The Trump Campaign Whiffs While Harris Flashes the Badge

Dear Reader,

One of the primary knocks on Kamala Harris from the far left during her failed run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination was that she was a “cop.” The accusation was, in essence, that the former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general was not a “progressive prosecutor,” or at least not progressive enough. She locked up too many people, for too long, without embracing the popular criminal justice reform proposals of that particular moment.

At the time, the New York Times ran an op-ed by a law professor entitled “Kamala Harris Was Not a Progressive Prosecutor,” which accused her of landing “often on the wrong side of history.” The accompanying photograph showed an  unflattering image of Harris, mouth pursed and wagging her finger. An online activist accused Harris of “rampant anti-Blackness” and generated tens of thousands of “likes.” USA Today published a piece titled, “Public defender: I worked with Kamala Harris. She was the most progressive DA in California.” At the time, the piece was intended as a defense of Harris. Today, the same headline could fuel an opposition attack ad.

Indeed, the criticism that Harris was not sufficiently progressive as a prosecutor sounds anachronistic now – bizarre, even – but at the time, Harris was on her heels. She struggled to parry the “Kamala is a cop” narrative, and at times even downplayed her own law enforcement credentials.

But now Harris has taken a strikingly different, and far more effective, position on her prosecutorial past. It has become a cornerstone of her campaign as she shifts to the center, eager to dispel any suggestion that she was some bleeding heart liberal San Francisco flower-child DA who wept for her downtrodden defendants. In one of her first speeches after becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in July, she jumped right in: “I took on perpetrators of all kinds – predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Of course, it doesn’t hurt her rhetorical cause that the guy she’s running against happens to be a convicted felon – for the moment, at least. The Manhattan hush money case stands on dubious legal footing and will soon face appellate scrutiny. But for now it’s on the books, and it’ll stay there through the election. (The other criminal cases against Trump are sputtering, and nothing’s going to be resolved anytime soon, certainly not before November.) Still, what a gift: the DA gets to run against the defendant.

Harris’s turnabout seems to be equal parts strategy and serendipity. Clearly, she has chosen to lean in and celebrate her prosecutorial background rather than apologize for it. But the times also have changed so drastically, so quickly, that the mega-woke days of 2019 and 2020 feel like another historical epoch. Not long ago, politicians openly argued in favor of defunding the police, Lego halted marketing of police sets, and television networks canceled highly-rated shows that followed cops on the beat. Now, candidates strain to avoid any perception that they might not fully support law enforcement.

The Trump campaign, for its part, has mostly whiffed on this issue. They’ve cast about for a 2024 version of Willie Horton to throw at Harris. But thus far the effort hasn’t stuck in any meaningful way, in part because Trump’s messaging has been sporadic and scattershot. Some of the Trump campaign’s focus (fleeting as it has been) has landed on a man named Edwin Ramos – a multiple-murderer who was prosecuted by Harris’s office, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison in 2014. The rap is that Harris wouldn’t seek the death penalty in the Ramos case, or in another involving the murder of a San Francisco police officer. That criticism just hasn’t landed forcefully enough with the electorate. The fact that Harris’s office put both defendants behind bars, for life, seems to have blunted the negative impact.

While Trump’s team flounders on her prosecutorial past, Harris and her campaign are owning it. She often  boasts on the campaign trail about the countless hardened criminals she put away, as any former prosecutor would do. (Kids, trust me, if you want to go into electoral politics someday, start off at the prosecutor’s office.) She reminds voters that she stood up for crime victims. During the presidential debate, she said that she would never ask victims about their political party –a strange point, given that no prosecutor would ever do so –) but that she always would ask them “How are you?”  She even has made a point recently to tout her gun ownership and to tie it to her prosecutorial past: “I have a Glock. And I’ve had it for quite some time. And look, Bill, my background is in law enforcement. So there you go,” she proudly declared during her recent 60 Minutes interview. And in her interview with Fox News this week, Harris effectively brandished her prosecutorial credentials to parry questions that implied she was soft on border crime, reminding Brett Bauer that she had prosecuted transnational cartels.

Harris has had a near-complete turnabout in how she packages her prosecutorial past on the campaign trail. Back in 2019, it was mostly warm fuzzy embraces of the trendiest progressive policies, and now it’s all “book ‘em” tough talk. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, has failed thus far to paint her as permissive, soft-on-crime DA. I suspect they’ll try again – watch for some new Horton-type ads down the stretch – but the cement has already largely dried on the issue. Those “Kamala the Cop” memes certainly hurt Harris the last time she ran. But now she wears the label like a badge.

Stay Informed,

Elie