‘Kamala the cop’ or ‘soft as Charmin’? Rival narratives about Harris’ crime record could shape the election

SAN FRANCISCO — On the presidential campaign trail Kamala Harris has leaned into her prosecutor past, saying she protected children from sexual predators as a district attorney even as she glosses over other parts of the job that hurt her with progressives.

How successfully she can manage that tension could determine whether she can capture a broad base of voters in November: moderates who are worried about crime and liberals who distrust the criminal justice system.

The nuanced approach to the larger issue of crime the Harris team is considering carries political risk — even as Republicans waffle on how to attack a Democrat whom progressives once derisively nicknamed “Copala.”

Harris’ aides and allies are still refining the young campaign’s message on crime, but they argue her past record shows she was a middle-of-the-road prosecutor who supported some progressive criminal justice reform, while taking tough action on serious infractions.

“She’s very pragmatic,” said Scott Wiener, a Democratic state senator in California. “She has strong core values, but she’s not an ideologue. She wants the trains to run on time.” Wiener, a longtime Harris ally, volunteered on her 2003 campaign for San Francisco district attorney when she defeated a more progressive incumbent .

How voters perceive Harris’ public safety record could be crucial to shaping the election, as both parties try to appeal to swing-state voters frustrated with crime and urban decay. Harris will have to overcome decades of voters trusting Republicans more on the issue as Trump pushes the portrayal of California and other blue states as dystopian beds of lawlessness — even though many categories of reported crimes have fallen in recent years.

The GOP-led effort to rebrand Harris, from aggressive prosecutor to effete liberal, was illustrated in a tweet Wednesday from Trump campaign adviser Steven Cheung, who called her record on crime “SOFT AS CHARMIN,” a post that was embellished with emojis of toilet paper.

Wiener said the attack shows the Republican Party is worried she is an effective messenger on crime: “You have a prosecutor running against a crook, so they’re peeing their pants right now.”

The “Prosecutor versus Convicted Felon” narrative has quickly become a dominant theme that Harris and Democratic surrogates have used to hit Trump on the campaign trail.

Harris’ aides say her resume will help beat back one of the caricatures being crafted by the right — that she’s a soft-on-crime progressive who’s personally responsible for the rampant theft and open-air drug markets on the streets of San Francisco where she was once district attorney before becoming California attorney general. And the campaign will continue to remind voters of Trump’s first term, which ended with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — and his proposals to cut federal funding for police.

At the same time some Trump campaign supporters have also tried to highlight how the tougher parts of Harris’ record could alienate voters on the left. “She put a lot of Black men in jail for small stuff, small ball,” said California RNC National Committeemember Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco attorney and Trump ally.

Leaning into the “Kamala the Cop” persona that Harris tried to downplay during her first run for president when progressive reformers held sway in the Democratic Party is risky. The flip flop invites critics to redeploy the familiar charge that she puts political expediency over personal values.

“She’s always been pandering with her eye on the next prize,” Dhillion said in an interview. “I would call Kamala Harris an empty vessel, and that is scary because who’s going to pour their dollars and views into her next?”

Dhillion pointed to the fact that Harris embraced law and order rhetoric and even prosecuted people for marijuana possession as DA, but pivoted to a softer approach as a senator and during her 2019 presidential campaign.

Harris’ record on crime is hard to define in purely ideological terms. She was aggressive in sending people to prison for violent crimes and drug possession, a stance that continues to alienate some justice reform advocates who accuse her of perpetuating the mass incarceration of Black and brown people in the early 2000s.

Yet Harris was a vocal opponent of the death penalty and created diversion programs for non-violent drug and petty-theft offenders who accepted guilty pleas. And she later endorsed progressive DA’s like now-embattled George Gascón of Los Angeles County.

It’s an approach Harris outlined in her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer,” in which she calls for prosecutors to embrace a dual mentality: use tough enforcement tactics on the most violent criminals while, at the same time, adopting reform-minded programs to help lower-level offenders better their lives.

Harris is promoting her prosecutor roots on the trail after spending the last several months sharpening her message against Trump as a convicted felon.

Her law-enforcement resume wasn’t a major focus for her after joining President Joe Biden’s ticket in 2020, when the nation was reeling from the death of murder of George Floyd. But now, with Trump running again, after being found guilty on 34 felony counts himself, Harris’ aides believe her credentials bolster her authority on the issue. They also believe now is the time to highlight her credentials in a way she hasn’t been able to before.

“In those roles, 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,” Harris told a rowdy crowd at her campaign debut in Milwaukee this week. “So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”

But Trump campaign advisers say they are confident they can cast Harris’ record in a harsher light, arguing that voters across the nation will see her resume — while moderate by San Francisco standards — as extreme to people outside of the West Coast. Still, the GOP has struggled to hone its attack in the days since Harris became the Democratic frontrunner.

Some Republicans have cautioned the party about giving too much air to the left’s critiques of Harris. In a tweet this week, the conservative think tank America 2100, which is led by Sen. Marco Rubio’s former chief of staff, warned it’s a mistake for the party to “run to Kamala's left on crime.”

Lateefah Simon, a friend of Harris and a Democratic candidate for an Oakland House seat, burst into laughter over the phone when POLITICO asked her about the soft-on-crime characterization. Simon worked under Harris for nearly four years when she was San Francisco DA, and launched a division to support rehabilitated offenders.

“She’s tough. Her ideals were, ‘If you break a social contract, there needs to be accountability,’” said Simon, a progressive who is favored to win retiring Rep. Barbara Lee’s seat this fall. Simon said she occasionally disagreed with the hard edges of Harris’ policies.

But, Simon added, she also saw a softer side. Many times, she watched Harris embrace weeping mothers whose sons, often Black and Latino, were killed from gun violence in the 2000s.

“I would hear those wails from those mothers,” said Simon, who worked in an adjacent office. “It’s one of those moments where it’s like, ‘This woman really loves our people.’”

The Biden-Harris campaign had been playing offense on crime and immigration in recent months, in an effort to flip the script as Republicans seized on both issues. Biden, who endorsed Harris Sunday, has warned advisers that scenes of chaos at the border and crimes in cities could turn off independent and suburban voters. The White House was banking on the idea that voters would reward them for efforts to crack down on the border and boost spending on law enforcement.

In her new place atop the ticket, Harris too is expected to tout those policies despite her past fizzled efforts during the Biden administration to work with Central American countries to address the root causes of migration.

Whether voters buy into the message could also trickle down to swing races in largely blue states like California and New York that could determine which party controls the House next year.

Also on the ballot in California this November is a measure to roll back parts of a decade-old state initiative that reduced prison sentences for some low-level drug and theft crimes. Republicans have tried to cast Harris as an architect of that measure, known as Proposition 47, which reformed tough sentencing laws from the 1990s.

Harris, however, didn’t take a stance on Prop 47 when it was on the ballot during her tenure as attorney general in 2014, a move that infuriated some liberal Democrats. Republicans still argue the ballot summary her office prepared didn’t warn of the potential consequences.

National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Ben Petersen told POLITICO the party is eager to have a debate about crime on California’s November ballot — and to tie the top of the Democratic ticket to it.

“Kamala Harris would drag the nation down a dangerous path until everywhere looks like the worst of San Francisco,” he said in a statement.