The NPR Politics Podcast - Harris Embraces Prosecutor Past In Campaign Against Trump

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris is using her record as a prosecutor to her advantage in the campaign against former president Donald Trump. So far, it appears to be working. That's a big contrast from her 2020 Democratic presidential primary bid. But this is a different race and the politics of crime have changed, too.This episode: senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, voting correspondent Ashley Lopez, and White House correspondent Deepa Shivaram.The podcast is produced by Casey Morell and Kelli Wessinger. Our intern is Bria Suggs. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Kevin from Rochester, Michigan, currently taking a break from drowning in a sea of tomatoes. Planted way too many this year, lesson learned. This podcast was recorded at 1.07 p.m. on Tuesday, the 13th of August. Things may have changed since recording, but I'll still be plotting my defenses for next year against an army of slugs and one very adorable yet hungry rabbit. And here's the show. He's gonna have to start canning or something. I was gonna say, you want to send some to NPR? Yeah, seriously. Too many tomatoes is my version of like champagne problems.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Deepa Shibaram. I also cover the White House. And I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting. And today on the show, Vice President Harris started her career as a prosecutor. And in the early days of her campaign for president, she's put that at the center of her pitch to voters. And 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.

So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump's type. So before she was vice president, before she was a senator from California, Harris was that state's attorney general. And before that, district attorney in San Francisco. Deepa, what was Harris's reputation as a prosecutor? And just tell us how she approached that job. Yeah, I mean, we can go even one step further back from that. She was a courtroom prosecutor. That was where she started her career after law school. And, you know, you talk to old friends of Harris, old law school classmates of Harris, and they will tell you, like, she was known for

her skills in the courtroom. She was very exact and precise. And I talked to David Chu as I was reporting this story out. He's now currently the city attorney of San Francisco. And he said when he started out his career there, way back when, this was like late 90s, his boss had called him and said, can you go to the courtroom? I want you to watch the closing arguments of a prosecutor named Kamala Harris. And so way back when, she was really well known for having these skills. And that's kind of what led her to a point where she was going to run for office in 2003, the first race she ever ran, district attorney of San Francisco. And at that time, you know, she really rejected this binary choice. She always says on the campaign trail, she said this in the past,

that she rejected the false choice that you either had to be tough on crime or soft on crime. And this is, of course, like, you know, the 90s in San Francisco. The perception of crime, the perception of justice was a very different era at that time. And Kamala Harris ran that campaign total underdog. She was polling at 6 percent in the primary, like had no shot of winning here. But her approach was to be smart on crime. And that was the message that she took to voters. And it also ended up being the title of her first book. Is that a way of not taking a position or being hard to pin down? Is that sort of a politically savvy thing? That's a very good question to ask about Kamala Harris specifically. And I think you're so right

to approach it that way, Tam, because I feel like Kamala Harris's perspective on criminal justice is reflective of her larger politics, which is that she doesn't fit into a box. She's never wanted to. She has rejected any pressure to do that. She doesn't fit into the progressive box. She doesn't fit into the moderate box. And it kind of goes the same way in terms of her approach on criminal justice. The problem, though, is that that leaves a lot of voters kind of confused on what she believes in and where she stands. So she's had some issues that she's really leaned in on. She was very early on against the death penalty and faced a lot of pressure on that when she was, you know, an elected official in San Francisco. And that was, you know, pretty early on at that time. Someone like Dianne Feinstein, for example, like really called her out

on something like that. But at the same time, she, you know, was still working in a system that a lot of people perceived as very broken and unjust, specifically towards Black people. That idea of the justice system being unfair to a large swath of the population, that really took center stage in American politics in 2020. And Harris's Democratic presidential primary campaign, which did not even last into the year 2020, she tried the prosecutor thing. She did. It's pretty shocking, actually, to be on the road with Kamala Harris in the last three weeks and quite frankly, even before then, because she was starting, even as Biden was still at the top of the ticket, to bring back her history as a prosecutor and remind voters that she was a prosecutor for a very long time. And that's how she thinks about problems and political issues. And that was something that, you know, her big

fans in 2019, voters who were at her rallies, you know, in the early stages of that primary were really happy with that. And you're hearing that come up so much more again in this campaign where it's not just a small group of her big fans. It's everyone who's rallying around this message of like we want the prosecutor to take down the felon who's her opponent, Donald Trump. Ashley, this is a different time in American politics, apparently, because I don't know that that would have worked. And I don't think it did work for Harris previously. I mean, 2020, there was a summer of racial justice protests that spread not just from cities, but to suburbs and all over the country. Yeah, and that has definitely changed. I mean, I think it's safe to say that some Democrats, especially those living in cities where crime did take up during the pandemic, are embracing more conservative policies when it comes to criminal justice issues, right? So during the primary elections this year, we've seen voters weigh in on sort of like local measures related to crime in New York City and even Harris's hometown of San Francisco. And voters in

these very, very blue cities have reversed some of San Francisco. And voters in these very, very blue cities have reversed some of those reforms that were made in the wake of the George Floyd protests. And I should say the base of the party, I don't think, has backed off reforms that were proposed in that era. I just think the politics of this has shifted in some blue cities. But, you know, because the party isn't uniformly moving to the left on this issue, I think this has opened up a space for Harris to make clear where she sort of stands in like a sort of nuanced position on the spectrum of tough on crime versus reformer. And, you know, this could also be helpful in the coming months. Right. Because Trump has been talking about crime rates on the campaign trail. Many of these attacks are not based in fact, I should say. But nonetheless, they're being used against Harris as they were against Biden. And Deepa, I guess I wonder how you expect Harris with her background will navigate

this sort of critique that often comes for Democrats during general elections. Yeah, I mean, I talked to Paul Butler. He's a former federal prosecutor about this. And I was asking him, you know, from your perspective, like, how can she best move forward with this prosecutor argument? If she's canny, she'll be able to use her experience as a prosecutor to say, on the one hand, she's coming after Donald Trump, just like the way she came after criminals in San Francisco. She'll also say that what she learned as a prosecutor is that the system has a whole lot of problems and that she's best equipped to fix those problems. So you still kind of hear that argument of both and that I think Kamala Harris and her

career has really tried to sort of toggle her entire career. The way I kind of think about it is honestly, like if you guys remember in the first Harry Potter book, The Mirror of Erised and how it's this mirror that like shows you what you want to see. And I think if she plays this right for voters, kind of like what Paul Butler was saying, there's going to be voters who are like, I want someone who is more progressive on criminal justice, who's going to change the system. And Kamala Harris can say to those voters, well, yeah, I've worked on the system from the inside. I know how to make that change. And for folks who are like, you know what? I feel unsafe in my community. I feel like crime is up. She can say, well, I have the experience of being a prosecutor and taking on criminals. And so I think it'll be interesting to see how she sort of figures this

out in the next couple of months, because her job is to alienate as few voters as possible, but also at some point has to take a stand on something. I think like this is a testament to timing because, you know, in the primary in 2020, I think Harris was really forced into a sort of uncomfortable and unnatural position for her, which is to the left of people like Joe Biden on the issue of criminal justice. And so I think it's going to be really interesting to see her like now in a general election in a place where maybe nuance can be reintroduced to her opinions and sort of political postures, because I think in 2020 that wasn't obviously entirely reflective of her career or her opinions.

Yeah, there is a big difference between a primary and a general election. All right, we're going to have more on that after a quick break. And we're back. And for those of us who are old enough to remember the 2016 campaign, which is all of us here, there was a familiar chant at Donald Trump rallies, which was, Lock her up. It was aimed at Hillary Clinton. Now, at Kamala Harris rallies, we're hearing something very similar. Lock him up.

But the former prosecutor is not interested in hearing that. Harris has been trying to shut it down. Well, well, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. The court's going to take care of that. We just don't beat him in November. We'll beat him in November. Deepa, those chants of lock him up started basically as soon as Harris started running at the top of the ticket. And by the end of last week, she had come up with that line to shut them down. So what do you think is going on there? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I was at

that very first rally she did, like, what, two days after she announced her presidential campaign in Milwaukee. And the crowd pretty, you know, organically after that very first rally she did, like, what, two days after she announced her presidential campaign in Milwaukee. And the crowd pretty, you know, organically after that piece of sound we had played in the first half of the pod where she's saying, I know Donald Trump's type, right? Like, she's emphasizing over and over again that she is a prosecutor. So, of course, the crowd is responding with this lock him up chance because Harris is standing on stage mentioning Trump's 34 felony convictions. And so it sort of shifted. Last week, as she went on this blitz around the country with her now VP pick, Tim Walz, both he and Harris started sort of shutting the crowd down and saying, you know, no, no,

no, no, we're going to beat him at the ballot box. Like, we're going to let the courts handle that. And they're sort of moving away from that rhetoric, or at least trying not to let that rhetoric continue. And I think it's kind of interesting. I talked to Erin Haney. She's a former public defender in California. She's with the Nonprofit Reform Alliance. And, you know, she has some critiques about Kamala Harris's prosecutor record, of course.

She's a public defender. But she said one thing that's important here for Harris in this whole lock him up kind of rhetoric is that she says Harris is someone who's generally known as a prosecutor who didn't just take out individuals and focus on individuals who had committed crime. She's someone who tried to take down the injustices in the system writ large. And so when you have people who are shouting lock him up and they're talking about Donald Trump specifically, what you kind of lose the plot with is like, hey, there are larger problems with the criminal justice system. And that's what she's kind of hoping Harris kind of pivots to and focuses more on in her campaign. Well, and Ashley, I think that when people started chanting lock her up at the RNC back in 2016, a lot of people were sort of alarmed at the idea of a candidate running on prosecuting their political opponent. Yeah, I mean, I remember the 2016 election, and I remember this being like one of the most unsavory and sort of like unpopular parts of

Trump's message with like a bigger audience, even, you know, not just at the RNC, but with independent voters. I mean, in general, it's a bad look to be overtly egging on throwing your political rivals in jail, right? This is why in general, we have heard the Biden administration avoid or outright dodge questions about Trump's various legal issues. And they've largely said, this is up to the courts, leave us out of it. And then there's the other like sort of political considerations in all this. And I think an ingredient in this like magic sauce is helping the Harris campaign right now. And excuse my strange metaphor is that so far, it's a fairly positive campaign. And this really would not kind of like be in the spirit of like how I think they want that campaign rollout to sound. And another ingredient is all these voters

who are sort of coming back into the fold for Democrats now that Harris is leading the ticket. And we're talking about younger voters and voters of color, particularly Black voters who are giving Harris her biggest boost in the polls. You know, according to the latest NPR, PBS News, Marist poll, Harris went from a 23 point lead with Black voters over Trump just a couple of weeks ago to a 54 point lead now. And these voters, for the most part, are not quite as interested in a tough on crime rhetoric as independent voters and definitely Republican voters are. So I think like there are a lot of political calculations being made here for why like they don't want to be the lock them up. Right. And that contrast is what they're really trying to hammer home.

Right. So it doesn't really help to go and have voters at your rally shouting similar things that Donald Trump and his supporters might have said, though. I will say, like, you know, we're not trying to draw any false equivalencies here. Obviously, there is a big contrast between 2016 and this election that we're in right now, and particularly with all the charges against Donald Trump himself. But it is really interesting. And that point on joy, I think, is so interesting too, Ashley, and the literal feel of the campaigns are just so different. Right, right. Harris is calling them joyful warriors, and joyful warriors probably aren't trying to seek retribution. Okay, well, let's leave it there for today. I'm Tamara Keith.

I cover the White House. I'm Deepa Shivaram. I also cover the White House. And I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.