On the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

SAN FRANCISCO — On the presidential campaign trail Kamala Harris has leaned into her prosecutor past, saying she protected children from sexual predators as a district attorney even as she glosses over other parts of the job that hurt her with progressives.

How successfully she can manage that tension could determine whether she can capture a broad base of voters in November: moderates who are worried about crime and liberals who distrust the criminal justice system.

The nuanced approach to the larger issue of crime the Harris team is considering carries political risk — even as Republicans waffle on how to attack a Democrat whom progressives once derisively nicknamed “Copala.”

Harris’ aides and allies are still refining the young campaign’s message on crime, but they argue her past record shows she was a middle-of-the-road prosecutor who supported some progressive criminal justice reform, while taking tough action on serious infractions.

“She’s very pragmatic,” said Scott Wiener, a Democratic state senator in California. “She has strong core values, but she’s not an ideologue. She wants the trains to run on time.” Wiener, a longtime Harris ally, volunteered on her 2003 campaign for San Francisco district attorney when she defeated a more progressive incumbent.

How voters perceive Harris’ public safety record could be crucial to shaping the election, as both parties try to appeal to swing-state voters frustrated with crime and urban decay. Harris will have to overcome decades of voters trusting Republicans more on the issue as Trump pushes the portrayal of California and other blue states as dystopian beds of lawlessness — even though many categories of reported crimes have fallen in recent years.

The GOP-led effort to rebrand Harris, from aggressive prosecutor to effete liberal, was illustrated in a tweet Wednesday from Trump campaign adviser Steven Cheung, who called her record on crime “SOFT AS CHARMIN,” a post that was embellished with emojis of toilet paper.

Wiener said the attack shows the Republican Party is worried she is an effective messenger on crime: “You have a prosecutor running against a crook, so they’re peeing their pants right now.”

The “Prosecutor versus Convicted Felon” narrative has quickly become a dominant theme that Harris and Democratic surrogates have used to hit Trump on the campaign trail.

Harris’ aides say her resume will help beat back one of the caricatures being crafted by the right — that she’s a soft-on-crime progressive who’s personally responsible for the rampant theft and open-air drug markets on the streets of San Francisco where she was once district attorney before becoming California attorney general. And the campaign will continue to remind voters of Trump’s first term, which ended with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — and his proposals to cut federal funding for police.

At the same time some Trump campaign supporters have also tried to highlight how the tougher parts of Harris’ record could alienate voters on the left. “She put a lot of Black men in jail for small stuff, small ball,” said California RNC National Committeemember Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco attorney and Trump ally.

Leaning into the “Kamala the Cop” persona that Harris tried to downplay during her first run for president when progressive reformers held sway in the Democratic Party is risky. The flip flop invites critics to redeploy the familiar charge that she puts political expediency over personal values.

“She’s always been pandering with her eye on the next prize,” Dhillion said in an interview. “I would call Kamala Harris an empty vessel, and that is scary because who’s going to pour their dollars and views into her next?”

Dhillion pointed to the fact that Harris embraced law and order rhetoric and even prosecuted people for marijuana possession as DA, but pivoted to a softer approach as a senator and during her 2019 presidential campaign.

Harris’ record on crime is hard to define in purely ideological terms. She was aggressive in sending people to prison for violent crimes and drug possession, a stance that continues to alienate some justice reform advocates who accuse her of perpetuating the mass incarceration of Black and brown people in the early 2000s.

Yet Harris was a vocal opponent of the death penalty and created diversion programs for non-violent drug and petty-theft offenders who accepted guilty pleas. And she later endorsed progressive DA’s like now-embattled George Gascón of Los Angeles County.

It’s an approach Harris outlined in her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer,” in which she calls for prosecutors to embrace a dual mentality: use tough enforcement tactics on the most violent criminals while, at the same time, adopting reform-minded programs to help lower-level offenders better their lives.

Harris is promoting her prosecutor roots on the trail after spending the last several months sharpening her message against Trump as a convicted felon.

Her law-enforcement resume wasn’t a major focus for her after joining President Joe Biden’s ticket in 2020, when the nation was reeling from the death of murder of George Floyd. But now, with Trump running again, after being found guilty on 34 felony counts himself, Harris’ aides believe her credentials bolster her authority on the issue. They also believe now is the time to highlight her credentials in a way she hasn’t been able to before.

“In those roles, 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,” Harris told a rowdy crowd at her campaign debut in Milwaukee this week. “So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”

But Trump campaign advisers say they are confident they can cast Harris’ record in a harsher light, arguing that voters across the nation will see her resume — while moderate by San Francisco standards — as extreme to people outside of the West Coast. Still, the GOP has struggled to hone its attack in the days since Harris became the Democratic frontrunner.

Some Republicans have cautioned the party about giving too much air to the left’s critiques of Harris. In a tweet this week, the conservative think tank America 2100, which is led by Sen. Marco Rubio’s former chief of staff, warned it’s a mistake for the party to “run to Kamala's left on crime.”

Lateefah Simon, a friend of Harris and a Democratic candidate for an Oakland House seat, burst into laughter over the phone when POLITICO asked her about the soft-on-crime characterization. Simon worked under Harris for nearly four years when she was San Francisco DA, and launched a division to support rehabilitated offenders.

“She’s tough. Her ideals were, ‘If you break a social contract, there needs to be accountability,’” said Simon, a progressive who is favored to win retiring Rep. Barbara Lee’s seat this fall. Simon said she occasionally disagreed with the hard edges of Harris’ policies.

But, Simon added, she also saw a softer side. Many times, she watched Harris embrace weeping mothers whose sons, often Black and Latino, were killed from gun violence in the 2000s.

“I would hear those wails from those mothers,” said Simon, who worked in an adjacent office. “It’s one of those moments where it’s like, ‘This woman really loves our people.’”

The Biden-Harris campaign had been playing offense on crime and immigration in recent months, in an effort to flip the script as Republicans seized on both issues. Biden, who endorsed Harris Sunday, has warned advisers that scenes of chaos at the border and crimes in cities could turn off independent and suburban voters. The White House was banking on the idea that voters would reward them for efforts to crack down on the border and boost spending on law enforcement.

In her new place atop the ticket, Harris too is expected to tout those policies despite her past fizzled efforts during the Biden administration to work with Central American countries to address the root causes of migration.

Whether voters buy into the message could also trickle down to swing races in largely blue states like California and New York that could determine which party controls the House next year.

Also on the ballot in California this November is a measure to roll back parts of a decade-old state initiative that reduced prison sentences for some low-level drug and theft crimes. Republicans have tried to cast Harris as an architect of that measure, known as Proposition 47, which reformed tough sentencing laws from the 1990s.

Harris, however, didn’t take a stance on Prop 47 when it was on the ballot during her tenure as attorney general in 2014, a move that infuriated some liberal Democrats. Republicans still argue the ballot summary her office prepared didn’t warn of the potential consequences.

National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Ben Petersen told POLITICO the party is eager to have a debate about crime on California’s November ballot — and to tie the top of the Democratic ticket to it.

“Kamala Harris would drag the nation down a dangerous path until everywhere looks like the worst of San Francisco,” he said in a statement.

On Sunday, President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, effectively kicking off one of the shortest campaigns in modern political history. With only three full months to go before Election Day, Harris has an ultra-compressed timeline in which to build a policy platform, refine her message and define herself as a candidate to voters.

How do you run a three-month campaign in an era when presidential campaigns have become yearslong affairs? We gathered three top campaign managers to ask just that. We spoke with Patti Solis Doyle, who ran Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential primary campaign; Robby Mook, who ran Clinton’s 2016 general election campaign; and Stuart Stevens, lead strategist in Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.

In an hourlong roundtable discussion, the three drew on decades of campaign experience to hash out how Harris should define herself in opposition to Trump; how she should attack rather than go on defense or respond if Trump resorts to racist and sexist attacks; what her path to 270 electoral votes might look like; and who her VP pick should be. On that last one, all seemed to point in the direction of one governor in a key battleground state. “If I were on the campaign and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro brought me half a point,” Mook said, “I really want that half a point, because that might be the half a point you win the state by.”

The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What should Kamala Harris do differently in this campaign than in her unsuccessful 2020 campaign?

Patti Solis Doyle: I feel kind of odd offering any advice because she seems to not really need it. The last 72 hours have been unbelievable in terms of rollout. She locked up the nomination. Within 36 hours, she got the delegates. She got the endorsements from Congress. She got the money. And her first events have been through the roof.

I think she’s doing it. I think she is being forceful in her prosecution of Trump. I think she’s offering a hopeful view of the future. I think she’s doing the politics right.

Robby Mook: Your question is interesting because my initial reaction is, a primary campaign and a general election campaign, particularly one only 14 weeks out, are just totally different. But she’s brilliantly set up here because the staff were hired; the fundraising apparatus is in place; the politics are done; the nomination is secured. It’s like she turned the first 10 months into two days.

There’s a paradox here. This is a really short campaign, and that is great, because she is rested. She is ready to go. I think time is often your enemy on these, particularly as a quasi-incumbent. But on the other hand, time is short, so the imperative is to lock in, first of all, who is she? And second of all, what is her vision?

I think she’s done a very good job rolling that out right out of the gate. But there’s a question about calcifying that and pushing it deep. And we know that these — they used to be called double-haters but I think they’re just persuadable-again or either-way voters — we know that they have the least information about her and they get their news disproportionately from social media. One advantage she really has that we didn’t have on the Clinton campaign, and I don’t think Joe Biden really had, is the internet is a really safe space for her right now. It’s a great safe space for people to express support for her. So that’s great.

But the Harris campaign has got to drive that advantage because we’re already seeing the GOP going on TV. It’s almost like it’s March 15th — it’s after Super Tuesday, she’s secured the nomination. What can happen? The incumbent, which in this case is Trump, is going to try to go in and define you right away. And the Harris team has got to resist that. They’ve got to have that strategy, get it on the air and drive it in. And that’s the test, I think, over the next month.

Stuart Stevens: I think I would challenge the premise of the question that she didn’t run a good campaign because she didn’t win. Because most people don’t win. And she did end up on the ticket, which is the next best thing you can do. She won a very tough race for attorney general. She’s vice president of the United States, and now she’s the Democratic nominee for president. So how far would she have gone if she was a good politician?

Defining the narrative

By virtue of her position as vice president, many voters still don’t actually know her. How should Kamala Harris define herself?

Robby Mook: I think the challenge for her is going to be there’s this really tricky dynamic with the electorate right now. On one hand, the economy is doing really well. And on the other hand, people, particularly the folks she needs to bring in to win this election, are really unhappy with the economy. They’re very on edge. And the world has become much more seemingly dangerous and volatile. And she’s sort of an incumbent, but not totally. So she’s going to have to really address head-on that agitation in the electorate, because it’s very easy for Trump to say, “If you don’t like the way things are, time for a change,” right? And while Trump’s policies caused inflation, he wasn’t president when the inflation that his policies caused came into effect. So I think that’s going to be the maze she’ll have to navigate.

Patti Solis Doyle: My first presidential campaign was Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. And for a lot of reasons, he didn’t actually get the nomination until very, very late into the primary process. Which meant we had a very short general election. And that was a blessing in many, many ways.

Stuart Stevens: I think this is a chance to really pose the question of, “Who are we?” To say that there are two competing visions of what America should be — a guy who wants to ban Muslims and says immigrants are murderers and rapists, or someone who embodies what the American dream is about.

I’ve always felt that when President Biden was still in this, that there had to be two things that needed to be accomplished that were critical to winning. One was that the Democratic candidate needed to represent the future. And it’s clear that the Harris campaign understands that. I mean, you’re running against a guy who’s against all mandatory vaccines in schools. So, like, that’s the pro-polio camp, the pro-whooping-cough camp, pro-measles. I think that’s a pretty small group. And the Democratic candidate needed to be the safe choice.

I think the model for this in a lot of ways is the Obama campaign in ’08. They did a magnificent job in setting it up so that when you voted for Barack Obama, it said something about who you were and what you wanted the country to be, not just who you wanted to be president. And I think that’s the challenge that Harris should run right into.

And I think the Trump campaign is completely ill-equipped to deal with this. Trump hates women, JD Vance hates women. They don’t know how to talk about women. And I think tonally, they’re going to be completely off as they have been in the past 72 hours.

Patti Solis Doyle: Robby and I have had the experience of trying to elect the first woman president of the United States and failing. With Hillary, she was predefined, and she came with a lot of baggage. Harris doesn’t have that burden. And it’s a real, real opportunity. And I couldn’t agree more with Stuart that they’re not going to know how to handle her. They’re just not going to know how to approach her, how to engage with her, how to define her. Hillary was a lot easier to do that with. And I think they’re not going to know what to make of her.

Attacking Trump’s weaknesses

 
What are the biggest vulnerabilities that you see in terms of how Trump will attack her? And is there anything specific in the Biden record that her campaign will want to avoid or should avoid?

Robby Mook: We’re seeing change elections everywhere around the globe right now. In Britain, it was from conservative to Labour, and in France, we saw the two poles against the center. In India, we saw change. So I do think they’re going to have the wind at their back on this question of change. I do think that’s an opportunity for Harris because I think she is her own person. She can both reach back to the accomplishments of the administration and talk about what’s worth protecting, but she can also propose a new direction. We’ve already seen that: She talked about pre-K and elder care and so on — new ideas that weren’t really associated with Biden.

I also just can’t emphasize enough how we’ve had so much change coming from the right via the Supreme Court, particularly the overturning of Roe v. Wade. So I think also this question of change is an opportunity for her to say there’s been a lot of really bad changes, and we need to push back on that. And we saw her doing that, just in the last two days.

Patti Solis Doyle: The two issues the Trump campaign is going to drive hard — and I would, too, if I were them — are the economy slash inflation slash cost of living and the border and immigration. It’s going to be very difficult for her to sort of disassociate herself from the Biden administration and the Biden record on those two issues, particularly the border because she was ostensibly put in charge of that early on in the administration.

But at the same time, I agree with Robby that she can pivot. She absolutely can pivot to her vision of the future. I think we’re going to see inflation get much better between now and the election.

The third issue that is very prominent is women’s reproductive rights. And she can just own that and really drive it all the way through the general election. So on the issues, I think she’s fairly well positioned. But ironically, this has been sort of an issue-less campaign thus far. This has been all about Biden being too old and Trump being a criminal. And we haven’t really talked about our vision for policy priorities, et cetera. I think Kamala will be able to pivot there as well.

Stuart Stevens: If I were on the Harris campaign, I would attack Donald Trump on his record with immigration. It was a total failure. Barack Obama deported more people than Trump. Trump said he was going to have Mexico pay for a wall. I would go in and say he’s the greatest failure that we’ve had. And that’s what the Biden administration handled. I would not defend; I would attack on that. But the bottom line is that if this is a referendum on immigration, it’s not going to be a great day for the Harris campaign. So you have to switch.

And if you look at that 100-day plan that the president rolled out in Michigan after the debate, which I thought was beautifully done and timed … and if you take Project 2025 and what Republicans were talking about at that convention … I mean, one tests about 80/20 to the good, and the other tests about 20/80 to the bad. So it’s not hard to take that 80/20 and run it against the 20/80. And do that all day. And I would attack, attack, attack. I think I’d run maybe one positive ad and the rest would be contrasts.

So what’s her strongest message here then? Is it the anti-Trump focus or is it pro-abortion rights? Is it something else? Change?

Stuart Stevens: To me, her strongest message is, “I am more like America than Donald Trump is,” which is true. Republicans keep getting into these culture wars, and they lose. They attack Nike and Colin Kaepernick. What happens? Nike makes $9 billion. They get in a fight with Disney? The happiness company? They’re sort of at war with the modern world, and I think you have to just bet on that. There’s more of her than there are of them. I would make that bet and take that bet.

Robby Mook: I think she’s going to need to talk to people’s pocketbooks at least somewhat. I think any presidential candidate ignores that at their peril. I think you’re going to start to hear her talking more about how Trump went in front of a bunch of oil executives and said, “You give my campaign $1 billion, I’ll give you whatever you want.” We’ll hear more about that, but also more about what she’s done for people. There’s a lot in the IRA — at least hundreds of thousands of jobs that have been created. I would put abortion in a special lane. I think that issue transcends in a way. It was such a rupture in our national policy. And it is so powerful that I think it deserves a special place in the messaging of the campaign.

On the other side of that coin, how hard should Harris be going after Trump? And how should she be responding to his more caustic attacks, particularly the ones that are going to have racist or sexist undertones, either from Trump or surrogates for his campaign?

Patti Solis Doyle: I think she should attack him and contrast with him every opportunity she has. Every day, 20 hours a day. In terms of how she reacts to his racist, sexist, misogynist attacks on her, I would just not even go there. Do not take the bait.

Robby Mook: I think Patti brings up an important point there, because I think sometimes when you do, it makes it about you. But she can have surrogates, certainly, push back on that.

On campaigns, there’s positive advertising and there’s negative advertising. I do think in many ways, this is shaping up to be a contrast campaign. It is not enough to just say, “Well, here’s what I think,” and then you wait. It’s really, “Here’s what I think, and here’s what the other person thinks, and here’s why I have a better deal.”

Stuart Stevens: Yeah, I mean, I think she just shrugs and says: “Is that all you got?” and just makes fun of it. That is a base play when they’re doing that. They’re basically telling jokes that they think are funny, that most people don’t think are funny, and you can’t make them think that it’s not funny. You just have to bet that most of the people don’t think it’s funny.

Patti Solis Doyle: I’m going to lose my Hillary card on this one. But Hillary was a very polarizing figure. So when Trump called her a nasty woman, half of the country was kind of like, “Oh, yeah, she kind of is,” and that’s not the case with Kamala Harris. She doesn’t have that sort of polarized perception from the American people. I think she can bring more people into the tent if he chooses to attack her in that way.

Gaming out a path to 270

I wonder if I could change directions a little bit here and talk a little bit about the Electoral College and the best map to 270 for Harris. One could argue that Harris has particular strengths that might reopen the Sun Belt path that seemed to be closed for Joe Biden. Am I off-base there?

Robby Mook: I do think there’s potential for the Sun Belt to open up a little bit. I think Arizona has remained in the hunt. I think the question was really more about Georgia and North Carolina and where they stood. And if Harris is able to drive up support with African American voters, that’s really key to pulling those states back in. To state the obvious, they’re so important because those states can replace losing, for example, in Wisconsin. But, and this is, to me, the key to the Electoral College: I don’t see a way that either candidate probably wins without winning Pennsylvania. It’s 19 electoral votes. I don’t see where else you get those. So I think we’re going to definitely see a focus on the so-called Blue Wall and on the Sun Belt. But gosh, if I were sitting in that campaign, Pennsylvania is a must-win.

Patti Solis Doyle: Almost immediately, with the Harris announcement, I think two things happened. One, it stopped the hemorrhaging. It was a tourniquet on all the support we were losing in the Blue Wall. The second thing she’s done is shore up the base and our coalition of Black people, brown people, young people, women. And by bringing those folks in — we won’t know until we see some credible polling in the next week or 10 days — but I believe strongly that we’re going to close the gap in those Rust Belt states as well, which gives us more paths to 270. It was very nerve-wracking to only have one path to 270 when we had Biden at the top of the ticket. And I think Harris, with whoever her VP selection is going to be, gives us more optionality and opportunity.

Stuart Stevens: Republicans have won Pennsylvania once since 1988. And that was with Trump. So I don’t think there’s anything that’s happened inside Pennsylvania politics that has made it more likely that Trump would win now. I think it’s the opposite. This Trump-like candidate ran for governor and got crushed. You have a very popular governor who seems to be pretty good at politics. Demographically, the state has not trended in a way that would be unfavorable, I think. And you have a very fractured Republican Party in that state. So I like the odds Democrats can win it.

How about from a campaign mechanics standpoint, within this compressed time frame, what doesn’t the vice president have time to do that a normal campaign would? What can’t she do now because of the nature of the time left?

Robby Mook: You could argue they lost some time in fundraising in July, and time matters for fundraising. But, gosh, I’d like to think that was made up for in the last few days when they broke $100 million. So I’m not concerned about that.

She has a staff in place. It was a prepared, capable campaign that had plenty of time to get set up. The DNC and the party were in good shape. She is vastly outmatching Trump on ground game right now. The only things I could point to is it would be nice to have more time to think about a VP, but I think the ones she’s looking at are excellent. And I just don’t think that’s really going to have much impact.

I don’t see a lot of downside, personally.

Patti Solis Doyle: I agree with you. She’s not starting from scratch; she inherited a campaign apparatus and structure. I don’t think she really has the burden of not having enough time. I like the sprint to Election Day from now until November. I think it works to her advantage.

The stakes of the veepstakes

Okay, let’s talk about vice presidential options. Who do you think has the biggest upside for Kamala Harris? And are there any prospective candidates out there who haven’t been mentioned that might have a catalytic effect?

Patti Solis Doyle: I think you’ve got to view it from the prism of what do you actually need? What are the goalposts that you need to be able to clear? First, obviously the person has to be able to do the job, should something happen. I think all the people that she’s looking at check that box. Then there’s who helps you electorally. I think all the people she’s looking at check that box. And then, there’s the chemistry. I don’t put a lot of stake in that just because the very nature of the relationship is that there’s just tension there, right? I mean, I don’t think Bill Clinton and Al Gore got along very well, and I don’t think Barack Obama and Biden got along very well. There’s just natural tension in that dynamic. Then there’s the balancing of the narrative. For Kamala in particular, I think you’re looking for someone who’s a little more moderate, who’s a little whiter, who’s a little maler. I think all the people on her list do that.

Robby Mook: We were talking about Pennsylvania being paramount to the math of the Electoral College. I’m in the camp that doesn’t believe the VP choice makes a whole lot of difference, but if I were on the campaign and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro brought me half a point, I really want that half a point, because that might be the half a point you win the state by, right? It was won and lost by so little in the last two cycles. So that I just find interesting. Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly to me is also interesting. Unfortunately, his wife was the victim of an assassination attempt. He is such a unique American. And his military service, being an astronaut. But any of the people being talked about I think would be very solid.

Stuart Stevens: You know, if you held a gun to my head and said who to pick, my heart would say Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. And my brain would say Shapiro.

Patti Solis Doyle: That’s what heart and head would say, too.
 

What it will take on Election Day

If you had to guess who wins the presidency, and you could have just one post-election data point to make that call, what would that data point be? I’m talking about, is it turnout in Philadelphia? In Detroit? Is it turnout in Madison? Is it TV spending? Is it fundraising? What would that one data point be that you’d want to have in making that call, if you could have only one?

Robby Mook: I would say Bucks County, Pennsylvania. If that’s just not where it needs to be, then that’s probably a pretty good bellwether.

Patti Solis Doyle: I’m shocked this is coming out of my mouth because two weeks ago, I was despondent, but I think Kamala Harris is going to win this election. And that’s because the double-haters now have an alternative. They don’t have to hold their nose and either vote for Trump or hold their nose and vote for Biden. They have an alternative that is pretty amazing. The way they shift in the battleground states is going to call it.

Stuart Stevens: The one data point I’d look at is the white vote. Trump has to get 58 or north of the white vote to have a chance in this race. His coalition was 85 percent white in 2020 in a country that is 60, 59 percent white — less so since we’ve been talking. If Trump gets 54 percent of the white vote, this thing is going to be a rout. He’s got to get closer to 60. There’s one dynamic I think we don’t focus on enough here: He lost by 7 million votes in 2020. He needs new customers. So where is he getting those new customers? And I don’t think he is. And I think that’s why he keeps getting stuck at this number. This guy has won one election in his life with 46.2 percent of the vote. Romney lost with 47.2 percent of the vote. He would have to crush numbers with white turnout. And I think he’s not because I think he’s going to lose the higher-educated white voters who would have voted Republican in a lot of local races and can’t stomach Trump.

Robby Mook: I need to mark the tape. I do believe that Harris will win, but Stuart brought up an important point here, which is back in the day, if there was exceptionally high turnout, that was really good for Democrats. And I think that equation is starting to change. And so, Stuart, I hadn’t thought about it this way until you said this, but I think his best source of new customers is turnout. And you were alluding to that.

I think that’s part of why he picked Vance. If on Election Day we’re seeing exceptionally high turnout, that’s a bellwether that’s helpful for Trump. We saw this in 2016; Florida looked like it was in the bag for Hillary going into Election Day. And then the turnout on Election Day was exceptionally high.

More people vote early now than in 2016. That really changed over Covid. But we need to be careful about making too many predictions before Election Day, because that in-person turnout is Trump’s secret weapon — if it exists for him, I don’t know. We have to assume the worst always until it’s over.

Stuart Stevens: It can’t be overemphasized what Trump has done gutting the RNC. There is no Trump organization out there. Of any magnitude. And they’re not going to create it. I just don’t know where he gets more white voters.

What is Trump’s biggest advantage against Harris right now?

Robby Mook: Inflation — that’s the drum that he’s going to beat. And as we all know, he opposed a very conservative bipartisan agreement on immigration and killed it for the express purpose of perpetuating what’s happening at the border. So those are two cudgels that he can use.

In this new era where particularly the kinds of voters that are harder to turn out are really getting their information and living their political life on social media. Trump’s superpower is marketing. I think it’s fraud, but it’s marketing, and he’s good at it. If he were to win — I don’t think he will but if he were — it’s going to be because he was able to turn people out just through this.

Even more important than the money that Harris raised over the last 72 hours was this explosion of online content and this community that’s been built around her, the memes about her, that you cannot buy, you cannot hire someone to create. It’s priceless. And so, my hope is that she will compete just as much as he can in that space.

Patti Solis Doyle: People aren’t happy. I think that’s his strongest advantage. If people aren’t happy, why are they unhappy? In presidential politics, it is always a referendum on the sitting president. I think that’s the advantage that Trump has. But we’ve just sort of switched it up 72 hours ago, so I think that very clear advantage on issues and the mood of the country is flipping on him a little bit.

Stuart Stevens: I’d say Trump’s greatest advantage is that there are still a lot of racists in America. For all the talk we have about how race impacts our politics, I don’t think we talk about it enough. In 1964, Goldwater got 7 percent of the Black vote. In 2020, Trump got 8 percent. That’s one point every 56 years. So, when I see these polls where, you know, he’s getting north of 14, 15 percent of the Black vote, I can’t tell you how many times and races with really good pollsters, I saw those numbers right up to the end of Republican races. But I can tell you how many times it happened. And that was never. So I’d take any of these polls, I would model it at 8 percent of the Black vote. I’d give him 34 percent of Hispanic vote. And that’s what’s going to happen. There still are a lot of racists in America. And this is going to be a referendum on that.

Here’s a lightning-round question: Do you expect we’ll have a presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump?

Robby Mook: I’m going to dive in and say yes, but it will be negotiated directly with the networks; that would be my guess.

Patti Solis Doyle: I hope so, because I think Harris will be very effective against Trump, and he’ll fall for some foolish traps. I think yes, because Trump won’t want to look like he’s dodging it.

Stuart Stevens: Yes. Almost absolutely. Donald Trump would come and appear at your kid’s birthday party if you invited the guy. He can’t say no. I wouldn't be surprised if there’s more than one debate.

Three years ago, Vice President Kamala Harris gave a pitch for the Biden administration’s Build Back Better agenda by highlighting ambitions to use federal dollars to make life easier for caregivers.

“For far too long, investments in care have dropped to the bottom of the priority list,” she said in a virtual town hall in October 2021. “It is time to make corporations pay their fair share and pass our agenda, because care cannot wait.”

As history would have it, those items did drop off the priority list and weren’t included in Democratic legislation that boosted clean energy and aimed to reduce prescription drug prices.

But with Harris’ late entry into the presidential race, that vision has been given a sudden bolt of electricity, and her 2021 pitch is a window into her potential economic agenda if she inherits the Oval Office.

“I think she will prioritize these issues in a more authentic and enthusiastic way than we’ve seen before,” said Vicki Shabo, a longtime care policy advocate at the left-leaning think tank New America.

This has the potential to set Harris apart from President Joe Biden in an important way. Biden focused his campaign efforts on convincing people that the economy is doing well, pointing to low unemployment and rising wages. But he spent little time at all talking about what else needs to be done over the next four years, even as he acknowledged that an affordability crisis is still weighing on people.

Notably, neither Donald Trump nor Biden ever answered a question about what they’d do to make child care more affordable in the disastrous debate that ultimately ended the latter’s presidential run.

That’s not to say the White House didn’t have plans of what they’d like to do — not just on care issues, but also in other areas like housing and universal pre-K. But very few voters were going to scroll through the president’s proposed budget to find it.

While the vice president hasn’t been a leading voice on economic issues, she’s consistently supported paid family and medical leave from her earliest days in the Senate.

She’s also advocated for more funding for child care facilities and been a vocal proponent of the administration’s push to enhance the child tax credit, after a pandemic-era expansion led to a dramatic reduction in child poverty. In her first appearances since her candidacy began on Sunday, she made reference to all of these policies, including in a pitch to teachers.

These are all parts of boosting what the Biden administration calls “the care economy,” which refers to the labor — often unpaid — done by people taking care of vulnerable populations like children or the elderly.

While any initiative faces long odds of clearing Congress — particularly while the politics of inflation puts greater pressure on elected officials to offset the cost of new spending with higher taxes on at least some portion of the electorate — it’s worth noting: Having someone in the White House with a penchant for these issues could shake up the politics and give them a fighting chance of being enacted.

There is a macroeconomic pitch to making child care more affordable. According to an annual survey conducted by the Federal Reserve, nearly 40 percent of unemployed mothers in their prime working years said child care responsibilities contributed to their decision to not have a paying job — reducing the available supply of workers.

But Harris doesn’t tend to speak in macro terms.

And beyond specific positions she’s taken, it feels hard to extrapolate what her views on any given issue will be, since she’s never really articulated an overarching policy vision.

Allies of Harris say her style isn’t revamping the entire system but rather looking for targeted solutions to problems that people — particularly disadvantaged people — face.

It’s a stark contrast with Trump, who had and still has much more enthusiasm about economic policy than any other 21st century president and talks regularly about policies like putting 10 percent tariffs on all imported goods or lowering the corporate tax rate further.

Harris tends to gravitate toward issues that are more granular; she’s been a vocal player in the Biden administration’s policies that are aimed at helping minority-owned businesses get access to capital or that would eliminate medical debt from people’s credit scores.

“One of the questions she always comes back to is ‘Do these policies give people more freedom, choices, and ultimately autonomy over their own lives?’” Rohini Kosoglu, who previously served as domestic policy adviser to the vice president and as chief of staff to Harris when she was in the Senate, told me. “She is fighting for Americans to be empowered.”

Whatever her precise platform, Democrats and allies are hoping she’ll make a renewed effort to sell a forward-looking agenda for the economy.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) agreed when I asked her about the Democrats’ economic messaging outside the House floor on Tuesday, ticking off three priorities immediately, which she called “the largest pain points”: health care, housing and child care.

“We really need to have a vision of the future,” she said. “And we need to talk about what we’re gonna do once the American people hand us the keys.”

Democrats have had a bright spot after several months of fretting about their electoral prospects: Their House candidates are flush with cash.

Both parties have sought to stockpile money as they’ve prepared for a heated fight for control of Congress, and incumbents on both sides have raised large amounts. But Democrats in particular — despite being battered and bruised from weeks of chaos — have seen marked success in fundraising.

Democratic challengers last quarter outraised their incumbent Republican opponents in 17 of the 29 GOP-held districts that either party considers competitive, according to a POLITICO analysis of Federal Election Commission data. In races with settled primaries, those Democratic challengers raised an average of $1.2 million — compared to a $965,000 average raised by the Republicans they’re looking to oust.

That fundraising advantage, revealed in FEC reports last week, was a rare glimmer of hope for Democrats facing tough battles for the White House and Senate. They need to gain just a few additional House seats to win back a majority, but Democrats have in recent weeks feared that President Joe Biden’s deep unpopularity would torpedo their chances.

Then Biden ended his bid, Vice President Kamala Harris stepped in and tens of millions of dollars began pouring into Democratic coffers. How much of that money ends up helping the dozens of battleground House races remains to be seen, and there’s no guarantee that jolt will continue through the cycle, especially as Republicans aggressively look to define Harris and tie down-ballot Democrats to her.

Republicans say they’re used to being outraised, but the fundraising gap has not grown big enough to worry them. Plus, the GOP incumbents benefit from larger war chests on average compared to their Democratic challengers.

But Democratic candidates and groups, warily breathing a sigh of relief, are emboldened by what they’ve seen in recent days.

“It’s the new beginning, different faces, fresh moment. That’s true in New Jersey, but it’s also now true nationally,” said Sue Altman, a first-time candidate running against Republican Rep. Tom Kean in New Jersey’s battleground 7th District. “For a while there, our campaign was providing hope when other places in the country hope was hard to find, and that’s including the presidential mess. I think now, however, it’s even more so the snowball is rolling down the hill because now there’s hope everywhere you look.”

Democratic challengers — but not Republican ones — are raising a lot of money

At the party committee level, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee outraised its Republican counterpart by $7 million last quarter. And more than a dozen non-incumbent Democrats brought in more than $1 million from April through June.

Many of those were repeat candidates and benefited from name recognition and fundraising infrastructure from their previous runs — but others, like Altman and Oregon state Rep. Janelle Bynum, who’s challenging Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, posted impressive hauls as first-time congressional candidates.

Four Democrats in Republican-held districts targeted by DCCC raised more than twice as much as their GOP opponents in the second quarter:

• Rudy Salas, who is challenging Rep. David Valadao (Calif.) in a district Biden won by 13 points in 2020;
• Adam Gray, who is challenging Rep. John Duarte (Calif.) in a district Biden won by 11 points;
• Josh Riley, who is challenging Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-N.Y.) in a district Biden won by 4 points;
• And Janelle Stelson, who will face Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) in a district Trump won by 4 points.

Salas, Gray and Riley all ran in 2022. Stelson, a former TV anchor, is running for the first time.
What makes the Democratic challengers’ strong fundraising particularly notable is that Republicans looking to take down Democratic incumbents in battleground districts did not show the same strength.

Across 34 swing districts Republicans are targeting or Democrats have said they’re actively protecting, only one incumbent, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas), was outraised — and he’s fending off a challenge from former Republican Rep. Mayra Flores, who held the seat in 2022 and 2023. In races where the primary is settled, the average Republican challenger raised $404,000, compared to $984,000 raised by the average incumbent Democrat.

The average Republican challenger had less than $500,000 cash on hand as of the end of June, compared to $2.5 million for Democratic incumbents.

There are still real challenges for Democrats

Democrats will still need to convert their strong fundraising into electoral wins, and they’ll continue to face real obstacles to doing so.

For one thing, Democratic challengers have some catching up to do when it comes to their cash reserves. That’s the money that will be important heading into the most active stretch of campaigning, and while Democrats have narrowed the gap in recent months, GOP incumbents continue to hold an advantage, with a bit shy of $2.7 million cash on hand on average compared to more than $1.9 million on average for Democratic challengers.

It’s difficult to oust an incumbent, and money doesn’t guarantee a win. And it takes money for non-incumbents to erase the built-in advantages of those already in Congress, who have higher name ID, and get their message out to voters.

Republicans dismissed the Democratic fundraising numbers, saying GOP candidates remain in a strong position heading into the final months of their races.

“Democrats traditionally always raise more money than our team does,” National Republican Campaign Chair Richard Hudson told POLITICO last week.

He noted that the NRCC’s second-quarter fundraising was its best ever for April-June of an election year and said he’s “pleased” with the amount of money they have raised.

“Our $37 million to $44 million, if we can keep that close, I’m not concerned about it,” Hudson said. “We can’t let them get so far ahead that they can kind of blow us out of the water, so we’ve got to continue this pace, we’ve got to continue to raise the money.”

The NRCC has also boasted other statistics, like its candidates who are backed by Speaker Mike Johnson outpacing their top recruits from the midterms in fundraising and cash on hand. The Republican incumbents designated as top defensive priorities by the NRCC slightly outraised DCCC’s endangered incumbent Democrats by just under $20,000 last quarter.

Republicans are also poised to be buoyed by big outside spending: The party’s chief House super PAC, Congressional Leadership Fund, had nearly $111 million in the bank as of the end of June, compared to $88.6 million for its Democratic equivalent, House Majority PAC.

Democratic hopes spiked after Harris took over the Biden campaign

Down-ballot Democrats have been touting gains — from interest in their campaigns to hard dollars — in the days immediately following the launch of Harris’ campaign for president.

In the aftermath of Biden endorsing Harris, DCCC had its single best online fundraising day of the cycle. Democrats’ Senate campaign arm saw a boost, too — also coming off of a strong quarter for Democratic Senate candidates compared to their Republican challengers. And the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which marshals the party’s strategy for state legislative races, also posted record-breaking days in the Harris aftermath.

A full picture of post-Biden fundraising won’t be clear until all congressional campaigns file their third-quarter FEC disclosures in October, but several Democratic congressional candidates reported significant surges. Some House and Senate campaigns saw an 800 percent increase in daily donations in the immediate aftermath of Biden’s decision. ActBlue, the major Democratic donation processing platform, said that small-dollar donors gave more than $154 million to Democratic campaigns and groups, from the presidential race on down, in the 48 hours after Harris’ campaign launch.

“Donors have clearly gotten the message that we need to flip the House because the presidential is expected to be close,” said Brian Derrick, co-founder of Democratic donation processor Oath.

He said the enthusiasm for Democrats with Harris at the top of the ticket can help down-ballot candidates in states that aren’t presidential battlegrounds, but have competitive House seats, like California and New York.

Dave Min, a Democratic state senator running for California's open battleground 47th District, said the days since Harris’ campaign launch on Sunday have seen an acceleration of the fundraising momentum he saw in the second quarter, when he raised about three times as much as his Republican opponent.

“Normally we see a cyclical trend in our fundraising: It’s kind of static for most of the quarter, and toward the end of the quarter it picks up significantly,” Min said. “In the last few days, we’ve seen numbers that look more like the end of the quarter. … It tells us there’s a lot of excitement around the change at the top of the ticket.”

And Will Rollins, a fellow California Democrat who’s running for a second time to unseat Republican Rep. Ken Calvert and raked in more than $2 million in the second quarter, said he raised six figures online since Sunday with more than 2,000 unique donors.

“I think it’s more than just a sigh of relief,” Rollins said. “It’s feeling fired up.”

Biden dropped out for the same reason politicians have ended their campaigns since time immemorial: He realized he couldn't win.

Charles Murray believes that Americans must face up to reality, or risk losing the republic as we know it.

Vice President Kamala Harris met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in private Thursday and followed it with a strikingly forceful call on his government to get a cease-fire deal done and ease the suffering of civilians in Gaza.

Harris, as she works to define herself as her party’s new likely nominee, did not diverge from Biden administration policy except perhaps in the directness of her message.

“Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters,” she said.

Harris, standing in front of a row of American flags, delivered on-camera remarks soon after the meeting ended. She told reporters that she had a “frank” conversation with Netanyahu.

The vice president said a two-state solution is the only path to ensure it remains a “secure, Jewish and democratic state,” while providing Palestinians with the “freedom” they “deserve.”

She pleaded with Americans to understand the complexity of the foreign policy issue, urging them to condemn acts of hate, antisemitism, Islamophobia and violence, a day after some protesters burned American flags and voiced support for Hamas in Washington

She addressed head-on the Democratic unrest that has been facing the Biden administration for months.

“We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent,” Harris said. “So to everyone who has been calling for a cease-fire, and to everyone who has been calling for peace, I see you and I hear you. Let’s get the deal done so we can get a cease-fire to end the war. Let’s bring the hostages home, and let’s provide much-needed relief to the Palestinian people.”

The substance of the vice president’s remarks didn’t diverge from President Joe Biden’s past comments, but her delivery was notable and offered the clearest picture of Harris’ views on the conflict to date.

Just days into her young campaign for president, Harris faces the political challenge of defining herself on one of the country’s most fraught foreign policy issues, while continuing to serve under Biden as he works to finalize a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas.

It remains unclear if and how the vice president might try to distance herself from Biden’s Israel-Gaza policy, though there has been some daylight between the two leaders in the past. In December, Harris told administration officials, including the president, that she wanted the White House to show more public concern for the humanitarian devastation in Gaza — Biden sharpened his public criticism of Israel in the months after. And she also argued at the time that the administration needed to begin making “day after” plans for how to handle the aftermath of the war.

Biden met with Netanyahu ahead of Harris’ meeting, urging the Israeli prime minister to secure a cease-fire deal in Gaza — and the Israeli leader committed to hostages’ families that he would step up negotiations with Hamas. They held their high-stakes meeting in the Oval Office on Thursday, the leaders’ first meeting since October and after months of growing frustration in the White House about Netanyahu's approach to the war.

No longer worried about his political future after ending his reelection bid, Biden pledged to take a tougher tone with Netanyahu — with whom he has frequently clashed — to reach an agreement with Hamas to free the group’s hostages and end the fighting that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

The slow pace of negotiations has angered both Biden and the families of the hostages still being held in Gaza. After the president and prime minister met for 90 minutes, they then spent another hour with the families of Americans still being held captive by Hamas — and the anguished loved one said they felt some new hope.

"After the meeting we feel more optimistic than we have at any point since the previous hostage deal last November," said Jonathan Dekel-Chen, the father of Sagy Chen, told reporters. "Biden and Netanyahu pledged that they understand that time should not be wasted and that the current deal on the table should be completed with as few changes as possible.”

“With each passing day bringing our loved ones back alive becomes less likely," he said.

Dekel-Chen stressed that the families told Biden and Netanyahu that a deal must be concluded to return all the hostages and end the suffering in Gaza. The families said that Netanyahu denied he was slow-walking the negotiations for his own political benefit and vowed to send a new proposal to Hamas in the coming days.

The war started when Hamas surged across the border on Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s invasion of Gaza, including many civilians.

After bowing out of the presidential race, Biden vowed to make a cease-fire deal a centerpiece of his remaining time in office. National Security spokesman John Kirby, who spoke to reporters as the men met, said that the president believed “strongly that it was time to get a hostage deal in place.”

“The president is reaffirming to Prime Minister Netanyahu that we need to get there and we need to get there soon,” Kirby said. “There are gaps that remain. But we believe that they are of a nature that can be closed, and we can achieve a deal. But it will require, as it always does, some leadership, some compromise, and some effort to get there."

U.S. officials have said that negotiations in the region would resume next week and that a deal could be struck before long.

Netanyahu is also slated to visit Trump at the Republican nominee’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Friday.

SACRAMENTO — The Supreme Court’s effort to dig itself out of the ethics hole it finds itself in would be greatly aided by some kind of oversight that isn’t provided by the justices themselves, Justice Elena Kagan argued Thursday.

Kagan publicly endorsed calls for a system to enforce the code of ethics the court adopted last year after a raft of bad publicity about ethics issues involving her colleagues led to outrage from Congress and tarnished the court’s prestige.

“The thing that can be criticized is: Rules usually have enforcement mechanisms attached to them, and this set of rules does not,” Kagan told a meeting of federal judges and lawyers.

Kagan said she welcomed the code the court announced last November but that the absence of any means of enforcing it was a glaring omission.

“It's a hard thing to do to figure out who exactly should be doing this and what kinds of sanctions would be appropriate for violations of the rules, but I feel as though we, however hard it is, that we could and should try to figure out some mechanism for doing this,” the liberal justice appointed by President Barack Obama said.

Kagan said there was no simple answer to who should oversee the conduct of the members of the nation’s highest court, but she ruled out the idea that the justices should sit in judgment of each other’s conduct.

“I think it would be quite bad … for us to do it to each other,” she told the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference.

Kagan said the best choice would likely be “judges lower down the food chain,” even though that “creates perplexities” by inverting the usual process of the justices overseeing subordinate federal courts.

Kagan suggested that Chief Justice John Roberts could establish a committee of lower-court judges to tackle complaints against the justices. She also did not rule out the possibility that Congress could pass a law requiring something similar, as many Democrats in Congress have endorsed. In her remarks to the same conference last year, Kagan disputed her colleague Justice Samuel Alito’s public claim that Congress has no role to play in policing ethics at the high court.

Kagan made no direct reference Thursday to the ethics claims that have swirled over two of her conservative colleagues over the past couple of years: Alito was accused of failing to report a private airplane flight to Alaska paid for by a wealthy Republican donor, and Justice Clarence Thomas faced stories disclosing that he’d vacationed by private yacht with another major GOP donor. Alito and Thomas also faced calls to recuse themselves from cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, after their wives seemed to show solidarity with those who sought to overturn the election.

Creating an enforcement mechanism, Kagan suggested, would be preferable to the current system where justices basically decide for themselves whether they are guilty of violating the code.

“It would provide a sort of safe harbor. … Sometimes people accuse us of misconduct where we haven't engaged in misconduct. And, so, I think both in terms of enforcing the rules against people who have violated them, but also in protecting people who haven't violated them, I think a system like that would make sense,” she said.

A Supreme Court spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the chief justice, but Kagan said she was by no means suggesting any consensus on the court in favor of any enforcement regime.

“I’m doing no intimating here,” said Kagan. “This is one person’s view.”

During an hourlong onstage interview conducted by a judge and an attorney at a convention center a few blocks from the state Capitol, Kagan also lamented what she described as a current tendency by the justices to splinter in significant cases — sometimes largely agreeing on a result, but laying out very different rationales for reaching it.

“We don’t seem to be able to coalesce all that easily on some cases,” Kagan said. “There is a lot of separate writing that the court is doing right now. … It’s not a good thing for the court. It prevents us, I think, from giving the kind of guidance that lower courts have the right to expect and that the public has the right to expect. It muddies the waters.”

Kagan also complained that some of her colleagues use concurring opinions to try to recast the majority’s view. She noted that in a major gun rights case decided last month, the decision was nominally 8-1, but the court produced seven opinions. Kagan, who joined a concurrence by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said some mischief was afoot in the plethora of opinions.

“Everybody sort of tries to spin it one way or another,” Kagan said. “Often people use separate opinions to pre-decide issues that aren't properly before the court and that may come before the court in a year or two and try to give signals as to how lower courts should decide that, which I don't think is right.”

Kagan said efforts by individual justices to offer their own take on what the court decided create confusion. “I don’t know how lower courts are supposed to deal with it really. Mostly, I think they should deal with it by ignoring it, basically,” she said.

Kagan acknowledged profound disappointment with some of the rulings the court issued in the current term, as the three liberal justices often found themselves outvoted by the phalanx of six conservatives they now face on the bench. However, she said she doesn’t retreat to her office and cry as Sotomayor, speaking to an audience at Harvard in May, said she has sometimes done in recent years.

“I’m not much of a crier, myself,” Kagan quipped. “I get where the frustration comes from. I’m more of a wall-slammer.”

Kagan said the cases that trouble her the most are where she believes her colleagues aren’t adhering to principle or are straying beyond what she views as the proper role for judges.

“Courts shouldn't use individual cases as vehicles to advance some broader agenda or some broader project to change our governance structure or our society,” she said. “Hopefully, it doesn't happen much, but there have been cases in the last few years in which it has happened to my lights, at least.”

Kagan did not discuss the largely 6-3 decision the court issued earlier this month upholding much of former President Donald Trump’s arguments that he and other presidents enjoy immunity from criminal charges for their official acts.

However, she struck a theme she has in some other appearances where she’s suggested that there is a degree of banality and even misdirection in anecdotes some of her colleagues offer about the social interactions among the justices.

“I get frustrated sometimes when people talk about the collegiality question,” Kagan said. “Some of my colleagues share a great love of baseball. Some of my colleagues share a great love of golf. … That’s good for the court, but I can’t imagine why the public should care.”

Kagan said the social engagement matters only if it means the justices are engaging with each other’s legal arguments and trying to reach consensus where possible.

“Sometimes going to the opera together might produce that result; sometimes not,” she said.

The only ruling from this term that Kagan addressed in detail was the Supreme Court’s decision overturning a 40-year old precedent, known as the Chevron doctrine, that required judges to defer to federal agencies’ interpretation of relevant congressional statutes when those interpretations were reasonable. The court’s ruling last month, which split the justices 6-3 along ideological lines, said judges should interpret the law as they see fit in most instances where agency actions are challenged.

Kagan dissented from that decision and would have left the longstanding doctrine in place, but she said it’s not clear whether federal agencies will actually find their authority gutted as a result.

“I’m not exactly sure how it's going to play out,” she said. The justice noted that judges still have to pay “appropriate respect” to agency expertise, and Congress still has the power to explicitly grant agencies discretion about the scope of their authority. She also said some judges may struggle to resolve issues that are more about policy than law.

“The dictionary is not going to tell you much,” Kagan said. “There’s going to be a lot of uncertainty and a lot of instability on that front.”

While some critics have faulted the court for taking many fewer cases each term than it used to decades ago, Kagan said she still finds the workload pretty heavy, largely due to an increasing volume of emergency applications presented on what some call the court’s “shadow docket.” She said the court probably brought the tsunami of urgent applications on itself by granting several such petitions blocking Trump administration actions, but that the phenomenon means there’s no real time off for her or her clerks.

“Our summers used to be, actually, summers,” Kagan said.

In his first two solo rallies as the Republicans’ vice presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance took aim at Vice President Kamala Harris. But in several instances, Vance twisted Harris’ words or her record.

• Vance said Harris “supported abolishing ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement].” Back in 2018, Harris said elected leaders should “critically reexamine ICE and its role” but she did not call for abolishing the agency and all its functions.

• He said Harris “wanted to defund the police.” Harris talked repeatedly about “reimagining public safety and how we achieve it” but she never advocated slashing or cutting police budgets altogether.

• Vance said Harris had failed as “America’s border czar,” but Harris’ role in the Biden administration was to address the “root causes” of immigration in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

• Vance said Harris “called Joe Biden a racist and then ran with him two months later.” During a Democratic primary debate in 2019, Harris criticized Biden’s position on two race-related issues, but she began her comments, “I do not believe you are a racist.”

• Vance said that Harris “voted to eliminate the filibuster and pass the green new scam.” Harris said in 2019 that she was “prepared to get rid of” the procedural rule to pass the so-called “Green New Deal,” but that nonbinding resolution never received a vote.

In back-to-back solo rallies on July 22, Vance spoke in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, and then in Radford, Virginia. Many of Vance’s attack lines parroted the talking points contained in a National Republican Senatorial Committee memo that paints Harris as “an avowed radical.”

Harris on ICE

In his speech in Virginia, Vance distorted the facts in claiming that Harris “supported abolishing ICE.” He’s referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security agency charged with “enforcing immigration laws to preserve national security and public safety.”

Back in 2018, several Democratic leaders were making calls to abolish ICE. On her campaign website when she ran for a House seat in New York in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote that ICE represented “part of an unchecked expansion of executive powers that led to the widespread erosion of Americans’ civil rights.” In calling for abolishment of the agency, Ocasio-Cortez claimed ICE “operates with virtually no accountability, ripping apart families and holding our friends and neighbors indefinitely in inhumane detention centers scattered across the United States.”

While serving as a senator in June 2018, Harris was also critical of the way ICE operated during former President Donald Trump administration — such as its enforcement of Trump’s “zero tolerance” border policy that resulted in children being separated from their parents who were detained for entering the U.S. illegally. Harris said the government should “critically reexamine” ICE’s role, adding that might mean “starting from scratch.” Here’s the relevant part of a June 2018 interview with MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt (starting at the 8:55 mark).

Hunt, MSNBC, June 24, 2018: A lot of the signs at the rally you just held were people standing there saying, ‘Abolish ICE.’ Is that a position that you agree with?

Harris: Listen, I think there’s no question that we’ve got to critically reexamine ICE and its role and the way it is being administered and the work it is doing. And we need to probably think about starting from scratch, because there’s a lot that is wrong with the way that it’s conducting itself. And we need to deal with that.

Hunt: What do you think should be the alternative to ICE?

Harris: Well, first of all, I don’t think that the government should be in the position of separating families. And that is clearly what is part of what’s happening at ICE and DHS. You look at what’s happening, again, in terms of how they’re conducting their perspective on asylum seekers. That is a real problem and is contrary to all of the spirit and the reason that we even have the asylum rules and laws in the first place. So their mission, I think, is very much in question, and has to be reexamined.

In an interview on “The View” in July 2019, Harris was asked if she would get rid of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.

“I would not,” Harris said. “We need to restructure and reform it. … We need to deal with it and fix it, but I do not believe in getting rid of it.” Several times, Harris added, “I believe in border security.”

So Harris called for reexamining the way ICE was functioning under the Trump administration, and she talked about the possibility of “starting from scratch.” But she never called for abolishing the agency and its functions altogether.

Harris on Defunding the Police

Vance said Harris “wanted to defund the police,” adding, “even Joe Biden never went so far as to say he wanted to defund the police.” Neither did Harris.

Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, speaks at a campaign rally on July 22 in Radford, Virginia. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

Rather, in a series of interviews in mid-June 2020, Harris carefully drew out her position on the “defund the police” movement that arose in the wake of protests and riots in response to the death of George Floyd, a Black man, after a white police officer kneeled on his neck during an arrest in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020.

In her interviews, Harris talked about “reimagining public safety and how we achieve it.” The answer, she said, is not “more police on the streets” but rather investing more in struggling communities — in things such as education, job creation, affordable housing and health care — as a way to make them safer. She never agreed that that meant slashing or eliminating police budgets.

As we have written, there is no agreed upon definition for the term “defund the police.” Some critics of the police, who believe there is systemic racism in law enforcement, really do want to abolish police forces and replace them with other community safety entities. Others advocate shifting some money and functions away from police departments to social service agencies.

Amid the Floyd protests, Harris put herself at the forefront of the debate about police conduct. On June 8, 2020, she co-sponsored a bill that sought to increase accountability for law enforcement misconduct and to eliminate discriminatory policing practices. At that time, Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee. Harris was picked as Biden’s vice presidential running mate until August.

In an interview on ABC’s “The View” the same day, June 8, 2020, Meghan McCain asked if Harris supported “defunding and removing police from American communities.”

Harris, ABC’s “The View,” June 8, 2020: I think that a big part of this conversation really is about reimagining how we do public safety in America. Which I support, which is this: We have confused the idea that to achieve safety, you put more cops on the street instead of understanding to achieve safe and healthy communities you put more resources into the public education system of those communities, into affordable housing, into home ownership, into access to capital for small businesses and access to health care regardless of how much money people have. That’s how you achieve safe and healthy communities. …

Here’s the other thing, when I talk to law enforcement, they know that they don’t want to be nor are they skilled to be the ones who are responding to someone with mental illness or substance abuse or–or the homeless population, but in many cities, that’s what’s happening because we are not directing those resources, those public resources to where they need to go, which is addressing mental health, homelessness, substance abuse, so that we don’t have to have a police response because we are smarter.  

McCain: … Are you for defunding the police?  

Harris: How are you defining “defund the police”?  

McCain: Well, I’m not for anything remotely for that, so I would ask the protesters the same thing, but I … assume it’s removing police, and as congresswoman Ilhan Omar said, bringing in a whole new way of governing and a law and order into a community.

Harris: … So, again, we need to reimagine how we are achieving public safety in America and to have cities where one-third of their entire budget is going to policing but yet there is a dire need in those same cities for mental health resources, for resources going into public schools, resources going into job training and job creation.

Harris hit the same themes in an interview the same day on MSNBC, adding, “We don’t want police officers to be dealing with the homeless issue. We don’t want police officers to be dealing with substance abuse and mental health. No — we should be putting those resources into our public health systems, we should be looking at our budgets and asking, ‘Are we getting the best return on our investment as taxpayers?’”

In an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “Good Morning America” the following day, June 9, 2020, Harris said accusations from Trump that radical left Democrats supported defunding the police, Harris characterized that as “creating fear where none is necessary.” In that same interview, she said she applauded then-Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s proposal to reallocate about $150 million from policing to health and youth initiatives. And she again stressed the need to “invest in communities” to make them healthy and safer.

“We have to stop militarization of police,” Harris said. “But that doesn’t mean we get rid of police. Of course not. We have to be practical about this.”

In a Sept. 6, 2020, interview on CNN, after she was the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee, Harris was asked about a quote from her 2009 book about support for more police on the streets, and how that jibed with her more recent position that increasing the number of police officers was not the answer for safer communities.

“What I would say now is what I would say then, which is I want to make sure that if a woman is raped, a child is molested, one human being murders another human being, that there will be a police officer that responds to that case and that there will be accountability and consequence for the offender,” Harris responded.

So Harris advocated investing more in struggling communities as a means to make them safer, and she discussed redefining government roles so that social service and mental health agencies respond to some emergencies rather than police. But she didn’t call for eliminating police departments, as the “defund the police” phrase suggests.

Harris Was Not Named ‘Border Czar’

Vance said Harris failed as “America’s border czar,” attaching a title to her — as Trump has as well — that is not accurate.

“Kamala Harris is America’s border czar,” Vance said in Virginia, “and how’s our border doing, ladies and gentlemen? She hasn’t talked to the chief of Border Patrol a single time in her entire tenure as border czar. Remember, on her very first day in office, she and Biden suspended deportations, they stopped construction of the border wall, and they reimplemented catch and release. The border crisis is a Kamala Harris crisis.”

As we wrote on the third night of the Republican National Convention when Rep. Matt Gaetz and others wrongly said Harris was appointed a “border czar,” Harris was not appointed to be the person in charge of border security.

In 2021, Biden tapped Harris to head up a Central American initiative called the “Roots Causes Strategy,” an effort to “address the root causes of migration” from “from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.” It seeks to deter migration from those countries by, among other things, providing funds for natural disasters, fighting corruption, and creating partnerships with the private sector and international organizations.

In a meeting on immigration on March 24, 2021, Biden announced that he had tapped Harris to “help in stemming the movement of so many folks” from Mexico and the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras).

Harris said she looked “forward to engaging in diplomacy with government, with private sector, with civil society, and — and the leaders of each in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to strengthen democracy and the rule of law, and ensure shared prosperity in the region.”

The following month, when a reporter asked Harris if she had a trip planned to the southern border, Harris responded, “The president has asked Secretary Mayorkas to address what is going on at the border.” She clarified that “I have been asked to lead the issue of dealing with root causes in the Northern Triangle, similar to what then-vice president did many years ago.”

When Harris and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas did visit the border in El Paso in June 2021, Mayorkas noted, “The vice president is leading our nation’s effort to tackle the root causes of migration — why people leave their home in the first place.” Mayorkas said it was his responsibility to “secure the border.”

A big part of Harris’ efforts have been focused on encouraging private sector investment in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as well as Mexico, which, as of March had resulted in “more than $5.2 billion in private sector commitments for northern Central America,” according to a White House press release. Harris has also met with Central American leaders to encourage a “focus on good governance and labor rights,” again with the aim of addressing some of the root causes of migration.

Although it is difficult to measure the success of those programs in stemming migration, Customs and Border Protection statistics show that illegal immigration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras has decreased since 2021. Illegal border-crossing attempts by Mexicans, however, have risen since 2021.

Harris Did Not Call Biden a Racist

Vance tried to turn the tables on Democrats pointing out that he once made numerous biting comments criticizing Trump, by wrongly claiming that Harris once called Biden a racist.

“You know, it’s so funny,” Vance said. “The media says, ‘Well, you know, JD said some critical things about President Trump 10 years ago.’ And Kamala Harris, of course, called Joe Biden a racist and then ran with him two months later.”

Vance’s past criticisms of Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign are well-documented. In 2016, Vance wrote an opinion piece that likened Trump to “cultural heroin,” and in an interview that year he flatly said, “I’m a ‘Never Trump’ guy. I never liked him.” In a July 2021 interview on Fox News, Vance said he regretted those comments and he regretted “being wrong about the guy.”

As for Harris, she did provide one of the more contentious moments of a June 27, 2019, Democratic primary debate, aggressively confronting Biden on two race-related issues: Biden’s past opposition to school busing and his comments about working with “some civility” in the 1970s with two segregationist southern Democrats, Sens. James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia.

As we wrote, Harris began her comments by saying to Biden, “I do not believe you are a racist.” But Harris, who is Black, said that “it was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country.” Biden responded by saying, “I did not praise racists.” Harris didn’t say he did. She said he talked about their reputations, and Biden did say that he was able to work with them in a civil way to get things done in the Senate, despite their political and personal differences.

Harris on the ‘Green New Deal’

Vance accused Harris of voting to end a Senate procedural rule so that Democratic lawmakers could pass climate change legislation.

“She voted to eliminate the filibuster and pass the green new scam, destroying energy jobs in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and driving up the cost of goods,” Vance said. “That’s why we’ve got an affordability crisis in this country, my friends, because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, they’d rather buy oil and gas from tin-pot dictators all over the world. I say they should buy it right here, from American workers.”

Vance appeared to be referring to the “Green New Deal,” a nonbinding resolution that outlined ways the U.S. should address climate change. However, it never received a vote in the House or the Senate after being introduced in February 2019.

At a September 2019 town hall, Harris, then a U.S. senator running for president, did say she would be willing to eliminate the Senate filibuster, a rule that requires 60 votes to end debate on most legislation, to enact the measure into law. “Here’s my point: If they [Congress] fail to act, as president of the United States, I am prepared to get rid of the filibuster to pass a Green New Deal,” she said while answering a question.

But, as we said, the resolution was not brought to the Senate floor, so there was no filibuster to end. And there is no way that legislation could have “destroyed energy jobs” and increased “the cost of goods,” as Vance claimed, since it didn’t become law. The NRSC memo itself said Harris “pledged to eliminate the filibuster to pass the Green New Deal.”

His other claim that Biden and Harris would “rather buy oil and gas from tin-pot dictators” than “American workers” is also misleading.

Under the Biden administration, more crude oil and natural gas is being produced in the U.S. than ever before. Besides, while natural gas and crude oil are imported to the U.S. from other countries to help meet domestic demand, “these are all [business] decisions made by private companies,” not the federal government, Mark Finley, a fellow in energy and global oil at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told us in a phone interview. “There’s not a lot of space for the administration to impact that.”

In addition, about 99% of natural gas imports to the U.S. come from Canada, which does not have a dictatorship. Canada also has consistently been the source of about 60% of crude oil imports to the U.S. in recent years. After Canada, the main suppliers of U.S. crude oil imports are Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Colombia — the same top five countries for imports during the Trump administration.

Vance may have been referring to the fact that in 2023, the Biden administration temporarily lifted Trump-era energy sanctions on Venezuela, once again allowing imports from oil and gas companies in that nation, which is run by an authoritarian government. But the sanctions were reimposed in April, after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro went back on his agreement to work toward having free and fair elections in the country this year.

Even during the period when the sanctions were removed, less than 3% of U.S. crude oil imports were coming from Venezuela, according to federal data.

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