ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — It's not Carmela, Kam-AH-la or Camella. It's K-AH-m-a-l-a.
Kamala Harris, D-California, is presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's running mate, and you'll be hearing her name many more times during the next few months.
She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016 and since then, she said her first name has been pronounced in many different ways.
Way back in May 2016, during her campaign for the Senate, she posted a video to Twitter with #KidsForKamala explaining how to properly pronounce her name.
Even back in 2009, when Harris was the District Attorney of San Francisco, the senator was explaining how to pronounce her name.
She once told a reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle that he was the only person to ever ask her about it. She said to think of it either as "comma-la" or "calm-ala."
The first-term senator and former California prosecutor jumped into the 2020 presidential race in January 2019 but ended her campaign in December. As Biden's pick, she's the first Black woman and first Asian American woman to be on the presidential ticket for a major political party in the United States.
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