'My dear friend': Kamala Harris remembers late Beau Biden in victory speech

As attorneys general, vice president-elect and her running mate’s late son ‘had each other’s backs’

In her remarks to the nation after the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ticket was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, the California senator mentioned her close relationship with Beau Biden, the president-elect’s son who died following a brain cancer diagnosis in 2015.

“While I first knew Joe as vice president, I really got to know him as the father who loved Beau, my dear friend, who we remember here today,” she said.

The senator, the former attorney general of California, relied on support from Beau Biden – Delaware’s attorney general – as an ally through her decision to pull California out of an agreement among all 50 state attorneys general and the Justice Department to investigate banks and allegations of foreclosure abuse during the 2011 housing crisis. Attorney General Harris said an initial settlement amounted to “crumbs” for California.

Critics had warned that leaving negotiations would kneecap states, urging officials to pressure banks to wring more out of a settlement.

“We had each other’s backs,” she wrote in her 2019 memoir The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.

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She said that they talked “every day” through rough patches, “sometimes multiple times a day.”

Later, Joe Biden endorsed her run for US Senate.

Read more: Beau Biden, the president-elect’s late son

Following his death, Ms Harris, in a tribute on social media, said: "I feel fortunate to have known Beau as a friend and to have had the opportunity to work closely with him as Attorneys General. My heart and prayers go out to his family, which he loved so passionately."

“Joe is a healer, a uniter, a tested and steady hand,” she said in remarks from Delaware on 7 November, as the former vice president was declared president-elect, preventing Donald Trump’s re-election.

She said her running mate is “a person whose own experience of loss gives him a sense of purpose that will help us, as a nation, reclaim our own sense of purpose."

He is “a man with a big heart who loves with abandon,” she said.

“It’s his love for Jill, who will be an incredible First Lady,” she added. “It’s his love for Hunter, Ashley, his grandchildren, and the entire Biden family.”