During Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential primary campaign in 2019, she developed a reputation she has been unable to shake — that she’s a messenger in search of a message. This idea has also characterized her tenure as vice president and driven some Democrats’ concern about her potentially replacing President Biden at the top of the ticket. But it is outdated.
In 2019, Ms. Harris was competing on progressive bona fides with the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. She was running at a time when progressive voters were uniquely focused on criminal-justice reform and suspicious of law enforcement, which was a problem for Ms. Harris, who had built her political career as a prosecutor. Hemmed in by these dynamics, Ms. Harris struggled to define her brand.
She faces a different moment today. Less than four months from the general election, she would be competing not for progressive points but to keep the felon Donald Trump out of office. She would be doing so at a time when many voters are concerned about crime and public safety, and when prosecutors have assumed heroic status in the fight to prosecute Mr. Trump and his cronies.
This time around, Ms. Harris could finally be herself.
When Ms. Harris began her primary campaign in January 2019, she had served just two years as a senator; the rest of her career had been spent as a state and local prosecutor. While this background had traditionally been a reliable path to political office on the right and the left, the politics changed during Ms. Harris’s career. By the time she was packaging herself for a national audience, so-called progressive prosecutors had been elected in cities across the country. These prosecutors promised to divert or decriminalize drug-related offenses, reform cash bail, decline to prosecute cases involving police misconduct and otherwise minimize the prosecutorial role.
In this context, Ms. Harris’s prosecutorial record was found wanting (including by me, in a profile I wrote of her in 2019). As district attorney, she threatened parents whose kids were chronically truant with prosecution. When Ms. Harris was attorney general, her office defended the death penalty and cash bail. During the primary, Ms. Harris tried to paint her record as progressive — compared with prosecutors in most American jurisdictions at the time, it was — but she was slow to take policy stands on criminal-justice issues. With just two years outside a prosecutor’s office, she lacked the depth that Mr. Sanders, Ms. Warren and Mr. Biden brought to most other issues. She made some embarrassing stumbles, such as taking contradictory positions on Medicare for all.
By the time Ms. Harris dropped out of the race, before the Iowa caucuses, she was widely perceived as rudderless. This reputation has followed her as vice president. Months into her term, she gave a disastrous 2021 interview with NBC’s Lester Holt on border policy. Rather than making additional appearances that might have shifted how voters saw her, she retreated, seemingly scared of making things worse. By last year, Ms. Harris had the lowest net-negative rating for a vice president among registered voters since the poll in question began.
These struggles are partly because of Ms. Harris’s policy focus as vice president. She reportedly did not want to take on criminal-justice and policing issues, echoing her reticence on these issues during her primary campaign. She sought out voting rights, an issue in her personal and professional comfort zone but one that was doomed on the federal level.
By some accounts, Ms. Harris wanted nothing to do with her assignment relating to the administration’s border policy. Mr. Biden is said to have asked her to take on the root causes of Central American migration, in part because it was an issue he’d worked on as vice president during the Obama administration. Unlike Ms. Harris, however, Mr. Biden had extensive diplomatic and congressional experience, not to mention a nearly 40-year national reputation. Ms. Harris was still new to many Americans, and her attempts to take on the intractable southern border turned out to be a toxic introduction.
But this is not who Ms. Harris has always been. As a county prosecutor, San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, Ms. Harris was known as focused, charismatic and effective. What has come to be perceived as sometimes crippling caution was once understood as pragmatism and deliberation — necessary qualities when building a case. Ms. Harris has taken risks, from bringing hard-to-win sexual-assault cases as a line prosecutor to walking away from a proposed mortgage-crisis settlement from the big banks while she was attorney general, a move that contributed to a much larger eventual payout.
The progressive-prosecution movement has largely stalled. Reformist prosecutors have faced recall efforts by voters and been targeted by conservative state legislatures and governors. In liberal enclaves such as New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, the pendulum has swung toward a more conservative stance on crime and public safety. In this environment, a prosecutorial background has transformed from a liability to an asset.
This is especially so given Mr. Trump’s legal woes, which have sparked an appreciation — verging on fetishization — of prosecutors by many liberal news junkies. Even in 2019, Ms. Harris seemed most comfortable when going on the attack against Mr. Trump. That attack is even easier now that Mr. Trump has been convicted of falsifying business records to cover up a payoff to a porn star and found liable for sexual abuse, and remains under state and federal indictment in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Ms. Harris is also well positioned to connect Mr. Trump’s legal jeopardy to the threat posed by the Supreme Court, which recently announced a sweeping standard for presidential immunity that could end up shielding Mr. Trump from said indictments. Since the court overturned Roe v. Wade, Ms. Harris has been the Biden administration’s leading voice on reproductive freedom, an issue she has embraced with clarity and enthusiasm. More broadly, she is able to connect Mr. Trump to the devastating consequences of recent Supreme Court decisions in a way Mr. Biden seems uncomfortable doing.
In today’s climate, Ms. Harris can embrace her background and lean into a brand that is both genuine and comfortable. Any prior policy woes hardly matter when she and Mr. Biden are both defined — for good and for ill — by their past three and a half years in office. At this point in the race, few voters care about the nuances of Ms. Harris’s position on health-care policy. But she can make them care about Mr. Trump’s assault on democratic institutions, abortion access and communities of color, and about the rapid erosion of legal guardrails standing in his way.
Ms. Harris is not an ideal candidate. While much of her reputation among the electorate has been shaded by sexism and racism, her innate caution has at times manifested as paralyzing timidity. But to the degree that concerns about her primary campaign are held against her, they should be re-examined in light of today’s law-and-order mood and the advanced stage of the presidential race.
Now that Mr. Biden has dropped out of the race, we should evaluate Ms. Harris’s full history as an attorney and politician, which makes her in many ways a natural fit for this moment. If she can reconnect with the magnetic, relentless prosecutor who swayed San Francisco juries, voters and donors, we may finally get to know — and like — the real Kamala Harris.
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