What Kamala Harris’ career pragmatism tells us about how she could govern as president

On November 5, 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris will be up for election as President of the United States. Before becoming Vice President in 2020, Harris served as the U.S. Senator from California from 2017 to 2021, and before that as the state’s Attorney General for six years and the District Attorney for the City/County of San Francisco for eight years. Renée Van Vechten explores what Kamala Harris’s career at the city, county, and state level tells us about how she might govern as president. She writes that despite her reputation as a tough prosecutor, the core of Harris’s career has been about pursuing civil rights and criminal justice and addressing the needs of marginalized populations.

County prosecutor and public official. Attorney general of the largest state in the union. United States senator. Vice president. Could or would past performance in any of these roles predict how a future President Kamala Harris would govern, if elected in November?

How Past Experiences Influence a President’s Success

Limited by the small number of cases (only 45 individuals have held the office; only 15 since World War II), social scientists have used both quantitative and qualitative measures to explore the effects of experience on presidential performance. A general conclusion of this study is that no single, universal set of experiences prepares one for the myriad and unpredictable challenges of the American presidency.

In a 2012 paper, University of Miami political scientists Arthur Simon and Joseph Uscinski offered a more nuanced assessment. Their work shows that certain types of experiences are associated with successful presidential performance on a range of leadership traits or specific areas of governing, independent of broader circumstances. For example, modern presidents who have been governors of large states, such as former California governor and President Ronald Reagan, tend to excel in the areas of administrative skillsPeople like Dwight Eisenhower who served actively during the war are probably better able public belief, to practice moral authority, And crisis leadershipYears of experience in the corporate and private sectors predict negatively economic management. Service as a Congressional leader, like Lyndon Johnson, helps create more productive relations with CongressDemocratic affiliation is strongly associated with the pursuit of equal justicesuch as being a Congressional leader, certain military experiences, and total years in public and national office. They also note that vision/setting an agenda, international relationsAnd performance within the context of time are linked to specific aspects of military or gubernatorial experience.

With these conclusions in mind, Kamala Harris’s career provides clues about how she might translate her experience into presidential leadership. Moreover, her personal history provides insight into her priorities—other factors that would inform her approach to governance. As a Democrat who has served in national office and in the largest state at the city, county, and state level, Harris has built a track record that reflects her ambitions to use the levers of power strategically and respond pragmatically; the arc of her career can be largely defined by her public-spirited interest in civil rights and criminal justice and in addressing the needs of marginalized populations.

Kamala Harris’ Career Pragmatism

Harris’s pragmatism is evident in her early career decision to join the ranks of law enforcement as a prosecutor, a risk for a woman of color who could lose (or never gain) the trust of communities of color. In public speeches, she has recalled responding to her family members’ surprise at her decision to become a prosecutor by asking, “Why should we just be on the outside of the systems? Isn’t there a role for us to be on the inside, where the decisions are being made?” She went on to become one of the few Black/South Asian female prosecutors in the U.S. at any successive level of government. As one of her former deputy attorneys put it to me, “She went in there to protect people.”

“US Senator Kamala Harris to Speak at LA” (Public Domain) by lukeharold

The approach highlights the difference between pragmatism and ideology. Once in power as San Francisco’s district attorney and later as the state’s attorney general, Harris took calculated risks, generally in the pursuit of equal justice. She refused to “make” the law by pushing new legislative initiatives or taking public positions on her fellow Democrats’ high-profile crime-related bills, thus deftly shielding herself from potential criticism under the guise of neutrality while signaling a reluctance to alienate the state’s law enforcement officials, whose loyalty she relied on.

Balancing a stern prosecutor with moral convictions

Her approach could also be characterized as “threading needles,” carefully avoiding conflict and formulating solutions through input, rather than brutally imposing an inflexible version of reality to achieve an ideological goal. She is a biracial law-and-order Democrat who has put people behind bars, but who recognizes differential systemic outcomes for people of color in her decision-making.

Harris sought to strike a delicate balance between being a tough prosecutor (read: “I’m not a liberal who embraces criminals”) and addressing critical issues of fairness that disproportionately affect minority groups (“I’m one of you, and I want to use the system to help you”). Her self-described “Smart on Crime” initiatives reflected this approach: addressing the school-to-prison pipeline by targeting chronic absenteeism, which meant targeting the parents of elementary school students, for example, and tackling recidivism by implementing a “Back on Track” program that focused on holistic, community-based rehabilitation and civil reentry for low-level drug dealers.

Early in her career, she was heavily criticized for sticking to her moral convictions when she refused to seek the death penalty for a 21-year-old man who shot a police officer. Now, on the presidential campaign trail, she has pragmatically limited her exposure to scrutiny by avoiding media interviews and press conferences, a source of frustration to those who demand more access and proposed policy details than she has allowed.

Extensive – but limited – management experience

As California’s elected “top cop,” overseeing a budget of more than $830 million and more than 4,300 law enforcement officers and attorneys in the state who defend the people and the environment, Harris came to grips with administrative skillsBut not in the way that her colleague Jerry Brown, California’s governor from 2011 to 2019, would have done. The attorney general, considered California’s second-most powerful state administrator, has no unilateral tools, oversees a small fraction of the state’s government employees, and has a specific agenda, albeit one that is far-reaching and dwarfs that of most U.S. states. The state’s size and population (nearly 40 million people), its international border, and its status as a gateway to Asia have allowed Harris to wade into international issues while dealing with transnational gangs, trade and labor, crime, and border enforcement. However, following existing presidential studies, Simon and Uscinski write in their 2012 paper that such executive positions “do not sufficiently simulate the vast responsibilities or duties of the presidency to affect performance,” even if they do allow those officials to become more expert on issues they might later advocate for, such as environmental protection and immigration reform.

Likewise, Senator Harris’s efforts as a legislator reveal more about her priorities than her leadership abilities.People” And “need” were two of the most common terms used in all of her social media posts in 2020, and the pursuit of civil rights has been a common thread throughout her career. In a 2007 graduation speech, she spoke of her family’s commitment to civil rights, of using the courtroom to advocate for justice for victims, and of defending reproductive freedom — all themes that would recur in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in July 2024. Advocating for reproductive rights has consumed most of her energy as a post-Dobbs vs. Jackson Vice President. In other speeches and Senate votes, she has defended security as a right, along with voting rights and same-sex marriage.

What can we learn from Harris’ performance in the US Senate?

I coded the 80 bills Kamala Harris wrote and introduced in the 116th Congress (2019-20, immediately before she became vice president) and found that civil rights, climate change and the environment, labor law, health care, and criminal justice dominated her legislative agenda. Most of the bills targeted those she has championed throughout her career and who form the core of a liberal coalition: workers who are denied pay or face inadequate working conditions, people of color who have received unfair health care, unaccompanied immigrant minors, renters and homeowners buried under unsustainable housing costs, students robbed of their education by for-profit colleges, hungry schoolchildren, the homeless, business owners whose livelihoods have been decimated by the pandemic, and the environment itself: wilderness areas, crumbling coastlines, and polluted waters. As she argued in a 2009 commencement speech from UCLA Law School, “‘The People’ means all of us. (…) We say that when you are harmed, the community suffers.” As with her prosecutions, these initiatives say more about her ability to lead equal justice for allan area where most other former vice presidents have done well. (Incidentally, the experience of vice presidents is not enough to predict future leadership excellence.)

Of course, experience is not the only thing that explains or predicts presidential performance, and the life experiences that “make” a person are impossible to quantify. Historical forces and unexpected events also determine success, as do personal qualities such as character and temperament. Skills matter too, such as the ability to communicate with other leaders at home and abroad, and with the American public—public communication is a hallmark of the personalized modern president. Kamala Harris’ professional résumé may one day provide a data point for presidential scholars—but only if she can convince the jury—the American voting public—in November that it’s the next logical step in her storied career.