Kamala D. Harris leaned into her background as a former prosecutor to attack Donald Trump in her first presidential bid in 2020 — a message that attracted little support in the Democratic primary as Harris, short on money, ended her campaign before the first votes were cast.
Now, with the Democratic Party rapidly coalescing behind her following President Biden’s sudden withdrawal from the campaign on Sunday, Vice President Harris is getting another chance to make her case in the court of public opinion — and this time, against a recently convicted felon.
“There is a clear discernment between Kamala D. Harris and what she represents and her background and someone who has been convicted of 34 felonies and still has multiple indictments he has to go through,” said Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative and longtime Harris supporter.
In May, a Manhattan jury found former president Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony charges of falsifying business records in a case related to a hush money payment to an adult-film star. He also faces three outstanding cases — including one state case in Georgia involving election interference and a federal case in Washington involving Trump’s role in the events leading up the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A third case on charges of mishandling classified documents was thrown out last week by a federal judge; a Justice Department special counsel has filed notice of his intent to appeal.
Harris’s team spent Sunday reacting to the news from Biden — who put out a statement supporting her as the Democratic nominee to replace him — and preparing her own bid. But in the weeks following the stumbling June 27 presidential debate that sparked Biden’s eventual downfall, former advisers and people close to Harris — a former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general — said that embracing the role of prosecutor in chief against Trump would certainly be a key part of her message and appeal.
“This is someone who can clearly and forcefully articulate the case against Trump,” said Jim Margolis, a senior adviser to Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign. “That’s the prosecutor in her. And she’s someone who in a debate can move with the conversation and strike back hard — no notecards, just brainpower.”
Asked about the prospect of a prosecutor-versus-felon matchup, the Trump campaign linked Harris to the Biden presidency, arguing that Harris is responsible for everything from Biden’s border policy to “Bidenomics” to “a weak foreign policy that has led to war and chaos around the world.”
“No one has lied about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and supported his disastrous policies over the past four years more than Cackling Co-Pilot Kamala D. Harris,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Caroline Sunshine wrote in a statement. “While Biden kowtows to California liberals, Kamala D. Harris actually is one.”
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s newly announced running mate, said in a statement Sunday that “Joe Biden has been the worst President in my lifetime and Kamala D. Harris has been right there with him every step of the way.”
Harris made the prosecutor pitch during her failed 2020 campaign. Her slogan at the time — “Kamala D. Harris, for the people” — was what she used to introduce herself in California court. And one of her key ads then — which has since re-emerged and gone viral — explicitly drew a contrast between herself and Trump, with the narrator intoning: “She prosecuted sex predators; he is one. She shut down for-profit colleges that swindled Americans; he was a for-profit college — literally.”
“He’s tearing us apart — she’ll bring us together,” the ad concludes, noting that Harris is “in every possible way the anti-Trump.”
At the time, Harris withdrew from the Democratic primary before the first nominating contest. She was roundly viewed as a poor candidate, who churned through staff members — a problem she also had early in her tenure as Biden’s No. 2 — and couldn’t articulate an affirmative case for herself as much as she could a case against Trump.
In the wake of the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and a subsequent summer full of Black Lives Matters protests, her tough-on-crime prosecutor background also became something of a liability among her party’s more liberal members.
Now, however, with nearly four years of experience as Biden’s vice president and in a potential matchup with an actual felon, allies hope the message will have more resonance. The Biden campaign’s internal polling has found that attacking Trump as a “convicted felon” is effective, a Harris ally said.
“Her ability to unpack an argument and understand both sides of an argument and then reconstruct it in a way that the average person can understand is an incredible skill set to have,” said Ashley Etienne, who served as communications director to Harris in the vice president’s office. “That was the benefit of her being a former prosecutor and how that translated to the job of vice president.”
Appearing on CBS’s “Face The Nation” this month, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) anticipated that Biden would probably be replaced with Harris, offering a glimpse of her strengths — he described her as “very vigorous” — but also sharing a preview of how Republicans plan to attack her as farther left than Biden.
“She’s for the Green New Deal. She’s for Medicare for all. She’s more like Bernie Sanders on policy,” Graham said at the time.
Kellyanne Conway, a 2016 Trump campaign manager and confidante, said, “If Democrats had confidence in Kamala’s competence, they could have swapped him out for her a long time ago.”
Harris allies say that her image as prosecutor should be viewed broadly, and that they expect Harris to forcefully make the case on issues including reproductive rights — an area where Biden, an Irish Catholic, was more reticent — and an unchecked Supreme Court stocked with three Trump appointees.
“She’s certainly doing that regarding reproductive rights,” said Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii). “She can also make the case for what I would describe as this out-of-control Supreme Court and how dangerous it would be for Trump to get any more nominees onto that court.”
In the wake of the 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion, it was Harris far more than Biden who energetically traveled the country, pressing the case for a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body.
“She will give a much more full-throated attack on abortion rights being under assault in this country, and she will also really articulate, in a way that’s really authentic, why this is so important,” said Nancy Zdunkewicz, founder of Z to A Research, a Democratic polling firm. “Kamala is a really great communicator on this, and it is our most powerful attack.”
Abigail Disney, a filmmaker, Disney heir and longtime Democratic donor, announced this month that she was withholding donations to Democrats until Biden bowed out of the race and suggested Harris would be a capable alternative. In response to email questions from The Washington Post after her statement about freezing her donations, Disney hailed Harris as someone who “has been grotesquely underestimated by a Democratic Party establishment that has historically been less supportive of the women of color in their ranks even in spite of the loyalty with which women of color have supported them.”
Some of Harris’s most powerful moments came during her time serving as California’s junior senator. From her perch on the Senate Judiciary Committee, she earned plaudits as a tough questioner, with pointed interrogations of Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh and Attorney General William P. Barr going viral.
At the time, Trump described Harris’s questioning of Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing as “nasty,” saying she did “a horrible thing.”
“I got such a big kick out of watching Bill Barr squirm,” said Hirono, who served on the Judiciary Committee with Harris. “She’s very persistent. You can see the prosecutor in her. She’s very smart, she’s funny, she’s caring, she’s witty.”
More recently, several Democrats publicly and privately pointed to Harris’s comments this month at the Essence Festival of Culture, one of the largest annual gatherings of Black women. Speaking about the Supreme Court’s decision that Trump has absolute immunity for “core” official acts by a president, Harris simplified the complicated topic — displaying what allies says is a signature skill — and laid out why she says a second Trump term, with him largely immune from prosecution, would be especially dangerous.
“The United States Supreme Court essentially told this individual who has been convicted of 34 felonies that he will be immune from essentially the activity he has told us he is prepared to engage in if he gets back into the White House,” she said, warning that Trump has boasted of his plans to “weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies” and “talked about being proud of taking from the women of America a most fundamental right to make decisions about your own body.”
This ability to communicate in plain English will be key for a Harris candidacy, said Etienne, who added that the vice president will be at her most potent if she is not just attacking Trump, but simultaneously offering a unified vision for the nation.
“That’s the fine line you’ve got to walk — you can lean in and pull out a lot of adjectives to describe him, but is that really going to grow your base of support?” Etienne asked. “People want to be inspired, and adjectives about Trump aren’t inspiring. But asking me who I want to be in the next 20 years and asking me what type of country I want to leave for my daughter can actually inspire me.”