Maybe Timing Is What Plagues Kamala Harris Most of All

By the old political playbook, Kamala Harris did everything right. She went to law school and worked as a prosecutor across various offices in California, making her way toward the top: district attorney of San Francisco, then attorney general of the state of California. In 2016, as Americans were voting Donald Trump into office, Californians put Kamala Harris in the Senate. Less than three years later, she was running for president.

Then it all seemed to go wrong. Her campaign fizzled before it could gain any real momentum. Stories leaked out about how it had been in disarray from the start. Harris, once an incredibly promising potential star, seemed to have flamed out.

Despite what ought to be a solid recovery—Harris is vice president, after all—she’s never quite captured the attention, let alone the support, of Americans broadly or even Democrats specifically. Part of that is a Kamala Harris problem: She’s more comfortable asking questions than answering them; her notorious “word salads” make her a less-than-compelling public speaker. Part of it is a timing problem: She ran for president as a former prosecutor at a moment when skepticism of law enforcement was arguably at an all-time high. And part of it is a voter problem: While it’s too pat to write off Harris’ lack of popularity as simply the outcome of racism and sexism, it’s also tough to compare Harris’ trajectory to that of, say, Joe Biden and not conclude that at least some of the problem is racism and sexism.

Two recent profiles of Harris, one in the Atlantic and one in the New York Times, thoroughly illustrate these weaknesses, along with the general sense that she’s MIA. This is despite the fact that she is doing quite a bit behind the scenes, though sometimes she’s been assigned pretty undesirable tasks, and sometimes she’s just been bigfooted by Biden. Both pieces paint a picture of a woman who feels besieged and surveilled and unfairly criticized; who is more comfortable in the analytical space of question-asking and solution-finding and less at ease trying to connect her personal story to a mass audience; who hasn’t quite figured out how to navigate the reductively termed “identity politics” that have defined her ascent (has anyone?).

The truth is that the ground shifted under Harris’ feet. “When I was in law school, twenty years ago, prosecution was a form of public service that was thought to carry little controversial baggage,” Harvard professor Jeannie Suk Gersen wrote in the New Yorker in 2020. “Marked as neither liberal nor conservative, it was also an all-purpose route for young people who aspired to political or judicial positions.” The lawyer-to-politician pathway is so well established that every Democratic president in the past three decades has held a law degree, and many prominent liberal politicians have been not only lawyers but prosecutors. Bill Clinton and John Kerry were prosecutors; so were Sonia Sotomayor and Merrick Garland. For a politically ambitious young person in the 1990s and 2000s, working as a prosecutor no doubt seemed like a safe and respectable path. For Harris in particular, it may have seemed like a particularly beneficial one. She is a Black woman, after all, who came up within Black institutions—a multiethnic community in the Bay Area, then her college years at the historically Black Howard University—and no doubt understood that she would have to make herself palatable to a largely white power structure, and that would require proving she wasn’t a radical.

For a long time, it worked. Harris holds the distinction of being “first” in a long list of roles: first Black vice president, first South Asian vice president, first female vice president, first Black attorney general of California, first South Asian attorney general of California, first female attorney general of California, first elected Black female district attorney in California, first South Asian U.S. senator. (She was also only the second Black female U.S. senator.)

When she ran for president in 2020, though, a racial reckoning was underway. The mass protests against police brutality were some of the largest in history; by some calculations, Black Lives Matter was the largest social movement in the U.S., with 26 million Americans telling Kaiser Family Foundation pollsters that they had turned out to protest. Law enforcement— primarily cops, but prosecutors too—became the target of much of that rage. Even some Republicans seemed to rethink their long-standing tough-on-crime politics, and advocated against harsh sentencing for nonviolent offenders and in favor of programs they said could reduce recidivism. Kim Kardashian visited Donald Trump in the White House and successfully lobbied him to free several women serving lengthy sentences for nonviolent crimes. “Defund the Police” was soundly rejected by Republicans and never embraced by mainstream Democrats either, but liberal politicians were also generally loath to disavow it and risk alienating their progressive base.

At the same time, Democrats remained fractured after the 2016 election debacle, when the primary race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders had ripped open intraparty fault lines, then the general election between Clinton and Trump exposed America’s deep and pervasive misogyny. Many Democratic voters wondered, even four years later, if a woman could beat Trump at all, or if the country was simply too sexist, and the stakes of a second Trump term too high, to take that risk again.

This is the landscape onto which Harris, who long billed herself as a “top cop” of California, walked.

Many once-promising politicians find themselves in the right place at the wrong time, and that was certainly part of Harris’ problem. But the bad-timing theory is partly undercut by the reality that Biden won the Democratic nomination and the presidency in the same exact period. Biden was never a prosecutor, but he did pen the 1994 crime bill widely believed to have fueled the scourge of mass incarceration. Tellingly, in 2016, Hillary Clinton also faced widespread reproach for her support of the legislation at the time, even though she had been first lady and had neither written the law nor had the power to vote on it; her primary opponent Sanders had actually voted for the bill but was generally spared the attacks. So, even though all of these politicians—Biden, Clinton, Sanders, Harris—have expressed at least some regret for their tough-on-crime pasts, it’s worth noting that the women among them have faced much more scrutiny and shouldered much more blame.

The Harris-Biden comparison is in many ways an instructive one. Because, honestly, neither is a particularly compelling speaker, and both are known for their sometimes-incoherent answers. Both have tough-on-crime pasts and have allowed their politics to shift along with the times. Both took safe and well-established routes to political power. Both were “identity politics” candidates, Biden long branding himself the avatar of the working-class white man from America’s forgotten middle, and Harris a Black woman embodying the most-consistent and most-overlooked Democratic voters.

Not only that: Both assumed their roles as vice president in part because of their identities; it’s just that Harris’ is much more often remarked upon. There’s little question that Barack Obama believed having a moderate white man with blue-collar appeal as his running mate would benefit his campaign, the same way Biden later believed having a Black woman with female-voter and voter-of-color appeal would benefit his. The difference is that the white-man model was a familiar one—after all, every single vice president up until that point had been a white man—and so was framed less as “identity politics” than “the best guy for the job” (without much questioning as to why the job always went to a guy). Harris didn’t enjoy that benefit, and so her ascent to the vice presidency is often treated as somehow less earned, or less legitimate, than her predecessors’.

One big difference between Harris and Biden is that Harris’ status as so many “firsts” also meant that voters pinned hopes and expectations on her that rarely attach to men like Biden. When she failed to meet those hopes and expectations, the ire she faced was sharper—a fair outcome when she made promises she didn’t keep, but less fair when the expectations were more about who she was than anything she ever said or did. Harris needed to be many things: a Black woman who represented the interests of a diverse community for which voter opinion and activist goals are not always aligned; an advocate for racial justice and feminism to appeal to the many motivated Democratic voters sick of Trump and the white male hegemony he represented; and a nonthreatening moderate who, despite being a Black woman, wouldn’t scare off swing voters and moderates who might be considering switching their votes away from Trump. Joe Biden just had to be Joe Biden.

Harris’ political career didn’t exactly stall out. But she’s a notably quiet vice president. Press coverage of her is minimal, with the exception of conservative media, in which she’s routinely pilloried in often racist and sexist ways. Few people, even those immersed in politics, are able to point to anything Harris has actually done in the role. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, she has pushed harder than Biden for abortion rights and emphasized the importance of abortion as an election-winning issue. But she’s been far from the face of the movement. Even one of her early selling points—she’s young, and Biden is old—has been turned against her, with Republicans warning that a vote for Biden is actually a vote for a future President Harris. Harris, for her part, doesn’t offer much of a response, even though she is indeed asking to again be second in line to the oldest president in history. It’s obvious why she’s staying mum: Responding to concerns about Biden’s age cedes the point that his age might be a concern, arguably an unfair gotcha in an election in which the presumptive Republican nominee will also, should he win, be an octogenarian president. But it also means that Harris is losing the rare chance to make a second impression upon the American people.

The election of Biden over Trump was a triumph of democratic values over autocratic ones, and a moment in which Democratic voters across the moderate-to-left spectrum joined together to vote out one of the most dangerous presidents in American history. But Harris has also served as vice president at a moment of retrenchment. Support for Black Lives Matter has hit record lows. American women were dealt a stunning blow when abortion was, overnight, no longer deemed a constitutional right. Republicans are again running on a tough-on-crime agenda. Feminist and racial justice movements are in retreat. And Harris seems to be retreating along with them.