In many ways, 2024 has already been an unusual presidential campaign. Beyond the Biden-Harris swap, the policy landscape is defying the expected configuration.
One of the places that is most apparent is in the area of crime and criminal justice. It now looks like we are in for two months of a contest to show whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris would be tough or tougher on crime.
For more than the last half-century, the usual pattern of our presidential campaigns has had one party, the Republicans, to pose as a law-and-order party and accuse the other of being soft on crime. The Democrats have mostly eschewed the tough-on-crime strategy.
Not so much this year.
While former President Trump and his MAGA allies are doubling down on the law-and-order themes that have served Republican candidates for president well since 1968, the Democrats, having nominated a former prosecutor to be their standard bearer, seem determined not to concede the tough-on-crime terrain to them.
The dilemma for Vice President Harris and the Democrats is to avoid saying anything about the crime issue during the campaign that will inhibit their ability to be credible spokespeople for criminal justice reform if they take power next January. The criminal justice reform agenda that awaits them is quite substantial.
It includes dealing with problems in American policing, repealing mandatory minimum sentences, addressing our still great reliance on incarceration, and ending the death penalty, to name just a few things.
Sounding tough on crime while still leaving room for maneuvering will be a hard act for Vice President Harris to pull off. She must make clear, as she once put it, that the best way to be tough on crime is to be “smart on crime.”
As anyone following her campaign knows, Harris has put her crime-fighting credentials front and center in her presidential campaign. Over the last month, as she introduced herself to the American people, she has repeatedly used the same tagline. “Before I was elected as vice president, I was elected as United States senator, I was the elected attorney general… of California. And before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor.”
“In those roles,” she continues, “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.”
In her acceptance speech at last week’s Democratic National Convention, Harris again highlighted her background as a prosecutor. She explained that one of the reasons she became a prosecutor was because of the experience of one of her friends, named Wanda, who had been sexually abused as a teenager.
“I became a prosecutor,” Harris explained, “To protect people like Wanda. Because I believe everyone has a right: To safety. To dignity. And to justice.“ Harris reminded her audience that “As a prosecutor, when I had a case, I charged it not in the name of the victim. But in the name of ‘The People.’”
She argued that “In our system of justice, a harm against any one of us is a harm against all of us.” No one, she said, “should be made to fight alone. We are all in this together. Every day in the courtroom, I stood proudly before a judge and said five words: ‘Kamala Harris, for the People.’”
Later in her speech, she offered another glimpse of her tough-on-crime credentials.
She invited her listeners to look at her record, not just her rhetoric. “As a young courtroom prosecutor in Oakland, I stood up for women and children against predators who abused them. As Attorney General of California, I took on the Big Banks. Delivered $20 billion for middle-class families who faced foreclosure. And helped pass a Homeowner Bill of Rights—one of the first of its kind.”
She listed her work in standing up “For veterans and students being scammed by Big for-Profit colleges. For workers who were being cheated out of the wages they were due. For seniors facing elder abuse.” She touted her record going after “cartels who traffic in guns, drugs, and human beings who threaten the security of our border and the safety of our communities.”
However, nowhere in her acceptance speech or in her campaign appearances has Vice President Harris made specific promises about how she would handle the criminal justice reform agenda that awaits her.
Harris’ determination not to be outflanked from the right on the crime issue marks a stark departure from her approach when she ran for president four years ago. At that time, as the New York Times notes, “She called herself a progressive prosecutor and proposed to end the death penalty, mandatory minimum sentences and cash bail.”
What Time calls the “pivot from Harris’ earlier efforts to downplay her prosecutorial record highlights a broader shift within the Democratic Party” and an “altered the political landscape” in which Harris’s background in law enforcement is “more palatable to a broader electorate.”
But as she tries to navigate the altered political landscape on crime and criminal justice, Harris will have to avoid taking Donald Trump’s bait on the crime issue. She will have to work hard to avoid turning the 2024 campaign into a contest to show whose approach to crime is the most extreme.
And there will be plenty of bait for her to avoid taking.
For example, on Friday, after the completion of the Democratic National Convention, the Trump campaign posted the following: Kamala is DESPERATE!—Violent crime isn’t ‘down,’ it’s up almost 25% across 66 major U.S. cities while Kamala has presided over three of the four most murderous years in the last 25 years.”
“Under Kamala,” it claimed, “illegals she let into the country are brutally raping and murdering our citizens.—As DA, Kamala was known for being soft on crime, while San Francisco had the highest murder rate in a decade as Kamala became the ‘model’ for Soros-backed prosecutors across the country.—Drug cartels haven’t been ‘shut down,’ they’ve ravaged our communities with deadly drugs flowing across the border in unprecedented numbers.”
One day later, Trump himself said, “Kamala Harris is the Weakest Presidential Candidate in History on Crime.” Echoing these themes, JD Vance used an appearance in Wisconsin to remind his listeners that Harris is on record as wanting to defund the police. He repeated the tried-and-true Republican line, accusing her of not “backing the blue” and being soft on crime.
At this point, it is not clear how important the crime issue will be when people go to the polls or whether it will move independent voters one way or the other.
A Gallup survey taken last November found that while “Sixty-three percent of Americans describe(d) the crime problem in the U.S. as either extremely or very serious, up from 54% when last measured in 2021…far fewer, 17%, say the crime problem in their local area is extremely or very serious.”
Moreover, Gallup notes that only “3% name it as the most important issue facing the country.” That pales in comparison to 1994, “when an average of 42% of Americans…named crime as the most important problem facing the U.S., making it the top overall problem that year…. Crime stayed a prominent issue in ensuing years, with no less than 10% mentioning it between 1995 and mid-2000.”
Other polls show that most Americans now prefer to focus on crime prevention rather than harsh punishment. “A prevention-first approach to safety, which involves fully funding things that are proven to create safe communities and improve people’s quality of life, like good schools, a living wage, and affordable housing” was more popular than traditional tough-on-crime policies.
Younger voters are “especially likely to support candidates who favor crime prevention tactics….” And while Black and Latino voters say that crime is a big problem where they live, “The majority of these same voters are more likely to prefer ‘crime prevention’ strategies over ‘tough on crime’ policies.”
Kamala Harris seems uniquely qualified to understand and respond to the crime problem in ways that do not simply reiterate the tired solutions that have not worked in the past. She also can use her credibility as a former prosecutor to lead the way in fighting crime by addressing its causes.
As the 2024 campaign goes on, Harris will have an opportunity to show that she can be tough on crime, but not on Donald Trump and JD Vance’s terms.