Next week’s election has the potential to make a few different kinds of history. Not only would a win for Kamala Harris make her the first Black and South Asian female president of the United States, but it would make her husband, Doug Emhoff, the country’s first first gentleman. So, what exactly do we know about Emhoff? Here are 15 key facts.
Born in New York and raised in New Jersey and California, Emhoff earned his B.A. from California State University, Northridge, and his J.D. from the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. From 2017 to 2020, Emhoff was a partner at the firm DLA Piper, where he was based out of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. According to an official bio, Emhoff “is a highly experienced litigator and strategic advisor” who represented “large domestic and international corporations and some of today’s highest profile individuals and influencers in complex business, real estate, and intellectual property litigation disputes.”
In 2019, a profile of Emhoff in the Hollywood Reporter noted that in the early 2000s, “‘Yo quiero Taco Bell’ was a familiar refrain thanks to a series of ads featuring the live-action pooch that was developed by [Emhoff’s] client TBWA.” But a Michigan company said that it had actually created the “Psycho Chihuahua” character for Taco Bell and sued for breach of contract. When it was forced to pay $42 million, Taco Bell tried to pass on the bill to the ad agency, but Emhoff’s legal work successfully deflected that claim.
In 2013, when they were both in their 40s, Emhoff and Harris met on a dinner date arranged by Harris’s friend Chrisette Hudlin, a public relations consultant. In her 2019 memoir The Truths We Hold, Harris wrote about how difficult it was as a public figure to maintain a normal dating life. (When she met Emhoff, she was the attorney general of California.) “I knew that if I brought a man with me to an event, people would immediately start to speculate about our relationship,” Harris wrote. “I also knew that single women in politics are viewed differently than single men. We don’t get the same latitude when it comes to our social lives.”
At this year’s Democratic National Convention, Emhoff revealed that he left a legendary first voicemail for Harris during their courtship, noting that “she makes me listen to it on every anniversary.” After calling her at 8:30 a.m., he remembered, “I got Kamala’s voicemail, and I just started rambling: ‘Hey, it’s Doug. I’m on my way to an early meeting. Again. It’s Doug...’ I remember I was trying to grab the words out of the air and just put them back in my mouth.”
The morning after their first date, Emhoff reportedly wrote Harris an email. “I’m too old to play games or hide the ball,” it said. “I really like you, and I want to see if we can make this work.” The two were married less than a year later in a civil ceremony held at the Santa Barbara courthouse on a Friday afternoon. Harris’s younger sister, Maya, officiated.
When Harris met Emhoff, he was divorced with two young kids, sharing custody with his first wife, Kerstin. Harris has spoken frequently of being embraced by both her new stepchildren and Emhoff’s first wife, and the easy relationship of their blended family. (“When [Doug and Kamala] first started dating and [Kamala] was [attorney general of California], I just thought, Wow, that’s cool. Don’t mess this up!” Kerstin told Marie Claire in 2020.)
As reported in a 2018 Vogue profile, Emhoff’s son Cole graduated from Colorado College in May 2017 before working as an assistant at William Morris Endeavor and an executive assistant at Plan B Entertainment. His younger sister, Ella, is a model and talented knitter.
In June of 2019, as Harris spoke onstage at the MoveOn Big Ideas Forum in San Francisco, an animal-rights activist rushed the stage, snatching away the then senator’s microphone and beginning to speak to the crowd. Harris was quickly ushered off, but, along with a handful of others, Emhoff sprang into action, jumping up onto the stage to help drag the protester away. (You can watch the video here.) Afterward, Emhoff tweeted a picture of himself and Harris, both smiling (and he wearing a “Kamala Harris for the People” sweatshirt), writing, “Thx for all the kind notes. We are good. I love @KamalaHarris and would do anything for her.”
Early in Harris’s first presidential primary race, Emhoff bonded with Chasten Buttigieg, the husband of Pete Buttigieg, and the two quickly became social media buddies. After a less-than-complimentary profile of Emhoff came out in 2019, Chasten posted a shout-out to his friend: “The irony of an article telling you to be yourself and in the same breath telling you to be someone else is *chefs kiss. deep sigh. eye roll.* political life for campaign spouses. Keep being you, @douglasemhoff.” (Emhoff responded by tweeting: “Dear @Chas10Buttigieg: I’m not crying, just have something in my eyes. Thx for the support. #spousessticktogether.”) In another post, which included a picture of the two on the campaign trail, Emhoff wrote, “Just spent some time chatting with my friend @Chas10Buttigieg. Sometimes the only person you can talk to about going through this as a spouse, is someone going through this as a spouse!”
Emhoff was spinning with friends at the SoulCycle in Los Angeles’s West Hollywood neighborhood when Harris learned that Joe Biden would be dropping out of the 2024 presidential race—which initially made him difficult to reach. “I was there for 20 minutes or so, and all of a sudden one of the friends shows me his phone and said, ‘I think you need to look at this,’” Emhoff later recalled.
Okay, cool dad! Emhoff has his two children’s initials tattooed on his wrist, alongside a dragon symbol tattoo to commemorate his and Harris’s shared birth year of 1964 (the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese Zodiac).
No less an authority on mensch-y comedy than Andy Samberg himself has portrayed Emhoff on the 50th season of Saturday Night Live, referring to the potential first gentleman as a “trad huz” and a “little spoon.” Watch one laugh-out-loud funny clip for yourself below.
