5 Tough Questions Kamala Harris’s Campaign Will Have to Answer

After two years of speculation about which of them is best suited to bring the Trump era to a merciful end in 2020, Democratic politicians who have been spending their free time forming exploratory committees, soliciting donations, giving inspiring speeches, and hanging out in Iowa diners are at last announcing formal bids to become the next president of the United States. Over the next few weeks, we'll take a look at each of the front-runners: Who are they? What do they stand for? And in order to have a shot at winning the nomination they seek, what tough questions will they have to answer first? First up: California senator Kamala Harris.

1. Can she tell voters a compelling story about who she is?

Especially in a crowded field, many Democratic hopefuls have worked to make their names synonymous with a signature phrase or cause or idea—something that reminds voters who they are and what they would do if they were to become commander-in-chief. In 2008, Barack Obama was the harbinger of hope and change. Today, Elizabeth Warren is branding herself as the wonky consumer-protection guru, while Bernie Sanders wants to kick-start the economic and political revolution. Harris, who has been in Washington for all of two years, doesn’t really have hers figured out yet, mostly because she's barely had time (in D.C.-adjusted terms) to let the office paint dry. Her task, as the Los Angeles Times's Sarah D. Wire wrote last summer, is to decide what that One Big Thing is before her intraparty rivals and/or her across-the-aisle opponents do it for her.

This is not to suggest she won’t have a coherent policy agenda. On the contrary, Harris plans to run on a gigantic middle-class tax cut, federally provided rental assistance, and Sanders’s Medicare for All bill (of which she became the first Senate Democratic co-sponsor back in August). For someone who doesn't have a reputation as a strong progressive, this is a pretty dang progressive pitch.

The fear, instead, is that even a smart and charismatic and well-qualified candidate like her will be overwhelmed by the media neutron star that is Donald Trump unless they offer a bold, compelling reason for why they deserve more airtime and, after that, the office in which he sits. (Whether or not you think it fair, a common criticism of Hillary Clinton was that Democrats weren’t as enthusiastic about her as they’d hoped.) To that end, look for Harris to spend a lot of time in the coming months talking about her passion for criminal-justice reform, which she touts as a fiscally responsible method of achieving racial and economic justice.

2. Can she address lingering concerns about her career in law enforcement?

Positioning herself as the end-cash-bail candidate might invite an unwelcome brand of scrutiny, though, because her record as a prosecutor—she served as San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 through 2010, and then as California’s attorney general through 2016—is her most important liability. In a recent, blistering New York Times op-ed, law professor Lara Bazelon walked through the lowlights of Harris’s tenures in those roles: her defense of the death penalty, her support of legislation criminalizing truancy, and her startling tendency to try and keep wrongfully convicted defendants behind bars. As attorney general, she declined to prosecute OneWest, the notorious foreclosure factory owned at the time by now Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, despite what the U.S. Department of Justice called evidence of “widespread misconduct” on the part of OneWest.

Harris's usual response to this sort of criticism is that as a public servant, she had an obligation to represent the state, not herself. (“I have a client, and I don’t get to choose my client,” she said about her fight to keep federal supervisors out of California prisons.) A spokesperson asserted that many of Bazelon's claims lack context, and touted several of Harris’ more forward-thinking initiatives as evidence of her bona fides.

During a recent appearance at Howard University, when asked whether she had "regrets" about her time as a prosecutor, Harris said that she took “full responsibility” for her offices' conduct. She also disclosed mitigating facts, asserting that even as she fought on behalf of the Department of Corrections to bar trans inmates from obtaining gender reassignment surgery, she disagreed "vehemently" with the policy and worked "behind the scenes" to get inmates access to the care they needed. She also suggested that in matters related to the release of innocent imprisoned people, members of her staff made critical decisions without first soliciting her input.

It is perfectly plausible that Harris' subordinates misused their delegated power, or that a disconnect existed between her personal beliefs and what her job duties required of her. So is the simple notion that she, like many adults, thinks differently today about certain things than she did in the past. Whatever the explanation for a given problematic chapter of her career, her challenge, when asked, will be to speak frankly and authentically about each one—why she did what she did, what she thinks about it now, and how she would conduct herself differently (if at all) as chief executive—without coming off as a political opportunist.

3. Can she convince primary-season voters that the "progressive prosecutor" is not a myth?

As Briahna Gray argues in The Intercept, the problem may be less about Harris’ specific acts as a prosecutor than it is about her choice to be a prosecutor in the first place. Among Democrats today, it is widely accepted that the American justice system is an unjust one, at once forgiving of the powerful and cruel to the poorest and most vulnerable. No true progressive, the argument goes, would ever allow themselves to be co-opted by it—much less allow themselves to be co-opted by it twice.

Reasonable people can and will disagree about whether this is a fair standard to which to hold an aspiring elected official, particularly when that person just happens to be a woman of color; as Gray notes, throughout most of this country's history, "a well-worn and respected path to politics started in law school and cut through the district attorney’s office." But for some voters, at a moment when the party is championing social justice, embracing Black Lives Matter, and elevating the most ambitious elements of its policy agenda, possession of unblemished criminal justice reform credentials may be a purity test she cannot pass.

4. Can she overcome the bigotries that defined the 2016 race?

Democrats have an infuriating tendency to get skittish and conservative when the stakes are highest. And since sexism undoubtedly played a key role in Hillary Clinton's loss—and since the candidacy of Harris, whose mother is Tamil Indian and whose father is Jamaican, would add racism and xenophobia to the list of vile bigotries that the birther president and his acolytes would try to exploit—there are already plenty of tut-tutting whispers that nominating a more “traditional” candidate (read: a white man who enjoys broad name recognition, and who probably answers to “Joe Biden” or “Bernie Sanders”) is the safer play.

For most, this argument is borne less of genuine misogyny than it is of a crippling fear of losing. But entertaining it makes women responsible for the prejudices of others, and argues that the party should exclude from consideration an entire class of candidates based on dubious projections about how voters will react to them by virtue of their class membership and nothing else. It also treats the 2016 election as a final, unappealable referendum on gender equality, not as a close race riddled with bad breaks. Had Jim Comey held on to his letter for a few more days, or if Hillary Clinton had received a few thousand more votes between Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, none of the fatalistic hand-wringing about “whether any woman can ever win” would be taking place.

There is also mounting evidence that this line of reasoning is just plain wrong. If the most recent midterm results proved anything, it is that voters in 2019 are weary of of milquetoast centrists. And even in traditionally Republican-leaning states and districts, they are more enthusiastic than ever about backing women and/or candidates of color who are able to share clear, uncompromising ideas about what the country's future should look like.

5. Can she make voters believe in her right now?

Kamala Harris will be 56 on Election Day, but this question is less about her age than it is about her rank-order among the multitude of Democratic politicians patiently waiting their turn. Again, she will have been in Washington for just four years in 2020, with plenty of prime nomination-seeking time remaining in her career. When compared to national political fixtures like Biden or Warren, both of whom boast robust résumés and lengthy tenures in office, Harris is the relative newcomer. And again, in a crowded field, she'll have to convince voters why her status as such doesn't mean she should wait in line until next time.

That said, experience is but one of many factors voters consider, and there is strong (and recent) precedent for a young, black, recently-elected senator from a blue state relying on grassroots enthusiasm to leapfrog their party-establishment peers and win the nod anyway. There are early signs that Kamala Harris might be that candidate, too: On the day after announcing, she raised an eye-popping $1.5 million, with an average donation amount of just $37.

"I believe our country wants and needs some leadership that provides a vision of the country in which everyone could see themselves," she said on Morning Joe, when asked why she decided to run. Her nomination would certainly signal a changing of the guard within the party; she is about to find out whether Democrats are ready for it.