WASHINGTON ― One candidate spent much of her career putting criminals behind bars. The other has been convicted of 34 felonies.
Kamala Harris’ elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket against Republican Donald Trump sets the stage for a presidential contest unlike any other in American history in a campaign season already filled with unexpected twists and turns.
The race to become the most powerful leader in the world is now coming down to this:
The former prosecutor vs. the convicted felon.
‘I know Donald Trump’s type’
Democrats, who worried that questions about Biden’s advanced age and mental acuity would cause him to lose to Trump, sense that if Harris becomes their nominee, they have a chance to shift the focus back to Trump and his complicated tangle of legal problems.
“This changed the complete dynamics of the race, and it changed the campaign dynamics dramatically,” Democratic strategist Isaac Wright said.
If Harris is their nominee, age will no longer be the albatross that it was for Democrats when Biden, 81, was leading the ticket. If anything, Harris, 59, could enable Democrats to turn the age issue against the Republicans and Trump, who is 78 and now the oldest presidential nominee in history.
Harris’ prosecutorial skills, Democrats believe, will give her another big advantage in a head-to-head contest with Trump.
“She has the prosecutorial chops to make mincemeat of the mendacious malefactor Trump,” said Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn.
Harris foreshadowed the line of attack she’s preparing against Trump during a meeting with her campaign staff in Wilmington, Delaware, on Monday. Referencing her work as a prosecutor, Harris said she took on predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers and cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.
“I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said.
Republicans insist Democrats will gain nothing from having a former prosecutor lead their ticket.
“The era of ‘tough on crime’ Democrats is long gone,” said Steven Groves, who held several roles in the Trump administration during his presidency. “Harris’ time as a criminal prosecutor is a hinderance, not a help, to her candidacy.”
Donald Trump is ‘too criminal, too corrupt’
Harris, who served as Biden’s vice president for the past three years, started her career as a prosecutor in California’s Alameda County and later in San Francisco. In that role, she took on cases involving child sexual assault, homicide, robbery and serial felony offenders, among others. She eventually was elected as California’s attorney general and, later, as U.S. senator.
Trump, who served four years as president until he was defeated by Biden in 2020, became the first former president to be convicted of a crime when a New York jury found him guilty in May of 34 felony counts involving hush money payments to a former porn star with whom he allegedly had an extramarital affair. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 18 – just seven weeks before voters will decide whether to return him to the White House.
Trump also has pleaded not guilty to multiple felony counts in three other cases involving his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents after he left office.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, threw out the classified documents case in July, arguing that the special prosecutor who brought the charges had been improperly appointed. The Justice Department is expected to appeal. The other two cases remain in limbo following a Supreme Court ruling in July that Trump has immunity for some of his conduct as president.
Trump is unlikely to go to trial on any of the remaining cases before the November election.
Which is one reason why Democrats see Harris’s background as a prosecutor as an invaluable asset in the coming crucial weeks of the campaign. Democrats believe that having Harris as their nominee will call attention to Trump’s criminal cases and boost their argument that his legal problems should disqualify him for office.
“Her experiences as an attorney general, as a prosecutor, both lend strong credence to making the case against Trump that he is just too criminal, too corrupt, and doesn’t share the values we need in a president,” said Wright, a veteran political strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s and Al Gore’s presidential campaigns.
Clinton made essentially the same argument just hours after Biden withdrew from the race and Harris emerged as the frontrunner to replace him.
“I’ve known Kamala Harris a long time,” Clinton wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “This brilliant prosecutor will make the case against convicted felon Donald Trump and the Project 2025 agenda to take away our freedoms.”
As senator, Harris effectively used her prosecutorial skills to grill witnesses during committee hearings. In one memorable exchange, she lobbed one rapid-fire question after another at then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions during a high-profile hearing in 2017 on Russian election interference.
“I am not able to be rushed this fast,” a flustered Sessions said. “It makes me nervous.”
In the presidential campaign, Harris’ background prosecuting sexual predators will allow Democrats to draw a sharp contrast with Trump, who boasted in a television interview in 2005 that he liked to grab women by their genitalia.
Last year, a jury in a civil case found Trump liable for sexually assaulting magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996 and awarded her $5 million. In a separate case, a jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in damages earlier this year after concluding that Trump defamed her by claiming she lied about a sexual encounter with him at a Manhattan department store.
Harris’ experience as a prosecutor and Trump’s felony conviction also will give the Democrats an opening to counter the GOP argument that it is the party of law and order, Wright said.
“It wrecks that argument for Republicans when their ticket is led by a convicted criminal and the Democratic ticket is led by a successful former prosecutor,” he said.
Not all Democrats are convinced that Harris’ legal work will shake up the race.
“Poll after poll demonstrates that the electorate doesn’t really care about the president’s legal issues, so I’m not sure I buy that her background as a prosecutor does much because I’m not sure there’s much to gain there,” said Melissa DeRosa, a Democratic strategist and author.
Harris’ background does, however, give her a real platform to talk about crime and quality of life in America from a position of strength, DeRosa said.
“Her background in prosecuting homicide, robbery and three-strike cases shows she walks the walk, and given the moment we find ourselves in, with an electorate that increasingly feels the country is more and more out of control, having a tough-on-crime Democrat with a lifetime of work to point to can only be beneficial,” she said.
‘She was only thinking of herself’
Harris’ work as a prosecutor could, in fact, open her up to attacks from Republicans, who have been mining her record for ammunition to use against her on the campaign trail.
Before she became the Democratic frontrunner, most of the GOP criticism leveled against her focused on her time as vice president and specifically her role in the Biden administration’s efforts to secure the southern border.
Biden tasked Harris early in his presidency to lead the administration’s efforts with Mexico and Central American nations to address the root cause of illegal immigration. Though she was never directly responsible for security at the southern border, Republicans have accused her of failing to stem the flow of millions of migrants crossing illegally into the United States.
Now, her work as a prosecutor will be under greater scrutiny
One line of attack is likely to involve her handling of the murder case against a gang member who killed San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza in 2004. The suspect, David Hill, gunned down Espinoza, 29, with an AK-47 the Saturday night before Easter.
Harris, who had become San Francisco’s district attorney just three months earlier, came under fire for deciding to pursue a prison sentence of life without parole for Hill instead of seeking the death penalty. Her decision became an issue when she ran for president in 2020.
“I felt like she had just taken something from us,” Espinoza’s widow, Renata, told CNN in 2019. “She had just taken justice from us. From Isaac. She was only thinking of herself.”
Trump’s 2020 campaign slammed Harris over her decision not to seek the death penalty in the Isaac case, saying she “sided with criminals over cops” – a line of attack Republicans will try to resurrect now that she is the Democratic frontrunner and Trump’s likely opponent in November.
“Not only does Kamala need to defend her support of Joe Biden’s failed agenda over the past four years, she also needs to answer for her own terrible weak-on-crime record in California,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said.
While Harris’ critics will pick at parts of her record, Wright thinks her prosecutorial background works to the Democrats’ overall advantage, especially in an abbreviated campaign.
For many voters, Wright said, the choice for president will come down to this: “Do we want a criminal? Or do we want somebody that for much of their life has been putting criminals behind bars?”
Contributing: Vivian Jones of The Tennessean
Michael Collins covers the White House. Follow him on X @mcollinsNEWS.
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