Why does Kamala Harris want to be president?

Five years ago, standing in front of a crowd of some 20,000 people in Oakland, California, Kamala Harris announced that she was running for president. “My whole life, I’ve only had one client: the people,” she said. 

Now that President Biden has dropped out of the race and Harris has become the presumptive Democratic nominee, it’s fair to start asking what, exactly, she plans to do for her client if she wins in November. Despite Harris’s long career and remarkable rise in politics — she has served as the San Francisco district attorney, California’s attorney general, US senator, and, most recently, vice president — it’s still difficult to predict what her campaign, let alone presidency, will look like. 

Although Harris has been vice president for three years and ran a presidential campaign in the 2020 cycle, she’s managed to avoid being neatly pigeonholed into any ideological box. Unlike candidates Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, who are easily remembered for their Medicare-for-all or wealth-tax proposals, Harris’s 2020 campaign fizzled out with few, if any, policy ideas or slogans being closely associated with it.

At any point in her two-decade political career, she could fit the description of a number of “types” of Democrat: centrist, moderate, progressive, liberal, establishment, or outsider. But besides her “smart-on-crime” identity, none of those labels has ever effectively captured her way of thinking or how she would govern as president.

That might have been by design. “Policy has to be relevant,” Harris told the New York Times in 2019. “That’s my guiding principle: Is it relevant? Not, ‘Is it a beautiful sonnet?’” 

Her allies and those who have worked with her in the past describe her as a pragmatist — a fact that makes it hard for the public and press to decipher her vision for the nation. 

This may be the best way to understand Harris: She doesn’t necessarily believe in a big ideological mission to remake government or society, but instead considers government as a tool to concretely help improve the lives of as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, through practical means, like lowering the cost of medication, expanding access to broadband internet, and fixing roads and bridges. Aiming at smaller targets can effect change to bigger interconnected problems, like lowering inflation, expanding access to health care, and protecting reproductive rights.

“She thinks about policy and law not from a place of the words on a page, but the ways in which those words impact the lives of everyday people,” said Democratic California Sen. Laphonza Butler, a longtime adviser and friend to Harris. “She tends to see gaps and see around corners and make sure that the policy can work for everyone.” 

A 2015 profile of her in San Francisco Magazine underscored that incrementalist approach. “I don’t admire grand gestures,” Harris was quoted as saying. “I admire goal achievement.”

What those goals are, exactly, has remained unclear throughout her career. Even as recently as her last run for president, they weren’t entirely defined: As one person who sat in on a meeting with Harris about whether she should run later put it, “We launched into a void, without a worldview,” the journalist Edward-Isaac Dovere has reported.

As Harris hits the campaign trail anew, many more voters will want to hear what her vision for the country is beyond defeating Donald Trump. 

So, what does Harris actually want to achieve if she makes it to the Oval Office?

Harris’s 2020 campaign gave voters an incomplete picture

In the last election cycle, Harris’s career as a prosecutor seemed to guide much of her campaign: Her slogan — “Kamala Harris, for the people” — was how she introduced herself in court; her ads focused on her record prosecuting sexual predators, banks, and big corporations; and her promise to Democratic voters was that she’d be the best candidate to “prosecute the case” against Donald Trump in 2020. 

But as she campaigned, Harris’s messaging on policy was often muddied. She supported big ideas like Medicare-for-all, on the one hand, but emphasized that she’s “not trying to restructure society” on the other. 

Some of her policy positions were also never clear, in part because she flip-flopped on several occasions. There were multiple times, for example, when she seemed to support abolishing private health insurance while campaigning on Medicare-for-all, but she walked back on that position when pressed on whether her plan would leave room for private insurers. 

In one high-profile moment during the campaign, she went after Biden’s record on desegregation during a debate, skewering him for opposing court-ordered school busing programs in the 1970s. But in the days after her attack on Biden, Harris gave only vague answers about whether she supported federally mandated busing, leaving many to wonder whether there was actually any daylight between her position and Biden’s.

Aides who have worked with her in the past chalk some of this up to Harris’s “literalism” — what they say is a focus on the lived experience of the people who elected her and how policies and stances may need to change with the times or as reality sets in. 

“She’s someone who thinks about the user experience of government, how it works, how it operates, how people are experiencing it, and she wants to make it better in literal ways, as opposed to theory,” said Daniel Suvor, who served as Harris’s chief of policy when she was California attorney general.

There was, however, at least one clear and consistent message throughout her 2020 campaign: that she was the best candidate to defeat Trump in that cycle. And while defeating Trump might not be a long-term agenda, it’s also not necessarily an insufficient reason to run for the presidency. After all, that’s what Biden repeatedly said inspired him to run in 2020 and again in 2024. And if Trump does indeed pose a long-term threat to democracy, then beating him at the ballot box can be a legacy-defining achievement in and of itself.

What does Harris’s vice presidency tell us about her priorities?

If Harris struggled to define herself during the 2020 primaries, accepting the offer to serve as vice president only made that struggle harder. Early on, there were signs that Biden might want to empower his number two and make her a governing partner, as he said he would during the campaign. His pre-election talk about being a “bridge” to a new generation of leaders also cemented the idea that his vice president might be primed to be his successor. 

But it quickly looked like Harris would be sidelined — and that’s what the public and press eventually assumed occurred. Questions swirled around what her portfolio would include. Harris ended up doing a little bit of everything, contributing to the sense of ambiguity and that her tenure suffered from a lack of focus. She asked for one specific priority (voting rights) and received another more nebulous task (addressing root causes of migration).

The first priority was easy to define: securing the passage of the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. She reportedly made the decision to focus on this task after spending time talking to other Black leaders in the Democratic Party, including those focused on ballot access and voting rights, such as Stacey Abrams.

That’s when she made a departure from the pragmatism that had previously defined her, despite the grim odds of the legislation passing in a tied Senate, let alone breaking a filibuster with 60 votes. She saw voter access as an issue that could unite various factions of the Democratic Party, and on which she could carry on the party’s legacy of fighting for civil rights — meaningful given her own historic place as the first Black woman vice president.

She was warned about the low chances of this kind of legislation passing, but still, she tried, meeting with various activist groups and advocates to build popular support. Her work on Capitol Hill was more limited as the president himself tried to lobby senators. Despite an emotional last-minute push, the chance of abolishing the filibuster was essentially zero, killing the effort.

Her second priority, pegged to immigration, came as an assignment she did not ask for: leading diplomatic efforts and engagement with the countries of Mexico and the Northern Triangle to address the root causes of migration. It was essentially the same assignment Biden had received from Barack Obama eight years before, but it quickly spun into a greater political mess, one that will continue to be a vulnerability for Harris in the general election. 

The task was diplomatic, neither focused on border security nor the immediate response to the influx of migrants and people seeking asylum. But that distinction was muddled by the press, Republicans and the right, and even the White House.

Things changed for Harris when the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated the constitutional right to abortion. The vice president quickly seized on the issue, talking naturally and practically about the decision’s real-world implications — in large part because it dealt with two constituencies she has always prioritized: mothers and children, a former Harris adviser said. 

She traveled to battleground and Republican-run states, explained the ties between abortion rights and other reproductive and individual rights, and became the administration’s point person on the issue. Harris’s thinking and strategizing on how to talk about reproductive rights in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision also fit the larger theme of how she thinks about policies and initiatives: considering who is affected, and how long it will take to achieve justice. And it will be a centerpiece of the campaign she runs now.

What would a Harris presidency look like?

What Harris’s career has made clear is that she’s more likely to pursue incremental progress than big, ambitious ideas. That’s why if elected, it’s likely that her administration would simply be an extension of the current one rather than a disruption.

On the campaign trail this week, several priorities have come into focus, with the economy and affordability still at the top of the list. Harris continues to talk about prioritizing the middle class, just as Biden did: “Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency,” Harris said at her first major campaign rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Tuesday. “When our middle class is strong, America is strong.”

To support that swath of Americans, improving the care economy — those services that focus on children and the elderly — could be one of the major policy areas she may come to prioritize.

She would zero in on a straightforward policy agenda, said Carmel Martin, who served as the vice president’s domestic policy adviser from 2022 to 2023: a focus on “economic progress while bringing down inflation, expanding access to services that people need — health care being at the front of the line — and protecting reproductive rights.”

Harris has already shown signs of this focus, saying in a campaign address on Monday that she believes “in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty; where every person can buy a home, start a family, and build wealth; and where every person has access to paid family leave and affordable child care.” All of these stances are essentially what Biden has pitched before.

The fact that Harris has shown she’s not a hardened ideologue means that she can be swayed by political headwinds, giving social movements an opportunity to push various agendas. 

Some of the country’s most transformational legislation, for example, didn’t come directly from presidents who were ideological hardliners, but rather from presidents who were willing to listen to social movements and public sentiment — as was the case during the Civil Rights Era.

Will Harris help or hurt the Democrats’ chances in November?

Usually, by the time a presidential candidate makes it to the general election after a grueling primary campaign, their policy priorities and ideology are relatively clear. Barack Obama, for example, offered a vision for a post-George W. Bush America — promising to end the US “forever” wars, address economic inequality, and unite the country around the common desire for hope and change. By contrast, Donald Trump offered a distinctly dark vision for the country, building a backlash coalition by injecting more racism and xenophobia into mainstream American politics. 

In 2020, Biden was largely viewed as a centrist who campaigned on defending democracy and a return to normalcy after the rise of Trumpism and the devastating effects of a pandemic, specifically touting his vested interest in pursuing bipartisanship.

Harris, however, is starting a campaign essentially from scratch, without having gone through a primary process. As a result, voters haven’t been properly introduced to her as a candidate for the presidency.  

Her lack of a clearly defined ideological position up to this point in her career might now prove an asset: She has a unique opportunity to reintroduce herself to the country and offer a new vision for the future.

What Harris does over the next few weeks will help to shape voters’ opinions of her. That doesn’t mean she can entirely evade her past — her record as a prosecutor will likely keep coming up — or that she won’t be haunted by past policy positions. For now, though, she’s likely to focus on Trump’s baggage and the danger he poses to democracy.

“The script writes itself: the prosecutor against the convicted felon,” California Sen. Alex Padilla said. “That’s what this race has become.”