Vice President Kamala Harris, a California voter and former attorney general, refuses to say how she will vote One of the most important Criminal justice measures will go before state voters in a few years.
In her campaign for president, Harris has emphasized her credentials as a former top law enforcement official in the nation’s largest state, presenting herself as “tough” in ads and at the Democratic National Convention in August, going after smugglers and seeking justice for crime victims.
But his campaign declined to answer questions from The Times about how he will vote on Proposition 36, a tough-on-crime ballot measure led by the prosecutor who divides his Democratic base but it has broad support among California voters, according to polls. The measure Impose harsher sentences and potentially longer jail and prison terms. For repeat offenses involving fentanyl and theft, repeal parts of a voter-approved ballot measure A decade agowhen Harris was attorney general.
Harris also declined to comment on that measure: Proposition 47 —before voters approved it in 2014. And his presidential campaign declined to answer questions from The Times about his views on the earlier measure, which reduced sentences for certain nonviolent crimes and cut prison populations.
Her refusal to answer questions about the two crime measures underscores Harris’s caution, which predates her presidential campaign. She has given relatively few interviews since Democrats elevated her to the top of the ticket in late July, and the topic has not come up in those encounters. Harris’s strategy hinges on winning over moderate voters in key swing states who may view California’s problems through a more conservative lens than the state’s political establishment.
Former President Trump, who is registered to vote in Florida, has struggled to answer how he will vote on a contentious measure in his state that would expand abortion rights. Trump suggested in a late August interview with NBC that he might support Florida’s abortion rights measure, but changed his mind a day later after anti-abortion activists criticized him. Trump has boasted that as president he appointed Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, fulfilling a 2016 campaign promise, but the issue has become one of his biggest political vulnerabilities.
Republicans have criticized Harris over crime, even as statistics show some property crimes and most violent crimes are down both in California and nationwide. Trump has said cities are “out of control” as he attempts to link the issue to immigration and describe a broader sense of lawlessness. Trump in August misleadingly reclaimed Harris “destroyed California” because of her alleged role in Prop 47, despite her lack of involvement in the passage of the measure.
Although Harris did not take a position on Prop 47, some of her allies participated in the campaign for the measure, which they presented as progressive criminal justice reform.
“This is an issue that Democrats cannot resolve. Full stop,” said Alex Conant, a Republican consultant who advises Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. “She is still trying to explain and retract her comments about defunding the police from four years ago. She wants to talk about crime with balanced rhetoric and a complete lack of specifics.”
Harris praised efforts to examine police budgets in the wake of the George Floyd movement, but distanced herself from those views when she became President Biden’s running mate later in 2020 and then moved to increase money for law enforcement. She struggled to manage her record as a career prosecutor during the 2020 presidential primaries, facing criticism from left-wing activists who claimed “Kamala is a cop” and undermined her ability to fully define her more nuanced record.
Harris entered politics as San Francisco district attorney in 2004 and was elected state attorney general in 2010 and again in 2014. She has defined her approach to law enforcement as “smart on crime” — also the title of her 2009 book. That included creating a program to offer job training and other support for first-time, nonviolent drug offenders when she was district attorney, while seeking to crack down more heavily on sex offenders and others accused of violent crimes.
But when Proposition 47 went before voters in 2014, Harris, then attorney general, declined to weigh in. There were two reasons, according to Nathan Barankin, her chief of staff at the time: The advocates who drafted the proposal did not consult her or ask for her support, which she found surprising. And she had previously decided it was a conflict of interest whether or not to advocate for most ballot measures because, as attorney general, she was in charge of writing the ballot summary and title.
“Attorneys general are always faced with a dilemma of whether to do it or not to do it,” Barankin said. But “if they do intervene, someone is going to shout from the rooftops that you wrote this in a certain way to favor their point of view.”
But Harris did weigh in on at least one other measure while she was attorney general. During her 2016 Senate campaign, while still attorney general, she supported a ballot initiative aimed at getting money out of politics, her campaign said at the time.
Harris also used her authority as attorney general to refuse to defend a 2008 state initiative banning gay marriage when it was challenged in court.
Other attorneys general followed a similar practice, remaining mostly neutral on bill proposals but, like Harris, making some exceptions. Former Attorney General Jerry Brown, for example, campaigned against a measure that would suspend the state’s climate policies when he ran for governor in 2010. Attorney General Rob Bonta has expressed support for three proposals on abortion rights, gay marriage and funding for mental health treatment.
“The truth is that Harris took positions when she felt it was a politically smart thing to do and sometimes she didn’t take a position where a voter would want an attorney general to take a position,” said Dan Morain, a former Times reporter who wrote “Kamala’s Way: An American Life,” a biography of Harris.
Morain said Proposition 36 is an especially fraught issue from both a political and policy standpoint. California's elected Democrats are divided on the issue, with some arguing the measure will help get more people off the streets and into drug treatment, and others warning it will return the state to a tough-on-crime era that filled prisons with black and Latino Californians.
“The politics of this issue are quite complicated,” he said. “I’m not surprised she hasn’t taken a position on it yet.”
Even Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was an outspoken and active opponent of Prop 36 when the campaign began, appears to have backed off now that it is becoming clear it is likely to pass. Last week he said he was unlikely to invest more time and money into the opposition initiative.
“I'm afraid I won't be able to do it all,” he told reporters during a bill signing ceremony on Sept. 19 in San Francisco, adding that he had a busy political agenda that included electing Harris as president.
The comments came shortly after a poll showed 71% of likely voters support the measure. The Public Policy Institute of California poll found just 26% of voters planned to vote no. That was a much wider margin than an August poll by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and The Times, which showed 56% to 23% support for the measure.
