Vice President Kamala Harris is leaning on her decades as a local and state prosecutor to signal her toughness in the presidential race. But that professional experience also shapes her approach to tackling the country’s problems.
Consider inflation, which has been one of the Biden administration’s thorniest political problems. In a speech this month, Harris proposed going after grocery chains that she claimed are using inflation as a pretext to price-gouge consumers.
In one line in the speech, she outlined an approach that you might call prosecutorial populism: target the rule-breakers.
“Most businesses are creating jobs, contributing to our economy and playing by the rules, but some are not, and that’s just not right, and we need to take action when that is the case,” she said.
You can see echoes of this approach in Harris’ Democratic National Convention acceptance speech and other policy announcements:
- Student debt: She has talked about her work fighting for students “being scammed by big, for-profit colleges.”
- Immigration: She has spoken about fighting “cartels who traffic in guns and drugs and human beings.”
- Housing: She has targeted “Wall Street investors” and “private equity-backed price-setting tools” raising rents.
In each case, Harris clearly identified villains and proposed, essentially, prosecuting the cases against them. The benefits of this approach are that it’s easy to explain to voters and it forces the political opposition to defend some pretty indefensible behavior. There’s a reason defense attorneys have such bad reputations, after all.
The large companies breaking the rules are the target, and the solution is to go after them and leave the rest alone.
The populist approach would be to go after the large conglomerates in unflinching language — “every billionaire is a policy failure,” for example — but this prosecutor’s populism is narrower. The large companies breaking the rules are the target, and the solution is to go after them and leave the rest alone.
There are limits to this approach. Sometimes a problem doesn’t have a clear villain. Sometimes focusing on the people explicitly breaking the rules overlooks the broader problem that the rules created in the first place. Sure, scammy for-profit colleges are bad, but they aren’t the major reason student debt has become such a crippling problem.
The prosecutor’s mindset can also lead to a focus on easy wins.
Being a prosecutor is an inherently political job, but it has much different set of incentives from other positions such as governor or senator. At the local and state levels, prosecutors are typically elected, and many look at their win-loss ratios in court as the best way to persuade voters to re-elect them.








