Harris has a muddied track record except on abortion

The day after President Joe Biden announced he would no longer seek reelection, Vice President Kamala Harris secured the support of enough delegates to become the party’s nominee at the convention in August. So far, 254 out of 263 congressional Democrats and Democratic governors have endorsed Harris, whose campaign set a new fundraising record only hours after she confirmed she will stand for the nomination.

The daughter of an Indian cancer researcher and Jamaican economist, Harris earned a law degree at the University of California, San Francisco. Soon after, she started her first job working in the Alameda County prosecutor's office where she specialized in prosecuting child sexual assault cases. Harris was elected district attorney for San Francisco in 2002, after berating her opponent for his low rate of felony convictions. She served two terms before voters elected her as California attorney general in 2010 and then to the U.S. Senate in 2016.

Harris kicked off her campaign by traveling to Milwaukee on Tuesday. She is expected to repeat Biden campaign talking points on immigration and criminal justice, while landing further to the left on the issue of abortion.

Crime and punishment

Harris spent the majority of her career in the criminal justice field, most notably serving two terms as San Francisco district attorney from 2002 to 2010, when she was elected California attorney general. She remained in that role until her election to the U.S. Senate in 2016. Zack Smith, a senior legal fellow with the Heritage Foundation, said Harris has tried to paint herself as part of the progressive prosecutor movement over the past several years.

“Many on the left would not consider her to be part of this movement,” he said. “She essentially has pleased no one with her positions on criminal justice.”

Those positions have varied over the years, such as when she refused to pursue the death penalty for a suspect accused of gunning down a police officer in 2004 but later defended California’s use of the capital punishment in court. When California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a moratorium on executions in 2019, then-Sen. Harris called for the federal government to do the same.

While attorney general, Harris supported criminal justice reforms such as the creation of a program offering to wipe the records of nonviolent offenders if they completed a rigorous vocational training program. She also created a dashboard aimed at increasing transparency about arrests, in-custody deaths, and assaults on police officers and spearheaded the first-of-its-kind law enforcement training on implicit bias.

But she drew backlash from left-wing advocacy groups for championing legislation that punished parents with jail time or fines if their children habitually missed school. Harris also received criticism for refusing DNA testing to a death row inmate until a New York Times piece exposed the trial.

As senator, she co-sponsored legislation named after George Floyd, the Minnesota man whose death sparked anti-police protests in 2020. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act would have reformed the qualified immunity system protecting police from liability and banned chokeholds, no-knock warrants, and created a national police misconduct registry, among other things. Harris has said she supports independent investigations of police shootings, though she didn’t champion a similar California bill that would have put her office in charge of investigating such cases.

Harris also did an about-face on marijuana legalization. Though she opposed legalizing the drug in California in 2010, Harris changed her tune as a senator in 2019: “It is past time to end the failed war on drugs, and it begins with legalizing marijuana.” The Biden administration began the process of reclassifying marijuana as a less-addictive illegal drug in May.

Abortion

When Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America spokeswoman Emily Davis learned Biden had endorsed Harris for the Democratic nomination, she braced for an escalation in pro-abortion rhetoric and proposals.

“American women and babies lose if she’s in office, because she will not stop,” Davis said. “She knows whom she’s beholden to financially. She is the preferred candidate of the abortion lobby.”

In his most recent State of the Union address, Biden danced around the term “abortion” with euphemisms such as “restoring Roe” and “reproductive rights.” One pro-abortion advocacy group noted that it took the administration 224 days to use the word abortion in a notable public statement. Harris has no such qualms.

The vice president has spoken at more than 90 pro-abortion events in 21 states since the Supreme Court threw out Roe v. Wade in 2022. Her Fight For Reproductive Freedom tour included a visit to a Planned Parenthood facility in Minnesota in March—the first time a U.S. president or vice president has ever visited an abortion center while in office, the White House said.

Davis summed up Harris’ stance as “rabidly pro-abortion” and noted her position marks a shift in the Democratic Party’s attitude toward the issue. “It was only a few short years ago the Democrats used to say that all abortions are unwanted, tragic, need to be rare.” she said. “Under Kamala Harris, you’re now going to cement this ‘shout your abortion,’ abortion-on-demand type of stance.”

As California attorney general, Harris aggressively prosecuted David Daleiden, the pro-life activist whose undercover investigations exposed Planned Parenthood’s illegal profit from the sale of aborted babies’ body parts. Planned Parenthood leaders denied the accusations and accused Daleiden of violating state law by filming without their knowledge.

Harris ordered a raid on Daleiden’s home in 2015, the same week that Planned Parenthood’s political action committee donated to her U.S. Senate campaign, Daleiden’s attorneys noted. That year, Harris also promoted state legislation that forced pregnancy centers to refer clients to facilities that provided abortions, which the Supreme Court eventually struck down as unconstitutional.

Xavier Becerra, who is now the U.S. secretary of health and human services, succeeded Harris as California attorney general and charged Daleiden with 15 felony counts. A trial in the case is still pending.

In the Senate, Harris twice co-sponsored the Women’s Health Protection Act that would supersede state laws to guarantee a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy at any point if a physician agrees it endangers her health or life. Harris also voted against a bill protecting babies from abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy and rejected a measure that would have ensured abortion survivors receive medical care.

As vice president, Harris has not indicated whether she would support any specific limit on abortion, evading the question for almost four minutes in an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation last September.

Davis believes Harris’ radical abortion positions won’t resonate with most voters. A Gallup poll in May 2024 found only 35 percent of Americans think abortion should be legal in any case, while 50 percent believe it should be legal only under certain circumstances.

“The majority of Americans are not anywhere near her stance on abortion,” Davis noted. “Americans want limits on abortion. They do not agree with late-term abortion. They certainly don’t agree with no limits on all-trimester abortions.”

Immigration

As illegal border crossings ramped up after Biden took office, the president tasked Harris with leading his administration’s Root Causes Strategy to mitigate the main drivers of migration to the United States from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

“Some of that was related to gang violence. And some of it was related to corruption,” said Julia Gelatt, the associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, adding that the post-pandemic economy also spurred the influx. She pointed out that Harris does not oversee immigration policy and enforcement at the southern border, which is the job of the secretary of homeland security.

So far, Harris has secured more than $5 billion in private investments for the so-called Northern Triangle region and led diplomatic efforts to combat corruption in the three countries.

But crossings continued to rise. “We’ve seen a real diversification in who’s coming to the U.S.-Mexico border,” Gelatt said. “They’re coming from further afield.” Today, Chinese migrants are one of the fastest growing demographics at the southern border.

Border Patrol encountered a record 250,000 illegal immigrants in December 2023, which surpassed another of the administration’s all-time highs when agents encountered 224,000 migrants in May of 2022.

Under mounting pressure to thwart illegal crossings, Biden announced a policy in June prohibiting immigrants who cross between ports of entry from asking for asylum once illegal crossings top an average of 2,500 for seven days in a row. Gelatt said Harris will likely continue the president’s crackdown while also championing the creation of legal pathways such as Biden’s temporary parole programs and the CBP One app, which allows immigrants to make an appointment to request asylum at a port of entry.

“Vice President Harris’ record only tells us so much. She was in very particular roles,” Gelatt noted. “What’s been happening in the Biden administration is probably the most predictive of what she’ll do.”