But demographics aside, her professional CV is unusually well-suited to the moment in one way: She’s credibly tough on crime, which is among both voters’ top concerns and Democrats’ biggest vulnerabilities.
Harris began her career in California in the Alameda County prosecutor’s office, pursuing child abusers and sex traffickers. In a saner, less partisan world, those legions of QAnoners who profess great concern over sex-trafficked kids would back her rather than Donald Trump, who palled around with Jeffrey Epstein.
But even if those nutters aren’t persuadable, perhaps the more moderate middle is.
As she rose through the prosecutorial ranks, becoming elected district attorney of San Francisco and eventually California’s attorney general, Harris spoke often about “criminal justice reform” and her place in it, as the member of a population historically mistreated by law enforcement. Her actual positions were relatively nuanced, though, and often centered on victims of crime rather than alleged perpetrators. This sometimes put her at odds with a far left that would later become synonymous with calls to “defund the police.”
Though she alienated police unions by declining to pursue capital punishment for a cop-killer, she later defended California’s right to impose the death penalty when the policy was challenged in court.
She also declined to support or take clear positions on high-profile criminal justice reform proposals championed by the left. These included a bill that would have required her office to investigate police shootings and another that set statewide standards for the use of police body cameras (both legislative proposals failed). She also didn’t take a stance on a 2014 ballot initiative that reduced certain low-level felonies to misdemeanors. (This measure, Proposition 47, passed; hard-liners sometimes blame it for encouraging shoplifting sprees.)
Even more controversially, Harris threatened criminal charges against the parents of chronically truant students, citing a connection between missing class and subsequent lawbreaking.
Meanwhile, Harris’s rhetoric sometimes needled progressives, too. At a 2013 event, for instance, she gently chided slogans to “build more schools, less jails.”
“I agree with that conceptually, but you have not addressed the reason I have three padlocks on my front door,” she said. “Part of the discussion about reform of criminal justice policy has to be an acknowledgment that crime does occur. And especially when it is violent crime and serious crime, there should be a broad consensus that there should be serious and severe and swift consequence to crime.”
None of this helped her 2020 presidential efforts. Progressives accused Harris of prosecutorial overreach and insufficiently opposing, or even actively advancing, the carceral state. She was merely masquerading as a reformer, the charge went. Some went so far as to call this half-Black politician “anti-Black.” Harris found herself often playing down her law enforcement credentials, or at least talking up some of the more modest reforms she did oversee (such as the first statewide implicit-bias training for law enforcement personnel).
It was for naught. The “Kamala is a cop” meme helped tank her short-lived presidential campaign.
But what was a liability then is now an asset. “Crime and safety” are among voters’ most important issues. And when asked which party handles a series of issues better, voters say Democrats are furthest behind on “crime,” a recent YouGov poll found.
This is despite the fact that the country has had large declines in violent crime in recent years and might see its largest annual decline in murder on record this year, under the Biden-Harris administration. If trends continue, the annual murder rate is also on track to be at or below what it was throughout Trump’s presidency.
Illegal border crossings — another crucial “law and order” concern — have also plummeted, reaching lower levels this spring than they did during the same period of Trump’s last pre-pandemic year. Democrats are also cracking down on corporate tax cheats while Republicans have repeatedly tried to defund the tax police.
Meanwhile, the GOP standard-bearer has 34 felony convictions to his name, among his other legal entanglements (including a jury’s determination that he committed sexual abuse).
Needless to say, having a stronger record or more popular platform is not the same as being appreciated for those things. Biden’s specific policy positions were well-liked — at least in a blind test — but he was much weaker at communicating those positions. Similarly, voters believe Harris would do a worse job tackling crime than Trump would, per a YouGov poll conducted just before Biden announced his exit from the race, despite their records.
Harris’s challenge now is to demonstrate she’s not only tougher on crime, but a great saleswoman of that toughness, too.
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