The father of Vice President Kamala Harris was not at the recently-held Democratic National Convention. 

In other words, the New York Post reports that 86-year-old Donald Harris missed his daughter's acceptance of the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

However, other members of Harris's family - including her husband, Doug Emhoff, his two adult children, Cole and Ella, and Harris’s younger sister, Maya Harris - were present.

Accordingly, the big question is why Harris's father was not there.

Here is what we know:

It would appear that Harris does not think too highly of her father.

The Post reports:

While Harris spoke lovingly of her mother’s influence on her life in her speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, she only fleetingly mentioned Donald, cutting him out of her briefly recounted life story from the time she was in elementary school. She said from then, “it was mostly my mother who raised us.”

Harris's mother and father broke up with she was 8 years old. Donald Harris would go on to marry Carol Kirlew, and the two remain together. The Post reports that " Harris has never publicly acknowledged she has a stepmother."

It is unclear whether or not Donald Harris was invited to the DNC convention. He has not released a statement on the matter.

During her speech, Harris said:

At the park, my mother would say, "Stay close." But my father would say, as he smiled, "Run, Kamala, run. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you." From my earliest years, he taught me to be fearless.

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It is also possible that Harris is trying to distance herself, politically speaking, from her father.

Donald Harris is an economist with a far-left bent, and former President Donald Trump - Kamala Harris opponent in the 2024 presidential election - has been trying to argue that the apple does not fall too far from the tree.

Trump recently said of Harris:

We don't need a lecture on the economy from a candidate pushing communist price controls. Kamala has no idea what the hell she's doing. Her father is a Marxist professor, and I believe he taught her well. You know, he is a Marxist professor. Does anyone know that? I wonder if they knew that when they did an overthrow, or a coup, on Joe Biden, where she came from and what her ideology is.

The mainstream media has been circling the wagons, trying to claim that Harris is not as far to the left as her father is. An economics professor who knew Harris disagrees.

Joanilio Teixeira, an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Brasilia, said:

I have the impression that the press tends to exaggerate the distance between them in the political sense with people saying that he was much more to the left, more of a social democrat than she is.