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.
The past three weeks were strange ones for Harris. As Biden deliberated, fumed and tried to squint a way into reviving his reelection bid, she was not part of the main conversations. She knew she was not in control of her own fate: Biden would stick it out despite all the calls to leave and she’d have to stand by him, or he’d decide to go and she’d have to be ready to turn into a presidential candidate on a few minutes’ notice.
Old friends and people wanting to be new friends reached out to her and close staff. She did not answer almost any of the calls or texts or emails, and neither did they. Several who were in conversation with her said she would not even engage the topic of the presidential race at all in private, very conscious not to have leaks that made her seem like she was scheming in any way.
As the clock seemed to tick down on Biden, there were clear signs that she was huddling with those closest to her. On Friday afternoon, she made a surprise stop at a new ice cream store in Washington, DC, owned by supermodel Tyra Banks, her grandnieces in tow because they were in town. On Saturday, when she stepped out of the helicopter at Andrews Air Force Base to fly on Air Force Two to a fundraiser in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Tony West – who’s married to her sister Maya, and, in addition to being a former Justice Department official, is a longtime Harris political adviser — was in her cabin on the flight there and back where the door remained closed.
Although Harris usually comes to chat with reporters who travel with her, typically keeping those short sessions off the record, she avoided that the past few days, careful not to get caught with even a facial expression that might leak.
Part of the reason Biden decided to seek reelection in the first place was because of his wariness of Harris’ troubled start on the job, and his reservation about whether she could win was a central topic of discussion as he tried to hold on, people familiar with the conversations told CNN.
Some of the frustration from people close to Harris for years was that Biden and some of his top advisers had not done enough to help boost the woman he had all but anointed as his choice for the future of the Democratic Party, keeping the spotlight too much on him. But part of what Harris had been trying to do as she recovered from her rocky start was steel herself for a day she knew could have come at any point, say people who have spoken to her.
“She’s always been ready, from the moment she accepted to be his running mate. It’s been clear that he’s older, and might not complete two terms,” said Eleni Kounalakis, the lieutenant governor of California and a friend of Harris’ for years. “She always knew that this moment could come. And she’s been getting ready – very quietly, very deliberate out of respect for our country.”
Harris spent most of Sunday taking in the news and making calls to key supporters in Congress. While some have been rushing to get delegates to sign on with the aim of locking Harris in as the nominee within days, a person familiar with the calls told CNN that the vice president herself reiterated to many she spoke with on Sunday that she is opposed to rushing a virtual roll call vote and will follow whatever process the party sets up. For all the endorsements rolling in, she wants to be seen as earning the nomination and not being coronated.
One of her biggest tasks ahead will likely be very quickly vetting and choosing a running mate. In just the past week of campaign stops, she has appeared with three of the most talked about possibilities: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Harris got to hear Buttigieg from backstage on Saturday in Provincetown as he ripped into Trump running mate JD Vance and then said, “I can’t even begin to tell you how much more well off America is going to be with our vice president compared to the guy that they want to send in to be the vice president.”
Others discussed include Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly.
As of Sunday evening, people familiar with several on that list said no vetting requests had come in. Shapiro, Beshear and Cooper were among the people who got calls from Harris on Sunday.
A historic candidacy as the base has drifted away
Harris wouldn’t just be the second woman at the top of a national ticket. She’s a half-Jamaican, half-Indian woman whose given names are Kamala and Devi, who identified so strongly with the American Black experience that she specifically chose Howard University for college. She’s also married to a Jewish man. Her candidacy is historic.
But she has long been hyper-sensitive, as have some key people around her, to even inadvertent slights against her because she is a woman, or because she is a person of color. Even on the international stage, staff had grown weary of still having to gently correct some other governments’ protocol offices after they seated the vice president at dinners next to the wife of a foreign leader rather than the leader himself.
People close to Harris are steeling themselves for vicious attacks, and also for the possibility that she is about to confront subconscious racism and sexism.
They are also counting on Harris’ candidacy to drive a massive burst of enthusiasm from the base, both because it’s a shift from one of the most intense months of Democratic despair, and because, if she’s the nominee, the base will be represented in a way that many core party voters did not feel was the case from an 81-year-old White man whose most consistent Saturday evening activity was going to mass.
With women across the country already highly engaged on abortion, several Democrats predicted a boost from elevating a woman who has been out front on this issue for years.
“She’s just so much more robust and so much more authentic and so much more credentialed to speak about this,” Timmaraju said. “It’s the number one persuasion message in this campaign, and now you have the best advocate.”
Still, the worries about what Harris has been handed have been spreading for weeks. No one knows how most voters will respond to her, but even in polls that show her doing better than Biden, she is still behind Trump. Among those alarmed at the potential repercussions if she loses: Connecticut Rep. Jahana Hayes, who in a meeting of House Democrats two weeks ago said she worried that Harris and Black women overall could end up bearing the blame for a loss that she thinks would be more the fault of Biden, Democratic infighting and overall dissatisfaction with the direction of the country.
Hayes declined comment to CNN on Sunday night about her feelings after Biden dropped out.
Laphonza Butler, another longtime friend now serving as senator from California, told CNN she thinks both Harris’ experience as vice president and Trump’s legal problems make for a very different situation from the last campaign, on which she was an adviser.
“Just like a prosecutor, she is going to know her case inside and out. She is going to have her facts and her witnesses lined up and she is going to be talking to the jury, the American people,” Butler told CNN.
After a January 2019 campaign launch that was so big that the Oakland streets were packed for blocks and helicopters circled overhead trying to estimate how many thousands were there, Harris quickly fizzled out. Splashy successes tended to be followed by weeks of missteps.
Imagining a standard two-year primary campaign, former aides and friends alike saw at best a tortured slog. As hard as it will be for her to mount a campaign with just over 100 days before the election, several who know her told CNN that it may turn out to be the best news for her.
“She’s at her best when she’s got a high sense of urgency and limited time. She’s at her best when she’s prosecuting the case and has a foe to call out, and she has the ultimate foe,” said a former Harris aide. “She’s a better sprinter than marathon runner, and I think that’s going to be advantageous.”
Warren echoed that. “When the pressure is on, she gets calmer and more focused,” Warren said. And the Massachusetts senator said she hoped that she and other progressive leaders vouching for Harris would head off any cannibalizing from the left.
One House Democrat in a seat where Trump won in 2020 urged Harris not to bow to some of the “woke” thinking that they said has dominated the party in recent years.
“She can’t do this if she runs as a lawyer from California. She’s got to do this as someone who does the right thing, even if it pisses off progressives, someone who takes on crime whether it’s white-collar crime or street crime,” the lawmaker said. “She has a profile that hasn’t been exercised properly.”
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