Are You Curious About Doug Emhoff?

Last month, amid the frenzied optimism of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, some discerning (read: horny) voters were consumed not with Brat memes but with a photo of Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff. The photo showed a young Doug and his biceps smiling somewhere near a beach, his eyebrows arranged in a position I can only describe as Schlossbergian. Naturally, it has become so popular that the hardworking elves at Harris’s campaign HQ quickly slapped it on T-shirts, tank tops, stickers, and a dishwasher-safe mug.

Before the photo, most of us knew Emhoff as a Stan Smith–wearing guy who loves selfies and supporting his wife. (Like, the kind of guy who misses news of Biden dropping out of the presidential race because he’s in a WeHo SoulCycle class with his gay friends.) Now, we know there is so much more lying behind those hazel peepers. Let’s get to know this California hunk, shall we?

First things first. Is this photo real?

This really is a photo of our nation’s Second Gentleman. In April 2020, Emhoff posted it on X with the caption #MeAt20. Other photos from his early years suggest that this wasn’t a fluke and he did, in fact, look like that.

Who is Doug Emhoff?

Emhoff was born in Brooklyn but grew up in New Jersey before relocating to Los Angeles in the late ’80s when he was in high school. Emhoff has described his time in L.A. as “pretty incredible” — he compared it to Fast Times at Ridgemont High — so it sounds like he was enjoying himself. (See also: that photo.) Anyway, he ended up at California State University for college and then headed to USC Gould School of Law. After graduating, he made a name for himself as an entertainment lawyer specializing in creative intellectual property. His most high-profile case was a lawsuit against Taco Bell, which two Michigan men had accused of stealing the idea for the “psycho Chihuahua” in its “Yo Quiero Taco Bell” commercial from the ’90s. Emhoff defended the ad agency that had helped put the commercial together and ended up making sure Taco Bell — and not the ad agency — was responsible for paying the guys $42 million. Go, Doug!

Emhoff married a film producer named Kerstin in 1992, and together they had two children, Cole and Ella. (They are named after jazz musicians John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald.) Emhoff and Kerstin were married until 2008, when they entered into what has become a chill conscious uncoupling — Kamala Harris and Kerstin are close friends, and Harris has joked that their lovely family is “a little too functional.”

How did he and Harris meet?

Speaking of Harris: In 2013, Emhoff was living life as a high-powered lawyer–slash–divorced dad when his client Chrisette Hudlin set him up on a date with her friend Kamala Harris. At the time, Harris was the California State general attorney. Emhoff, according to his own account, reacted to the prospect of going on a date with her by saying, “She’s hot!” After several endearingly awkward phone calls on his end, he says, they met and got serious fast — they got married the following year at the Santa Barbara courthouse, with Harris’s sister officiating an interfaith ceremony that involved a flower garland, per Hindu tradition, and Emhoff following the Jewish custom of breaking a glass.

What does he do as the Second Gentleman?

In 2020, Emhoff left his law-firm post when Joe Biden won the election to head off concerns about conflict of interest. He’s taught a few classes at Georgetown Law since settling in D.C. but seems to mostly focus on his Second Gentleman duties. Last year, he led a roundtable with the Congressional Dads Caucus to talk about the administration’s work around family issues like child care and parental leave.

Emhoff, who’s the first Jewish spouse of a president or vice-president, has played a big role in the White House’s antisemitism efforts. In December 2022, shortly after Donald Trump dined with white nationalist Nick Fuentes and Kanye West, Emhoff organized a roundtable with the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish leaders, and six months later he was one of the team members Biden recruited to launch an ambitious strategy to counter antisemitism in the U.S. Since war broke out in Gaza, he has continued to express concern about antisemitic attacks on American Jews and has warned against conflating the beliefs of individual Jewish people with the actions of the Israeli government. Though his own feelings on Israel’s policies are a little murky — Harris has more explicitly called for a temporary cease-fire — he made efforts to include Arab Americans in his outreach in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s attacks and condemned “Islamophobia and hate of every kind” on Twitter. (Emhoff’s daughter, Ella, is more forthcoming — in March, she caused conservative uproar when she posted a Gaza humanitarian fundraising campaign to her Instagram Stories.)

Anything else?

In possibly his most momentous political contribution to date, Emhoff says he filmed the widely memed video of his wife telling Biden, “We did it, Joe!” on the morning the election was called in his favor in November 2020. (The couple was apparently out on a jog together when they got the news.) “It’s a pretty iconic video — that I took,” he told The 19th in 2022.

Why does everyone keep calling him a wife guy?

Though 20-year-old California Doug may appeal to our basest instincts, he has always held the more wholesome allure of an endearing wife guy — a moniker he used to describe himself well before the rest of the country did. None of them are wrong. For one thing, he is Harris’s biggest fan, endlessly posting about her and her campaign with enthusiasm of 17 KHive stan accounts.

In being such a good wife guy, Emhoff has also become a pretty cool model for the first male White House spouse. He has been widely lauded for putting aside his career as the wives of presidents and vice-presidents have done before him. But luckily for Emhoff, this is a man who appears to thrive in the passenger seat. He can pick a pet issue and give it the respect it deserves without jostling for the spotlight. When Biden was first elected, he wrote an essay about how “humbling” it had been to join the campaign trail and hear Americans’ stories. Also, one look at his face tells me can go all out on tasteful holiday décor. I wouldn’t want any other guy to be America’s first First Gentleman.

Perhaps most tellingly: Shortly after taking credit for the “We did it, Joe!” video, Emhoff told The 19th that he really wanted to be remembered as “a man who was supporting his wife who was the first woman vice-president.” Perhaps he might one day be a man who supports his wife who is the first woman president …?

What has his role been in the campaign thus far?

Doug is dutifully campaigning for Kamala on his own (something he’s no stranger to doing), first in Maine, where he visited Planned Parenthood and a rum distillery, and then at the Hmong Wausau Festival in Wisconsin. He has self-deprecatingly shared that spin-class story, called J.D. Vance a “weirdo” (correct), and made fun of Trump’s elaborate fumbles over his wife’s name. “Here’s the good news,” he said in Wisconsin. “After the election, you can just call her Madam President.” He also seems to have capitalized on his good standing with the gay community (see: his SoulCycle companions) — he and his friend Chasten Buttigieg, Pete Buttigieg’s husband, held a wildly successful fundraiser in Fire Island earlier this month.

Emhoff has made his Judaism and his continued battle against antisemitism a major talking point on the campaign trail (though he has side-stepped questions about the administration’s policies toward Israel and Gaza, deferring to his wife). Earlier in August, he was forced to address an extramarital affair from his first marriage that was dragged into tabloid headlines. “I took responsibility,” he said in a public statement, “and in the years since, we worked through things as a family and have come out stronger on the other side.”

The Harris campaign seems to have a keen sense of where to book Emhoff — in July, he appeared in a pitch-perfect Jack Schlossberg video (these two politically adjacent fellas really are kindred spirits), wherein Schlossberg asks Emhoff and David Letterman whether various substances are condiments or sauces. In it, Emhoff decisively calls ketchup a food group. It might be the most controversial thing he’s ever said.

This post has been updated.