Mother Jones illustration; Eric Risberg/AP, Steven Hirsch/New York Post/AP
A familiar script echoed throughout the United Center arena on Monday night: “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate but equally important groups. The police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders.”
It was an obvious nod to the long-running television show, Law & Order, and the crowd at the Democratic National Convention laughed in recognition. It was also clear why the campaign created this video: Kamala Harris’ history as a prosecutor is a tantalizing contrast to former president Donald Trump, who has been found guilty on 34 felony charges. “I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” Harris recently said at a rally. “I know Donald Trump’s type.”
It’s a 180-degree turn from her 2020 presidential bid when her prosecutorial role was something of a liability. Amid a national reckoning about murders of Black men at the hands of police, a common refrain from some on the left was “Kamala is a cop.” While that critique wasn’t the only thing that hamstrung her campaign, it was something she felt the need to address with a thorough criminal justice reform plan, one that she hasn’t re-circulated this time around.
Two things have changed in four years. First, public safety concerns have surged. Though crime has receded from its most recent peak from 2020-2021, fear-mongering about it is a tried-and-true tactic. Republicans have spent $130 million in the first five months of 2024 on ads focused on crime and immigration. Second, and more importantly, the law finally caught up with Trump. In May, a jury of his peers found him guilty on 34 felony counts for the hush money he paid to adult film actress Stormy Daniels while he was trying to win the 2016 campaign. Another judge ruled him liable for sexual assault. Yet another judge found him liable for fraud in his New York business dealings. The Harris campaign’s mission is to quell public safety concerns and remind voters of Trump’s record in the most damning way possible.
At the same time, the campaign has a small window of time to introduce Harris to voters. Her background as a prosecutor is an appealing vehicle for imbuing Harris with a key set of traits: being tough, standing up to bullies, caring about people, and caring about the rule of law. To quickly define both candidates, a quippy prosecutor-versus-felon message has emerged.
But criminal justice reformers are raising questions about the effectiveness of this dichotomy, and its morality.
“It’s not a winning strategy, and it’s not the sure-fire sort of like zinger that Democrats think it is,” says Insha Rahman, the director of Vera Action, which advocates for criminal justice reform. “Calling Trump a convicted felon doesn’t really stick on him because he doesn’t fit the trope of what a convicted felon is, because it is a dog whistle—it is linking race and criminality.”
Rahman was at the convention to give a talk on the right way to approach both Harris’ past as a prosecutor and Trump’s current status as an unrepentant fraudster. Mother Jones sat down with her—literally, on the floor outside a conference room—to discuss the most effective way campaigns can run on public safety. After a scheduling conflict, Rahman’s panel had been canceled, but she didn’t seem to take offense. “The fact that the Democratic Party is willing to have these conversations here in the belly of the beast, to me, feels like we should be optimistic.”
In Rahman’s telling, both political parties still adhere to the tough-on-crime political playbook from the 1980s. Over the past two years, Vera Action has been pushing the Democratic Party to throw out this blueprint. Not just because it’s the right thing to do when it comes to dismantling racist stereotypes, but also because, Rahman believes, it’s the best way to win an election.
For two years now, Rahman and Vera Action have poured significant resources into polling around effective criminal justice messaging. They have landed on what they believe is the strongest message for either party—shifting the focus from crime to safety and justice. “You actually need to own this issue, own safety, because it is a winning issue for you, and talk about it with the values that voters care about, which is safety and justice,” she tells Democrats. “The reaction we get when we talk to politicians is, ‘I don’t believe that’s right. How could that possibly be right?’ The incredulity is palpable.”
The party has shown an interest in her work. Vera Action has presented its findings to party officials in over 200 briefings, according to Rahman. Her message for the Democrats now is to rewrite the prosecutor-versus-felon frame. “If Kamala Harris says ‘I’m for the people, and here’s what I stand for, which is safety and justice,’ and contrasts that with ‘Donald Trump is only out for himself,’ that is actually the most winning statement,” she says. “It’s a way that Kamala Harris can use the prosecutor background to actually lean in and say what she stands for, and create a values contrast against Trump.”
Rahman’s panel may have been canceled but her message seems to be catching on. The effort to push this version of Harris’ record comes through in the videos sprinkled throughout the convention’s televised programming. In a segment on Monday, the campaign shared an anecdote about Harris standing up to a bully in kindergarten, connecting a drive to “stand up to the bully” and “stand up for what is right” and “her calling” to be a prosecutor.
Each evening in Chicago, speakers have added nuance to the portrayal of Harris as a prosecutor. On Wednesday night, Lateefah Simon, a congressional candidate in California who worked with Harris when she was the San Francisco district attorney, portrayed Harris as a compassionate prosecutor. “She wanted to get to the root cause of a broken criminal justice system,” Simon said.
Simon was followed by Harris’ brother-in-law, Tony West, the top lawyer at Uber and one of Harris’ longtime political advisors. West portrayed Harris as dedicated to the people unjustly swept up into the criminal justice system with the story of an innocent woman who would have spent a weekend in jail if Harris hadn’t called the judge on a Friday afternoon to get her out. “She wondered, does this woman work weekends? Would she lose her job? Does she have young kids at home?” West said. “That’s what it means to stand for the people.”
On the final night of the convention, four members of the Exonerated Five, formerly called the “Central Park Five,” addressed the convention. They were imprisoned for a heinous crime they did not commit. Famously, Trump took out full-page newspaper ads calling for their execution, and has never apologized. Their presence clearly aligned the unfair dragnet of the criminal justice system on Black men with Trump, not Harris.
Pollster Roshni Nedungadi believes the campaign’s treatment of Harris’ background is effective. “What we’ve been doing is testing pieces of her accomplishments, and particularly what she’s been able to accomplish as district attorney and attorney general in California,” says Nedungadi, founding partner of HIT Strategies, which focuses on polling young voters, women, and people of color. “Just introducing small pieces of information about her bio increases her favorability by almost 50 percent.” Introducing voters to Harris’ Back on Track program, which she initiated in California to reduce recidivism, increased her favorability among voters of color by 52 percent, a HIT Strategies poll found.
“Public safety is going to be one of the big issues in this election cycle,” Nedunghadi continued. “So showing how she is equipped to handle public safety concerns is really validating, especially as a contrast to Donald Trump.”
Rahman notes that the most progress comes from Harris herself. “It’s actually rare, when VP Harris is on the campaign trail, to just reduce Donald Trump to a convicted felon,” she says. Notably, in Harris’ remarks on Thursday night, the word felon was absent, and her message echoed Rahman’s exhortations for a contrast in values. But the campaign and its surrogates are frequently using the word “felon” to brand Trump.
“The term ‘felon’ doesn’t really get at the nuance of what people are upset about,” says Joshua Hoe, a formerly incarcerated host of the Decarceration Nation podcast and policy manager at Dream.org. To Hoe, what angers people is that Trump “doesn’t take responsibility for anything that he does. He’s been more or less flouting that he violates the rules and the laws for years and years and never has any consequences while everyone else does. That’s why a very large number of people are actually upset.”
At a Thursday panel session exploring how Democrats can reach “unseen Black men,” a convention-goer asked the event’s host how to convince former “felons” to participate in elections.
Mondale Robinson, the founder of the Black Male Voter Project and the mayor of Enfield, North Carolina, offered a gentle correction: not felons, but “justice-impacted individuals.”
He went on to criticize Democrats’ embrace of framing the 2024 election around policing. The phrasing, he said, is an attempt to calm white voters’ fears about crime without “considering the harm that it’s going to do” to Black Americans, who are five times more likely to end up in state prisons than their white counterparts. It is a strategy, he says, that further alienates an untapped voting bloc of millions of Black people and others impacted by unjust policing.
“We need to take a break from these same media consultants we’ve been using forever, and switch up and rethink what it means to talk to voters that we’ve never talked to before,” Robinson said.
Other criminal justice reform activists share his concerns. Sheena Meade, CEO of the Clean Slate Initiative, said she was so “shocked” by the incessant use of the word “felon” as a stand-alone pejorative that she tore up the speech she planned to give at an NAACP event in Chicago and wrote a new one.
“We have to stop perpetuating this harmful rhetoric that draws on decades of fear-mongering and dehumanizes people with a record,” she said. “This kind of language impacts 72 million people, mostly adults, in the US—including me.”
To be sure, Trump is a felon. There are 34 guilty charges to prove it—and he is accused of the far more serious crime of trying to steal the 2020 election, among other infractions. But, as champions of restorative justice and prison reform, these advocates suggest that Democrats focus on Trump’s refusal to take accountability for his crimes, rather than the commission of them.
The advocates maintain they aren’t trying to sink the Harris campaign. People can support a presidential candidate and still want them to do better.
“Honest dialog about messaging should not be seen as an attack on the party, or the party’s candidates,” said Hoe, “but should be seen as an attempt to better ensure its messaging lives up to its ideals.”