President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race amid concern from fellow Democrats that he stood no chance of beating Donald Trump this go-round. “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down,” Biden posted to X, before shortly after throwing his “full support and endorsement” behind Vice President Kamala Harris becoming the party’s new nominee.
“Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump,” Biden added. “Let’s do this.”
But can Harris “do this”?
It’s hard to conclude that Harris would fare worse than Biden, whose cognitive difficulties were so apparent his own party came to view him as a serious electoral liability.
Yet if one recalls Harris’ own ill-fated run at the Democratic nomination in 2020, and her time in politics before then, the math in this equation becomes somewhat fuzzier—Harris was a truly bad candidate. And prior to that, she perpetuated some truly bad policies.
Kamala Harris the horrible campaigner and Kamala Harris the cop can be easy to forget if you’re only considering what Harris has done lately. Her tenure as vice president has been almost entirely unremarkable. The most distinguishing feature has been a series of bizarre but benign word salads. And political memory is short.
So Harris isn’t the best orator? Surely that’s surmountable. Besides, the lack of distinguishing actions during her vice presidency could even be to her advantage. She’s basically a blank slate, at least if you don’t look back too far.
But what if you do look back?
The first thing you’ll see is Harris’ shambolic 2020 campaign for president. She wouldn’t commit to policy positions. She couldn’t defend her past actions. There were ongoing stories about her poor treatment of her staff. She entered the race as a top-tier candidate, with glowing press and some big-time backers, and dropped out two months before the Iowa caucuses, polling at just 3 percent nationally. She wasn’t even polling as a top-tier candidate in her home state of California.
It was impossible in that campaign to ascertain what Harris stood for. This wasn’t just a case of national campaigning jitters. One major thread in Harris’ career—including during her days as district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California—has been flip-flopping on issues to suit the audience or the political moment.
This may have worked as a short-term strategy. But it left a long-term impression of her as rudderless and ruthless—a phony. It will be incredibly easy for Republicans to portray her as someone who stands for nothing, or as whatever it is they think you’ll hate most, like a representative of “California socialism.” (Never mind that the GOP’s own candidate isn’t exactly a stalwart of consistency.)
The image of Harris as slippery—all ambition, no ideology—may contribute to her unpopularity among American voters. It’s almost certainly more of a liability than the once-common critique that Harris was an overzealous cop and drug warrior.
Harris’ tough-on-crime past makes her unpopular among leftists and more radical wings of the Democratic Party, as well as among civil libertarians and criminal justice reformers. There’s no doubt that this will come back to haunt her again should she become the Democratic nominee.
But this past may have been especially hurtful in 2020, when the protests inspired by George Floyd’s death were still raging and criminal justice reform momentum was still vibrant. (Remember “defund the police”?) And it likely mattered more in a Democratic primary than it would in a general election, since the types to find fault with Harris’ prosecutorial record are unlikely to find Trump and Republicans a more welcome alternative.
If anything, some of the lip-service Harris paid to progressive justice ideals—both in 2020 and in California—may be used by Republicans to help turn safety-minded independents against her.
That means Harris’ turnabouts on justice issues—not her actual record—may wind up harming her most. It leaves her vulnerable to attacks from both the left and the right on this front—to allegations that she’s been both too aggressive and too lenient on crime, even if only one of these (the aggressiveness) has been borne out beyond just words.
I won’t pretend to know whether Harris would be a better or worse choice for Democrats than some other potential candidates. I don’t know whether she could beat Trump, though I have my doubts.
What I do know is that if Harris becomes the party’s nominee, the rush to anoint her a saint—in the press, on social media, among celebrities—is going to kick into overdrive quickly, both because of her identity and out of desperation to avoid Trump getting elected again.
But as much as I want to see a female president sooner rather than later, and as much as I do not want to see another Trump presidency, I can’t pretend Harris doesn’t have serious and worrying flaws. As much as she’s been a pretty benign figure during her vice presidential days, there’s nothing to stop her worst tendencies from flaring up again if she becomes president.
These tendencies include a penchant for saying one thing during campaigns and then doing the opposite; of using the state to crack down on problems—like truancy and drug use—that many would agree could be better solved through nonpunitive approaches; and of using moral panics around sex in self-serving ways (even while publicly ignoring sexual misconduct among California cops). They include acting cavalierly toward the Constitution, defending dirty prosecutors, and finding new ways for the government to poke into people’s lives.
Remember: Not only did Harris help put the parents of truant kids in jail, but she wrote in her 2019 book The Truths We Hold that “instituting a statewide plan on truancy was part of the reason I’d run for the office in the first place.” That is who Kamala Harris is (though she claims the jailing was unintended).
Those who critique Harris for being something of a politically ambitious cipher aren’t wrong. But this image is incomplete.
There are some things Harris has stood for consistently, and none of them are good.
I’ll leave you with something I wrote about Harris back in 2019:
During her 28-year tenure as a county prosecutor, district attorney (D.A.), and state attorney general (A.G.),…in the public eye, she spoke of racial justice and liberal values, bolstering her cred as one of the Democratic Party’s rising stars. But behind closed doors, she repeatedly fought for more aggressive prosecution not just of violent criminals but of people who committed misdemeanors and “quality of life” crimes.
Every attorney general fights for state power and police prerogatives. It’s part of the job. But over and over again, Harris went beyond the call of duty, fighting for harsher sentences, larger bail requirements, longer prison terms, more prosecution of petty crimes, greater criminal justice involvement in low-income and minority communities, less due process for people in the system, less transparency, and less accountability for bad cops.
In the early days of her [2020] presidential campaign, Harris has sought to define herself as a liberal reformer who has kept up with the times. But a review of her career shows a distinct penchant for power seeking and an illiberal disposition in which no offense is small or harmless enough to warrant lenience from the state. Now she wants to bring that approach to the highest office in the land.
Whoever Harris pretends to be this time, she cannot be—to use one popular Harris phrase)—”unburdened by what has been.”
