“There is a clear distinction between Kamala D. Harris and what she represents and her background and someone who has been convicted of 34 crimes and still has multiple charges against her,” said Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative and a longtime Harris supporter.
In May, a Manhattan jury found former President Donald Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records in a case involving a hush-money payment to a porn star. He also faces three ongoing cases, including a state case in Georgia alleging election interference and a federal case in Washington involving Trump’s role in the events leading up to the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. A third case involving allegations of mishandling classified documents was dismissed by a federal judge last week; a special counsel for the Justice Department has filed a notice of intent to appeal.
Harris’s team responded Sunday to the news that Biden — who released a statement endorsing her as the Democratic nominee to replace him — and began preparing her own bid. But in the weeks since the stumbling June 27 presidential debate that heralded Biden’s eventual downfall, former advisers and people close to Harris — a former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general — have said that embracing the role of lead prosecutor against Trump would surely be a key part of her message and appeal.
“This is someone who can make the case against Trump clearly and powerfully,” said Jim Margolis, a senior adviser to Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign. “That’s the prosecutor in her. And she’s someone who can move with the conversation in a debate and hit back hard — no notecards, just brain power.”
Asked about the possibility of a prosecutor-criminal confrontation, the Trump campaign linked Harris to Biden’s presidency, arguing that Harris is responsible for everything from Biden’s border policies to “Bidenomics” and “a weak foreign policy that has led to war and chaos around the world.”
“No one has lied more about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and supported his disastrous policies more than Cackling Co-Pilot Kamala D. Harris over the past four years,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Caroline Sunshine wrote in a statement. “While Biden bows to California liberals, Kamala D. Harris is one herself.”
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s recently 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 with him every step of the way.”
Harris made the prosecutorial 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 the California courtroom. And one of her key ads then — which has since resurfaced and gone viral — explicitly drew a contrast between herself and Trump, with the narrator intoning: “She prosecuted sex predators; he’s one. She closed for-profit colleges that ripped off Americans; he was a for-profit college — literally.”
“He’s tearing us apart — she’ll bring us back together,” the ad concludes, noting that Harris is “anti-Trump in every way.”
Harris withdrew from the Democratic primary at the time, before the first race for the nomination. She was widely seen as a poor candidate who went through staffers — a problem she had early in her tenure as Biden’s No. 2 — and she couldn’t make an affirmative case for herself any more than she could make an argument against Trump.
After the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the subsequent summer of Black Lives Matters protests, her background as a hard-line prosecutor also became a burden for more left-wing members of her party.
Now, with nearly four years under his belt as Biden’s vice president and a potential showdown with a real-life felon, allies hope the message will resonate more deeply. Internal Biden campaign polling has found that attacking Trump as a “convicted felon” is effective, according to one Harris ally.
“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 to have,” said Ashley Etienne, who served as Harris’ communications director in the vice president’s office. “That was the benefit of her being a former prosecutor and how that translated into the vice presidential job.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) appeared on CBS’s “Face The Nation” this month and predicted that Biden would likely be replaced by Harris. He offered a glimpse of her strengths — he described her as “very energetic” — but also a preview of how Republicans plan to attack her for being further to the 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, Trump’s campaign manager and confidante in 2016, said: “If the Democrats had confidence in Kamala’s competence, they could have traded him for her long ago.”
Harris’ allies say her image as a prosecutor should be interpreted broadly and that they expect Harris to vigorously press her case on issues such as reproductive rights — an area where Biden, an Irish Catholic, has been more reticent — and an unchecked Supreme Court packed with three Trump appointees.
“She certainly does that with respect to 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 to that court.”
In the wake of the 2022 decision to Roe vs. Wadewho established a constitutional right to abortion, it was Harris rather than Biden who traveled the country energetically advocating for women’s right to make decisions about their own bodies.
“She’s going to have a much fuller attack on abortion rights that are under attack in this country, and she’s going to 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 tremendous communicator on this issue, and it’s our most powerful attack.”
Abigail Disney, a filmmaker, Disney heir and longtime Democratic donor, announced this month that she would withhold donations to Democrats until Biden drops out of the race, suggesting that Harris would be a capable alternative. In response to emailed questions from The Washington Post after her statement about freezing her donations, Disney praised Harris as someone who has been “grotesquely underrated by a Democratic Party establishment that has historically been less supportive of the women of color in its ranks, even despite the loyalty with which women of color have supported them.”
Some of Harris’s most powerful moments came during her time as California’s junior senator. From her perch on the Senate Judiciary Committee, she earned praise as a tough interrogator, with her searing interrogations of Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh and Attorney General William P. Barr going viral.
Trump at the time described Harris’ questioning of Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing as “vile” and said she had done “a terrible thing.”
“I’ve had so much fun watching Bill Barr wriggle,” said Hirono, who served with Harris on the Judiciary Committee. “She’s very persistent. You see the prosecutor in her. She’s very smart, she’s funny, she’s caring, she’s witty.”
More recently, several Democrats have 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. In a speech about the Supreme Court’s ruling that Trump has absolute immunity for “core” official acts of a president, Harris simplified the complicated topic — by demonstrating what allies say is a signature skill — and explained why she says a second Trump term, in which he is largely immune from prosecution, would be particularly dangerous.
“The Supreme Court of the United States has essentially told this individual, who has been convicted of 34 crimes, that he will be immune from the activities that he has told us he is willing to engage in if he returns to the White House,” she said, warning that Trump has bragged about his plans to “use the Justice Department as a weapon against his political enemies” and “has talked about how proud he is of the fact that he has taken away a fundamental right of the women of America to make decisions about their own bodies.”
According to Etienne, the ability to communicate in plain English is essential to Harris’ candidacy, adding that the vice president will be most successful when she not only attacks Trump but also presents a shared vision for the nation.
“That’s a fine line you have to walk — you can go out of your way and use a bunch of adjectives to describe him, but is that really going to expand your base of support?” Etienne asked. “People want to be inspired, and adjectives about Trump are not inspiring. But if you ask me who I want to be in the next 20 years and what kind of country I want to leave for my daughter, that can actually inspire me.”