Opinion | The prosecutor populism of Kamala Harris

Vice President Kamala Harris is leaning on her decades as a local and state prosecutor to signal her toughness in the presidential race. But that professional experience also shapes her approach to tackling the country’s problems.

Consider inflation, which has been one of the Biden administration’s thorniest political problems. In a speech this month, Harris proposed going after grocery chains that she claimed are using inflation as a pretext to price-gouge consumers.

In one line in the speech, she outlined an approach that you might call prosecutorial populism: target the rule-breakers.

“Most businesses are creating jobs, contributing to our economy and playing by the rules, but some are not, and that’s just not right, and we need to take action when that is the case,” she said.

You can see echoes of this approach in Harris’ Democratic National Convention acceptance speech and other policy announcements:

• Student debt: She has talked about her work fighting for students “being scammed by big, for-profit colleges.”
• Immigration: She has spoken about fighting “cartels who traffic in guns and drugs and human beings.”
• Housing: She has targeted “Wall Street investors” and “private equity-backed price-setting tools” raising rents.

In each case, Harris clearly identified villains and proposed, essentially, prosecuting the cases against them. The benefits of this approach are that it’s easy to explain to voters and it forces the political opposition to defend some pretty indefensible behavior. There’s a reason defense attorneys have such bad reputations, after all.

The populist approach would be to go after the large conglomerates in unflinching language — “every billionaire is a policy failure,” for example — but this prosecutor’s populism is narrower. The large companies breaking the rules are the target, and the solution is to go after them and leave the rest alone.

There are limits to this approach. Sometimes a problem doesn’t have a clear villain. Sometimes focusing on the people explicitly breaking the rules overlooks the broader problem that the rules created in the first place. Sure, scammy for-profit colleges are bad, but they aren’t the major reason student debt has become such a crippling problem.

The prosecutor’s mindset can also lead to a focus on easy wins.

Being a prosecutor is an inherently political job, but it has much different set of incentives from other positions such as governor or senator. At the local and state levels, prosecutors are typically elected, and many look at their win-loss ratios in court as the best way to persuade voters to re-elect them.

That can make them risk-averse, looking for cases with overwhelming evidence or seeking plea deals to avoid the uncertainty of going to trial. That could be a problem for Harris in the White House, where presidents often have to make snap decisions with incomplete information, such as when Barack Obama approved the late-night mission to kill Osama bin Laden.

America has had presidents who were prosecutors before. Both James K. Polk and William McKinley got their starts as local prosecutors, and Bill Clinton was Arkansas attorney general before serving as governor. But Harris’ experience is much deeper: She was a deputy district attorney, district attorney and California attorney general for 27 years, while she has been a senator and vice president for only seven years.

Other presidents have been shaped by their past careers. Ronald Reagan approached the presidency like another acting gig and viewed political problems through the lens of Hollywood screenplays. Obama sometimes sounded like he was still a constitutional law professor, debating with himself whether the president has the power to mint a trillion-dollar coin. And former President Donald Trump still thinks like a real estate developer, promising to build walls and airports and statuary gardens.

Harris has leaned heavily on her past as a prosecutor, promising to make the case against Trump, using “for the people” as her campaign slogan and talking about her handling of difficult cases to signal toughness to voters. It has also been used against her, as when some on the left criticized her ill-fated 2020 presidential campaign with the meme “Kamala is a cop.”

But based on her policy announcements so far, it’s clear that being a prosecutor is more than just a credential for Harris. It’s also a mindset that she’ll carry with her into the White House.