Since launching her presidential bid, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign and its supporters have been keen to frame this election as one prosecutor versus one criminal. That was among the themes on Monday’s first night of the Democratic National Convention. “In the criminal justice system, the public is represented by two separate but equally important groups: the police who investigate crimes and the district attorney who prosecutes criminals. This is the story of Donald Trump,” said the deep-voiced narrator in a video that wowed the audience at Chicago’s United Center. “We need a president who has spent his life trying to prosecute criminals like Donald Trump.”
The video became a part of Harris’s stump speech, a play on his legacy as a prosecutor. On August 6, he told a crowd in Philadelphia, “I’ve taken on all kinds of criminals. Fraudsters who have defrauded consumers. Fraudsters who break the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know the type of Donald Trump.” Others have made the contrast between the two candidates more clear. “The script writes itself: the prosecutor against the convicted felon,” Sen. Alex Padilla of California told Vox last month.
The framing aims to create a complete split screen between Harris and Trump, showing how they both end up on opposite ends of the law. But it’s not clear that this line of attack is effective, and there are real downsides to promoting a simplistic story of good versus evil in the context of prosecutors and criminals.
That’s because it’s not always such a clear contrast. Prosecutors, for example, have one A history of rule bending Get a conviction, and thousands of people Sent to jail For crimes they did not commit. Which brings us to the word “criminal,” a label that stigmatizes more than it describes—and does real damage to efforts to reform a broken justice system.
Let’s get something out of the way up front: Calling Trump a criminal is not unfair to Trump personally. While there are millions of people who have been mistreated by the US justice system, Trump is not one of them. He has spent years, if not decades, on the run with the law, yet he has yet to avoid any meaningful personal consequences for his misdeeds. In fact, after the Supreme Court judgment Trump v. United StatesHis status above the law has the seal of approval of the US Department of Justice.
But for others—especially those living on the fringes of society—the label “felon” can be a sign of injustice. It reduces a whole person, even a rehabilitated person, to one of their worst moments, and it further stigmatizes people with criminal convictions as inherently dangerous and undeserving of a second chance.
“Nearly 20 million Americans have a felony conviction, and 1 in 3 in our country has some kind of record. Labeling people as ‘criminals’ or using the term as a badge of honor for political purposes hurts millions of individuals and families. Slap,” said Desmond Mead, president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. Wrote a Time op-ed Last month “the truth is the label doesn’t hurt Trump, any more than it hurts the millions of other people who live with felony convictions.”
“Felon” doesn’t hurt Trump — but it could hurt millions of people
When he ran for president in 2020, Harris tried to brand himself as a “progressive prosecutor” — a label that didn’t stick because his record contained some tough-on-crime convictions that didn’t sit well with many progressive voters.
This time, however, Harris and his supporters aren’t shy about touting some of the tougher elements of his record as district attorney and attorney general. That’s why the “prosecutor vs. criminal” framing seems to have little concern for how it might alienate some progressive voters or criminal justice reform supporters.
The way many people use the word “felon” — as some of Harris’ supporters do — is often not as a neutral descriptor but as an insult. And it’s an insult that depends on society’s existing prejudices about who the “criminals” are.
Take this telling example from the Trump campaign. Despite representing a candidate convicted of 34 felonies, the campaign — in one of its first attacks against Tim Walz — Criticism of the Democratic Vice Presidential Nominee “To adopt policies to allow convicted felons to vote.”
The Trump campaign is comfortable attacking “criminals” because of the tropes associated with the word “felon,” despite Trump’s criminal convictions. The campaign clearly knows that for many people, especially its supporters, the word isn’t associated with people like Trump — anyway. Common white collar crime.
“When most Americans think about who is in the criminal justice system, they imagine someone who is black, who is poor, who is someone who is ‘not like us,'” said Insha Rahman, director of Vera Action, a criminal justice reform organization. Advocacy group. “There is another thing inherent in calling someone a ‘criminal’. It doesn’t stick to Donald Trump because he doesn’t fit those characteristics that people have in mind, but the danger is that it will stick to others and reinforce that stigma the more it gets thrown around.”
American politicians have long weaponized the stigma around the term felon to prevent millions of people from voting years after serving their sentences. and criminal disenfranchisement laws, many of which were enacted during Reconstruction, esp Designed to weaken black voting blocs. This is why there are often campaigns to uphold criminal disenfranchisement laws Lean on racist tropesLabeling those with felony convictions as inherently dangerous to society while disproportionately disenfranchising black, brown, and poor people.
When an average person is labeled a “criminal,” that term carries far more weight throughout their lives than it does for Trump. Once people leave prison, there are many barriers to re-entry into society, and the stigma that comes with just a felony conviction makes it difficult to reintegrate into society. From voting rights to housing to employment and education opportunities, people with felony convictions Faced with severe discrimination.
Over the past decade or so, many organizations have been pushing people to stop using the word “felon” to describe people because it reduces a person’s identity to a single category. Media outlets are also discouraged from using the term. Marshall Project founding editor-in-chief Bill Keller, for example, Written in 2016 That “words that not too long ago were used without hesitation could be considered derogatory: ‘colored,’ ‘illegal.’ ‘Felon’ is a word that makes the person synonymous with crime.
So how would Harris talk about Trump’s crimes?
One of the obstacles to distilling the “prosecutor vs. criminal” election is that Harris’ own record as a prosecutor underscores exactly why those labels aren’t so black and white. And while some voters might like to see a prosecutor at work, others in his coalition — especially progressive voters — are simply not fans of his tough-on-crime credentials. That is especially true in cases where he Pressed to uphold the wrongful conviction which was won through prosecutorial misconduct.
“I think so [the prosecutor versus felon] creating a gloss on many of the nuances of what prosecutors do,” said Wanda Bartram, a communications strategist at the Prison Policy Initiative. And it’s coming at a time when we’re starting to see the gains from electing truly progressive prosecutors.
None of this means Harris should avoid mentioning Trump’s crimes. Instead, the focus should be on his campaign while drawing contrasts between the candidates. But to do this effectively, Democrats need to move past broadly portraying Trump as a “criminal” and talk more specifically about what Trump actually did — and how his corruption deceived voters.
“The problem with reducing the race to prosecutor vs. criminal between two candidates is that it’s turning the election into a soundbite rather than a real judgment about the values and platforms and policies the voters in front of them run and own,” said Vera Action’s Rahman. “And voters deserve more and want more than soundbites.”
While the video played at the DNC Monday night looks like a slick ad for a law-and-order campaign, it also highlights why Trump has been held accountable in civil court and convicted in criminal court of his misdeeds. “He lies, he rips off staff, he sexually assaults women,” the video says. “He cheated in business, he cheated on his wife with a porn star and paid her off so the American people wouldn’t find out during the election.”
The more specific Harris is, the more effective his message will be. After all, being convicted of a crime does not disqualify someone from running for public office, and it does not mean that someone is inherently unfit to serve. But the specifics of what Trump has done — the lies and fraud — make a stronger case against him than any single label.
