Kamala Harris has spent much more of her life as a prosecutor than as a senator or vice president – and that is exactly how she is now going to run against Donald Trump.
In sessions that were quietly underway at the Naval Observatory even before Joe Biden’s disastrous debate, Harris and her inner circle had already landed on the plan to look past whoever Trump picked as his running mate and focus almost exclusively on the former president.
The vice president had expected that to be part of her role making the case for Biden. But it became clearer and clearer over the last month that she was likely going to be making the case for herself.
Now that Biden has stepped aside — and with even more of her potential opponents planning to endorse her by the end of the day Monday — over a dozen advisers and close allies told CNN they think her candidacy will lean heavily on her background as a district attorney, attorney general and cross examiner in Senate hearings.
It is simple, they say: prosecutor versus felon.
The strategy will be a return to the “prosecutor for president” framework of her 2020 presidential campaign, which included her slogan taken from her days standing up in court as a young assistant district attorney: “Kamala Harris, for the people.” In those days, her team was stretching the rhetoric. But this year, the GOP nominee has been found guilty in a New York hush money trial, liable for battery in a civil case, and faces two other criminal cases related to subverting the 2020 election.
Advisers believe that this is a way not just to raise up her own life story, but to make her come across as fighting for Americans while Trump is trying to serve himself. It’s also a strategy to play up attributes like strength, intelligence and toughness that are part of being a prosecutor but can also be of a commander in chief.
Her supporters are raring to see her do it.
“As a former prosecutor, Vice President Harris has a lot of experience holding convicted felons accountable,” said Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a former primary opponent in the 2020 Democratic race who quickly endorsed Harris after the news of Biden’s decision broke. “She was fighting on behalf of abused women. She was in the trenches against giant banks. She was out in the middle of multiple fights every day as a prosecutor and then attorney general in California.”
Warren noted that she first met Harris before either got to the Senate, when she was then setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the then-California attorney general was taking on big banks over the mortgage crisis.
“It’s such a beautiful juxtaposition,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All. “Her whole career she’s been taking on tough cases and tough characters like Donald Trump. Her reputation has grown from her success in putting bad guys away. And now she has the chance to put the ultimate bad guy away for good.”
During a stop in Fayetteville, North Carolina, last week – when Harris was still publicly defending Biden’s candidacy as his No. 2 – she road-tested some of the lines.
“As many of you know, I am a former prosecutor. So, I say, let’s look at the facts, shall we?” she said, as she compared Biden’s record to Trump’s on boosting manufacturing jobs, helping seniors, protecting Obamacare and lowering prices on goods.
Harris has said that approach includes laying blame directly on Trump for the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the state-level abortion restrictions that have followed.
“The prosecutor approach is really about just deconstructing an issue,” Harris told CNN in an exclusive interview after a campaign stop in Las Vegas in April. “It’s presenting and reminding folks about the empirical evidence that shows us exactly how we arrived at this point. … He can’t hide from this stuff.”
Several people involved in discussions and thinking about how she would campaign either with or without Biden pointed to one of the few ads from Harris’ primary campaign – before it sputtered out amid staff infighting and dried up fundraising.
“She prosecuted sex predators. He is one. She shut down for-profit colleges that swindled Americans. He was a for-profit college – literally,” a narrator says, as footage of first Harris and then Trump goes by. “He’s owned by the big banks. She’s the attorney general who beat the biggest banks in America and forced them to pay homeowners $18 billion.”
During the 2020 campaign, under attack from progressives who said that she had been too tough on crime, Harris soon abandoned that approach at the urging of her younger sister Maya, a former ACLU official and Hillary Clinton adviser who is extremely close to the vice president both personally and as an adviser.
