In 2005, one year into her job as San Francisco district attorney, Kamala Harris was showing a new hire around the office.
Ms. Harris had recruited Lateefah Simon, a 28-year-old racial justice activist, to lead a new program aimed at keeping first-time drug offenders out of jail. As the two women walked the halls, they stopped in front of a wall lined with photographs of Ms. Harris’s predecessors — all of them white men.
“The expectation of our community is that I’m going to fix all the havoc,” Ms. Harris said, according to Ms. Simon’s recollection. “They’re going to want me to fix all the racism, all the dysfunction, in the next four years.”
But in reality, Ms. Harris said, change will happen “bit by bit.”
The comment underscored the political philosophy that has guided Ms. Harris’s style of governance for decades. It is among the more striking contradictions of Ms. Harris’s candidacy: While she would bring about historic change if elected, as the first woman, the first Asian American and the second Black person to be hold the office, she is not offering sweeping change in policy. She is at heart an institutionalist, defined by a deliberate style, focused on granular impacts over broad society shifts.
It’s an approach that diverges from those of previous leaders who have captured the imaginations of the Democratic Party. President Barack Obama presented Americans with a hopeful vision that promised to heal some of the nation’s deepest racial, geographic and partisan divides. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont electrified Democrats with his populist calls for structural change and major economic reform. And President Biden promised to “restore the soul” of a nation fractured by the chaos of his predecessor’s administration.
Ms. Harris is a leader who rejects political labels. She believes in crafting clear rules and in step-by-step change that can add up to durable transformation in American society.
Now, as she prepares to formally accept the Democratic nomination on Thursday night, what Ms. Harris may be offering the nation is a future defined by the fine print, focused on accomplishing what can be done now rather than what could be.
“She’s like, ‘What can we get done in the shortest amount of time for people?’” said Rohini Kosoglu, a former policy director who was a chief of staff to Ms. Harris in the Senate and who left the vice president’s office in 2022. “She’s super pragmatic.”
‘I’m Not Trying to Restructure Society’
A biracial female prosecutor from California, Ms. Harris has defied easy ideological characterization — a trait that has been both her biggest political strength and, at times, her greatest liability.
Her supporters see in her a meticulous law enforcement officer, with a style of intense preparation forged during her early years as a prosecutor, first as district attorney and later as California attorney general. Critics have called her a shape-shifter and a flip-flopper who changes her positions based on what’s politically convenient.
Even some of the most prominent figures in the party remain uncertain about her policy agenda as president.
Mr. Sanders, who ran against Ms. Harris in the 2020 presidential primaries and served with her in the Senate, said in an interview Wednesday that it was still too early to assess how progressive an agenda Ms. Harris might pursue as president, though he noted that the convention had touched on important progressive themes, particularly wealth inequality.
“I can tell you: She is very smart,” he said. “I think she is very tough. I think she is very focused. I think she has the potential to be a great president.”
Aides say decisions have not been made about what she would do in her first months as president, should she win, though allies predict that she would probably be driven by the ideas that have animated her career, like economic fairness and gender equity. She would pursue codifying of abortion rights into federal law, a difficult legislative feat that she pledges in nearly every campaign speech, as well as seek to address voting rights and gun control, though it’s unclear how given the hurdles in Congress.
Campaign aides say Ms. Harris intends to release a few targeted policy proposals, akin to the first planks of an economic agenda she rolled out last week, but is unlikely to detail a broader agenda beyond what Mr. Biden has already articulated.
In the past, when pressed to articulate her ideology, she has seemed uneasy and pushed back.
“I’m not trying to restructure society,” Ms. Harris said in a 2019 interview. “I’m just trying to take care of the issues that wake people up in the middle of the night.”
The discomfort was especially clear in the presidential primary race. Liberals questioned her progressive bona fides, accusing her of being a law-and-order Democrat. She tried to respond by pairing soaring moral calls with more discrete — and sometimes contradictory — liberal positions.
She embraced the idea of a single-payer health system, but her plan also kept a role for private insurance companies. And despite a record of cracking down on undocumented immigration as California’s attorney general, she supported “starting from scratch” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement — aligning herself more with progressive calls to abolish the federal agency.
Now, Mr. Trump’s campaign is using her record in that race to cast her as an extremist.
“She’s a Marxist communist person, and we’re not ready for a communist president,” he said at a speech in Howell, Mich., on Tuesday.
The inclination to label Ms. Harris, and the assumption that she would be on the liberal fringe of her party, is tied to her race and gender, said Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.
“Our very lives are that of nuance and complexity,” said Ms. Pressley, the first Black woman elected to Congress from her home state. “And that’s exactly why she is such an effective leader, because people don’t live their lives in those boxes. They don’t live their lives in those categories — progressive, moderate, conservative.”
Still, progressive activists are holding out hope that, if elected, Ms. Harris might show surprising ambition on policy. “I believe Ms. Harris learned from her time in the Biden White House that big things can be possible,” said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, which endorsed Mr. Sanders in 2020 and now backs her.
Shifting, or a Balancing Act?
While Ms. Harris’s allies describe her approach as striking a balance on polarizing topics, critics say she is prone to shift her positions when it is politically expedient.
When, soon after becoming district attorney of San Francisco, she declined to seek the death penalty for a man who had murdered a police officer, she faced backlash from fellow Democrats, the police and the family of the officer.
When she ran for attorney general six years later, she promised to “enforce the death penalty as the law dictates.” And once elected, she defended the death penalty in court, as she said her job required..
In that same race, she opposed a measure that would legalize marijuana for recreational use. A week after announcing her presidential bid in 2019, Ms. Harris said she favored legalization and joked about having smoked pot in college.
Since becoming the Democratic nominee last month, Ms. Harris has quietly abandoned a number of the more liberal positions from her primary bid — for example, saying she no longer supports banning fracking, a single-payer health system, mandatory gun buyback programs or cutting the number of border agents.
Not all her new plans appear to meet her standards of pragmatism and direct impact. Last week, Ms. Harris called for a federal ban on corporate price gouging on groceries, embracing a policy that many economists doubt will have much of an effect on prices.
Some former allies say that as Ms. Harris has taken on more prominent roles, her policy stances have become more rooted in politics than in personal convictions.
“When she became vice president, things became much more of a political calculus than what’s right,” said Melina Abdullah, a onetime supporter who was tapped as the running mate for the independent presidential candidate Cornel West. “I still don’t know what she believes.”
What Ms. Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and co-founder of the Los Angeles branch of Black Lives Matter, sees as inauthenticity, aides and allies say is an understanding of political realities. She doesn’t generally take on challenges that she doesn’t believe are winnable.
She subjects policy to a two-pronged test, said Nathan Barankin, who served as Ms. Harris’s top aide in the Senate and as her chief deputy attorney general in California: How many people would this help? And, equally important, is there a shot at political success?
“I don’t want this to just be an empty gesture,” he recalled Ms. Harris as saying. “It’s not about are we going to win because there’s a high likelihood of success, but is there a way to win?”
Mr. Barankin says Ms. Harris is also a candidate who is comfortable with a degree of nuance that doesn’t always translate in a fiercely polarized political environment.
During her early political career, Ms. Harris ran as a self-proclaimed “smart on crime” prosecutor, playing into the desire of many Black Americans for additional law enforcement in their communities. Her focus was on balancing those beliefs with concerns about violating civil rights.
“We want our babies to be able to go to the park and be safe,” she said in 2006 during a panel with other Black leaders. “What we don’t want is racial profiling. What we don’t want is excessive force. What we don’t want is to have our civil liberties and civil rights be stripped, but we do want law enforcement.”
She won praise from police reform advocates for releasing data on police brutality. But she also did not support a bill that would have required her office to investigate police shootings.
But as political conditions shifted, so did her message.
During her 2010 campaign for attorney general, she celebrated her success increasing conviction rates. A decade later, the conversation had changed, and so did Ms. Harris’s message as she embarked on a campaign for president. Crime had dropped to record-low levels, and public outcry over police killings of Black men had fueled the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
According to her aides, Ms. Harris felt torn about embracing what had once appeared to be her strength: her prosecutorial record. Now, without worries about winning over the liberal base in a primary, her campaign is leaning into that background against a candidate with a felony record.
Working within systems
A touchstone of her approach, current and former aides and allies say, is to assess ideas based on how they could affect the experiences of Americans.
She becomes frustrated when aides present jargon-filled policy proposals and presses them to explain the direct effect they could have on the struggles of ordinary Americans.
“What’s it like when they wake up in the morning?” she would ask during campaign briefings in 2019, according to Senator Laphonza Butler of California, who was advising her at the time.
As vice president, during a meeting with civil society organizations, consumer protection groups and labor unions about artificial intelligence, Ms. Harris peppered them with questions about how the technology was being used to defraud older adults and how it contributed to housing discrimination.
“She just cuts through the complexity and the noise and gets to this practical approach,” said Arati Prabhakar, the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House.
Ms. Harris is particularly attuned to the barriers faced by more vulnerable people, and those that mirror her own experience as the biracial daughter of immigrants who was raised by a single mother. Fundamentally, she also believes that government can — and should — be the solution to breaking down those barriers and work to level the playing field so everyone can compete fairly.
Some of those actions can seem small to progressive activists who want to dismantle entire institutions like the criminal justice system and law enforcement agencies.
When Ms. Harris announced a new administration policy closing a decades-old loophole that allowed gun purchasers to evade background checks for some firearms, she tacitly acknowledged that it wasn’t the far-reaching change that activists wanted and that the administration had pushed for — the banning of assault weapons — but that it would save lives nonetheless.
“In the years to come, I do believe countless families and communities will be spared the horror and the heartbreak of gun violence by this new rule,” Ms. Harris said during a press call announcing the change.
Ms. Kosoglu, her former domestic policy adviser, recalled the multiyear effort by Ms. Harris to ban credit agencies from reporting unpaid medical debt, saddling Americans with lower credit scores that can hamper their ability to buy a home or get other loans.
“She’s not going to be like, ‘Oh, we need to, like, upend the entire banking system,’” she said. “But she’s going to get super excited about medical debt, because that’s going to be life-changing for those people that show up to get a house. She’s much more tangible.”
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