Presidential candidate Kamala Harris was hailed by Democrats as the "hope" of America at the Democratic National Convention, but one person was conspicuously absent from the gathering.

Retired Stanford University professor and Marxist economist Donald J. Harris, the father of Kamala Harris, has been silent about her 2024 run.

Harris' father in spotlight

Kamala Harris was raised by her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a biologist from India, after her parents separated when she was 7. Her parents met at UC Berkeley in the 1960s.

Harris briefly mentioned her father in her acceptance speech in Chicago, crediting him with teaching her to be "fearless." She described her parents as passionate civil rights activists who raised their daughter to be politically engaged.

Harris has long been estranged from her father, who taught "radical political economics" at Stanford, according to the university's newspaper, the Stanford Daily. In a recent review of his work, the Economist found a stylistic precursor to his daughter's infamous "word salad" ramblings.

"​​He is a clear writer. There are few compound nouns or sentences that run for paragraphs. Yet he is still a Marxist and his writings are sprinkled with obscurantist theorising," the Economist wrote.

The apple doesn't fall far...

Harris' father emerged from obscurity during her ill-fated 2020 run, when he scolded her for exploiting stereotypes of Jamaicans as carefree potheads to further her political career.

"Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty," he said at the time.

In a 2020 essay, Donald J. Harris lamented the outcome of his child custody battle.

"After a hard-fought custody battle in the family court of Oakland, California, the context of the relationship was placed within arbitrary limits imposed by a court-ordered divorce settlement based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting," he wrote in an essay for Jamaica Global in 2020. "Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children or reneging on my responsibilities as their father."

As Kamala Harris seeks the presidency a second time, her father's Marxist background has become political fodder. Donald Trump has blasted his Democratic rival as a communist, citing her widely panned proposal for price controls.

"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," Trump said recently. "Her father is a Marxist professor, and I believe he taught her well."