A familiar script It resonated throughout the United Center arena Monday night: “In the criminal justice system, people are represented by two separate but equally important groups: the police, who investigate crimes, and the district attorney, who prosecutes criminals.”
It was an obvious reference to a long-running TV show. Law and OrderAnd the Democratic National Convention crowd laughed in approval. It was also clear why the campaign made the video. Kamala Harris’s track record as a prosecutor stands in contrast to former President Donald Trump’s, who was convicted of 34 felonies. “I’ve dealt with all kinds of abusers,” Harris said at a recent rally. “I know the type of Donald Trump is.”
It’s a far cry from her 2020 presidential bid, when her role as a prosecutor was somewhat of a liability. Amid a national reckoning over the killings of black men by police, some on the left have said, “Kamala is a cop.” That criticism wasn’t the only thing that hampered her campaign, but she felt she had to address it with a plan for a thorough criminal justice reform, and she didn’t circulate it again this time.
“This is not a winning strategy, and it is not as foolproof as the Democrats think it is.”
Two things have changed in four years. First, concerns about public safety have skyrocketed. Crime has receded from its most recent peak in 2020-2021, but stoking fear about it is a tried and tested strategy. Republicans spent $130 million on ads focused on crime and immigration in the first half of 2024. Second, and more importantly, the law has finally caught up with Trump. In May, a jury of his peers found him guilty of 34 felony counts of conspiracy to commit hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels as he was trying to win the 2016 election. Another judge found him liable for sexual assault. Another judge found him liable for fraud in a New York business deal. The mission of the Harris campaign is to calm concerns about public safety. and It’s an attempt to remind voters of Trump’s actions in the harshest way possible.
At the same time, the campaign has a short window of time to introduce Harris to voters. Her background as a prosecutor is an attractive way to give Harris the core qualities of toughness, standing up to bullies, caring for people, and caring for the rule of law. In order to quickly define the two candidates, a clever message emerged: prosecutors versus criminals.
But criminal justice reformers question the effectiveness and morality of this dichotomy.
“This is not a winning strategy, and it is not as foolproof as the Democrats think it is,” said director Insha Rahman. Vera Action, which advocates for criminal justice reform, says, “Calling Trump a convicted criminal doesn’t work for him because he doesn’t fit the metaphor of a convicted criminal. It’s like a dog whistle. It links race to crime.”
Raman attended the convention Let’s talk about Harris’s past as a prosecutor and the right approach to Trump’s current status as an unrepentant conman. Mother Jones With her—literally on the floor outside the conference room—we discussed how to most effectively run a public safety campaign. Rahman’s panel was canceled due to scheduling conflicts, but she didn’t seem offended. “The fact that the Democrats are willing to have this conversation in the belly of the beast should make us optimistic,” she said.
According to Rahman, both parties still stick to a hard-line approach to crime. It’s a political playbook from the 1980s. For the past two years, Vera Action has been pressuring Democrats to abandon this blueprint, not only because it’s the right thing to do to dismantle racist stereotypes, but because Rahman believes it’s the best way to win the election.
For two years, Rahman and Vera Action have invested significant resources in polling on effective criminal justice messaging. They’ve found what they believe is the most powerful message for any party: shifting the focus from crime to safety and justice. She tells Democrats, “You really need to own this issue and own safety, because that’s a winning issue for you. And you need to talk about safety and justice, the values that voters care about.” “When we talk to politicians, the response we get is, ‘I don’t think that’s right. How can that be right?’ It’s clear that they can’t believe it.”
“Public safety is going to be one of the big issues this election cycle, so it makes a lot of sense for her to show that she’s prepared to address public safety issues, especially in contrast to Donald Trump.”
The party has taken an interest in her work. Vera Action has presented its findings to party leaders in more than 200 briefings, Rahman said. Her message to Democrats is to rewrite the prosecutor-versus-criminal framework. “If Kamala Harris says, ‘I’m working for the people, and what I represent is safety and justice,’ and contrasts that with, ‘Donald Trump is only out for himself,’ that’s actually the most compelling statement,” she said. “That’s how Kamala Harris can use her background as a prosecutor to really say what she represents and create a values contrast with Trump.”
Rahman’s panel may have been canceled, but her message seems to be getting through. The effort to push this version of Harris’s record is evident in videos sprinkled throughout the convention’s television programming. In one segment Monday, the campaign linked Harris’s “stand up to bullying” and “fight for what’s right” movement to her mission to become a prosecutor, sharing an anecdote about her standing up to bullying in kindergarten.
Each evening in Chicago, speakers added nuance to their portrayal of Harris as a prosecutor. On Wednesday night, Latifah Simon, a California congressional candidate who worked with Harris when she was San Francisco district attorney, described Harris as a compassionate prosecutor. “She wanted to get to the root of our broken criminal justice system,” Simon said.
Simon was followed by Harris’s brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s top lawyer and one of Harris’s longtime political advisers. West portrayed Harris as someone who is committed to those who have been unfairly dragged into the criminal justice system, telling the story of an innocent woman who would have spent the weekend in jail if Harris had not called the judge Friday afternoon to let her go. “She said, ‘Is this woman going to work on the weekend? Is she going to lose her job? Is she going to have young children at home?’” West said. “That’s what it means to stand up for people.”
On the final day of the convention, four members of the “Innocent Five,” formerly known as the “Central Park Five,” spoke at the convention. They were incarcerated for heinous crimes they did not commit. Trump famously took out full-page newspaper ads calling for their execution, and he never apologized. Their presence aligned Trump, not Harris, with the criminal justice system’s unfair treatment of black men.
Pollster Roshni Nedungadi believes the campaign’s treatment of Harris’s background has been effective. “What we’ve done is test some of her accomplishments, particularly as a district attorney and attorney general in California,” said Nedungadi, a founding partner of HIT Strategies, which polls young voters, women and people of color. “Just introducing a little bit of information about her history increases her favorability by almost 50 percent.” According to the HIT Strategies poll, introducing Harris’s Back on Track program, which she started in California to reduce recidivism, increased her favorability among voters of color by 52 percent.
“Public safety is going to be one of the big issues in this election cycle,” Nedungadi continued. “So it makes perfect sense for her to show that she’s prepared to address public safety issues, especially in contrast to Donald Trump.”
Rahman notes that the biggest advances have come from Harris herself. “It’s actually rare for Vice President Harris to reduce Donald Trump to a convicted criminal when she’s on the campaign trail,” she says. Notably, Harris’s remarks Thursday night omitted the word “criminal,” and her message echoed Rahman’s advice about contrasting values. But the campaign and its surrogates often use the word “criminal” to brand Trump.
“The term ‘criminal’ doesn’t really capture the nuance of what people are upset about,” said Joshua Hoe, a former inmate and policy manager at Dream.org who is on the Decarceration Nation podcast. To Hoe, what people are upset about is that Trump “isn’t taking responsibility for what he’s doing.” He’s broken rules and laws for years and has largely ignored them while everyone else has done it with no consequences. That’s why so many people actually “It’s frustrating.”
At Thursday’s panel session: One convention attendee, who was trying to figure out how the Democratic Party could reach the “invisible black man,” asked the event’s moderator how to convince ex-convict “felons” to run for office.
Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project and mayor of Enfield, North Carolina, proposed a milder modification: not criminals, but “individuals affected by justice.”
He criticized Democrats for framing the 2024 election around police. He said the rhetoric was an attempt to appease white voters’ fears of crime and did not take into account the “inflicted harm” on black Americans, who are five times more likely to be in state prison than whites. He said the strategy further alienates a large untapped voter base, made up of millions of black people and others who have been disproportionately affected by police misconduct.
“We need to take a break from the same media consultants we’ve been using and rethink what it means to talk to voters we’ve never talked to before,” Robinson said.
Other criminal justice reform activists share his concerns. Sheena Mead, CEO of the Clean Slate Initiative, said she was so “shocked” by the constant use of the word “criminal” as a singular, derogatory term that she ripped up a speech she was planning to give at an NAACP event in Chicago and wrote a new one.
“We must stop perpetuating this harmful rhetoric that is based on decades of fear-mongering and dehumanizing people with records,” she said. “This kind of language affects 72 million people in the United States, mostly adults, including me.”
Surely Trump ~is He is a criminal. He has 34 convictions to prove it, and he has been charged with much more serious crimes, including trying to steal the 2020 election, and other misdeeds. But as advocates for restorative justice and prison reform, these advocates suggest that Democrats focus on Trump’s refusal to take responsibility for his crimes, and not on the crimes he committed.
Advocates argue that they are not trying to sink Harris’s campaign. People can support a presidential candidate while also hoping that they will do better.
“Honest conversations about messaging should not be seen as attacks on the party or its candidates,” Ho said. “They should be seen as attempts to better ensure that messaging lives up to the party’s ideals.”
