On November 5th, 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris may be elected as President of the United States. Prior to becoming Vice President in 2020, Harris served as a US Senator for California from 2017-2021 and before that, was the state’s Attorney General for six years, and San Francisco City/County District Attorney for eight. Renée Van Vechten looks at what Kamala Harris’ career at the city, county, and state level tells us about how she might govern as president, writing that despite her reputation as a tough prosecutor, the arc of Harris’s career is a pursuit of civil rights and criminal justice and addressing the needs of marginalized populations. 

County prosecutor and public servant. Attorney General of the largest state in the union. United States Senator. Vice president. Can—or might—past performance in any of these roles predict how a future president Kamala Harris would govern, if elected in November?

How past experiences influence presidential success

Constrained by the small number of cases (only 45 people have held the office; only 15 since World War II), social scientists have employed both quantitative and qualitative measures to tease out the effects of experience on presidential performance. One general takeaway from this scholarship is that no universal set of experiences prepares a person for the myriad and unpredictable challenges of the US presidency.

In a 2012 paper, University of Miami political scientists Arthur Simon and Joseph Uscinski provided a more nuanced judgment. Their work demonstrates that certain types of experiences are associated with successful presidential performance across a range of leadership attributes, or specific areas of governing, independent of larger conditions. For example, modern presidents who have been governors of large states, such as former California Governor and President Ronald Reagan, tend to excel on measures of administrative skills. Those such as Dwight Eisenhower who have been on active duty during wartime are more likely to be adept at public persuasion, exercising moral authority, and crisis leadership. Years in business and the private sector negatively predict economic management. Service as a Congressional leader, as with Lyndon Johnson, helps predict more productive relations with Congress. Democratic affiliation is strongly associated with pursuing equal justice, as is being a Congressional leader, select military experiences, and total years in public and national office. In addition to these, they observe that vision/setting an agenda, international relations, and performance within the context of times are attached to specific aspects of military or gubernatorial experience.

Bearing these conclusions in mind, Kamala Harris’s career yields clues about how she might parlay her experience into presidential leadership. Further, her personal history lends insight into her priorities–other factors that would influence her governing approach. As a Democrat who has served in national office and in the largest state at city, county, and state levels, Harris has assembled a record reflecting her ambitions to use the levers of power strategically and to react pragmatically; the arc of her career can be largely defined by her public-oriented interest in civil rights and criminal justice and on addressing the needs of marginalized populations.

Kamala Harris’ career pragmatism

Harris’s pragmatism is visible 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 might never gain) the trust of communities of color. In public speeches, she has recalled countering her relatives’ surprise at her decision to become a prosecutor by asking: “Why is it that we should only be on the outside of systems? Isn’t there a role also for us to play on being on the inside where the decisions are being made?”. She subsequently became one of the only Black/South Asian and female prosecutors in the US at each successive level of government. As one of her former deputy attorneys phrased it to me, “She got in it to protect people.”

“U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris speaks at L.A.’s” (Public Domain) by lukeharold

The approach highlights the difference between pragmatism and ideology. Once on the inside as San Francisco District Attorney, and later as state Attorney General, Harris took calculated risks, generally in pursuit of equal justice. She declined to “make” law either by pushing new legislative initiatives or by taking public positions on fellow Democrats’ high-profile crime-related bills, thus conveniently shielding herself from potential criticism under the aegis of neutrality while signaling a reluctance to alienate the state’s law enforcement officers on whose loyalty she depended.

Balancing being a tough prosecutor with moral convictions

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

Harris tried to strike a delicate balance being a tough prosecutor (read: “I’m not a criminal-hugging liberal”) and addressing critical issues involving fairness that disproportionately affect minority populations (“I’m one of you and I want to use the system to help you”). Her self-labeled “Smart on Crime” initiatives reflected this approach: for instance, addressing the school-to-prison-pipeline by targeting chronic absenteeism, which meant going after elementary school students’ parents, and attacking recidivism by implementing a “Back on Track” program centering on a holistic, community services-based rehabilitation and civic reentry of low-level drug dealers.

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

Extensive – but limited – executive experience

As California’s elected “top cop” who managed a budget of over $830 million and more than 4,300 state law enforcement officials and attorneys who defend the people and environment, Harris gained purchase on administrative skills, but not in the ways that her colleague, Jerry Brown, Governor of California from 2011 to 2019, would have. The Attorney General, considered the second most powerful state executive in California, lacks unilateral tools, oversees a tiny fraction of the state’s public employees, and commands a specific agenda–albeit a wide-ranging one that dwarfs those of most US states. The state’s sheer size and population (almost 40 million people), international border, and status as gateway to Asia meant that Harris waded into international issues while dealing with transnational gangs, trade and labor, crime, and border enforcement. Echoing existing presidential scholarship however, in their 2012 paper, Simon and Uscinski write that such executive positions “do not simulate the vast responsibilities or duties of the presidency adequately enough to impact performance”, even if they do enable those officials to become more expert in issues they might champion later, such as environmental protection and immigration reform.

Similarly, Senator Harris’s endeavors as a legislator reveal more about her priorities than about her leadership capacities. “People” and “need” were two of the most frequent terms used in all of her 2020 social media posts, and the pursuit of civil rights runs as a through line in her career. In a 2007 commencement speech, she talked of her family’s civil rights dedication, of using courtrooms to argue for justice for victims, and of defending reproductive freedom: all themes that resurfaced 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 v. Jackson Vice President. In other speeches and in Senate votes, she has upheld safety as a right, along with voting rights, and the right to same-sex marriage.

What can we learn from Harris’ US Senate record?

I coded the 80 bills that Kamala Harris authored and introduced in the 116th Congress (2019–20, immediately prior to becoming Vice President), finding that civil rights, climate change and environment, labor law, health care, and criminal justice dominated her legislative docket. Most bills were aimed at those whom she has defended throughout her career and who have been core to a liberal coalition: workers denied pay or subject to inadequate working conditions, people of color who have received inequitable health care, unaccompanied immigrant minors, renters and homeowners buried under untenable housing costs, students cheated of an education by for-profit colleges, hungry schoolchildren, unsheltered people, business owners whose livelihoods were decimated by the pandemic, and the environment itself: wilderness areas, crumbling shorelines, and polluted waters. As she argued in a 2009 commencement speech at UCLA Law School, “’The People’ means all of us.[…] We say the community is harmed when you are harmed.”. As with her prosecutorial actions, these initiatives say more about her ability to lead on equal justice for all, an area in which most other former vice presidents have done well. (Incidentally, vice presidential experience falls short of predicting future executive excellence.)

Experience only goes so far in either explaining or predicting presidential performance, of course, and lived experiences that render a person “who they are” are impossible to quantify. Historical forces and unexpected events also condition success, as do personal qualities such as character and temperament. Skills also matter, such as the ability to communicate with other leaders at home and abroad, as well as the American public –public communication being a hallmark of the personalized modern president. Kamala Harris’s professional résumé may someday provide another data point for presidential scholars—but only if she can convince the jury – the US voting public – in November that it’s the next logical step in her storied career.

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