a close advisor and, no doubt, a quiet influence.
For her part, Maya once said that she’s in no doubt where the power lies in this relationship.
‘My feeling is that when she is elected president of the United States, I will call her Miss President,’ said Maya during a joint interview with her sister in 2019. ‘Until then, you’re just Kamala.’
But when it comes to official titles, the better question might be: If the Harris sisters sit down together in the Oval Office in a few months, what will our new president be calling little sister Maya?