If Joe Biden stepped aside, how would Kamala Harris’ record affect her candidacy?

Reality Check is a Bee series holding officials and organizations accountable and shining a light on their decisions. Have a tip? Email realitycheck@sacbee.com.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ record, both as vice president and as a state and local official in California, is under new scrutiny as calls mount for President Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race. Harris is a strong favorite to succeed him if that happens, polls say. Former President Donald Trump has ramped up attacks on Harris in recent days as questions about Biden’s candidacy continue.

Being a vice president historically means being in the shadows. It often means taking on a single task — Dick Cheney helped shape President George W. Bush’s foreign policy, Al Gore helped “reinvent government” for President Bill Clinton and so on. But it’s difficult to separate their record from those of their bosses.

Harris’ biggest talking points in the Biden administration have been about abortion, even as Republicans have dubbed her the “border czar” for a Central American migration assignment she was handed during her first few months in office.

Biden tapped her in March 2021 to lead an effort to ease the “root causes” of migration from Central America. But the effort has been criticized and mocked by Republicans, and immigration analysts don’t see the effort as much about the border.

Harris on ‘root causes’ of migration

Harris is not the “border czar,” explained Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the nonpartisan research Migration Policy Institute.

“The idea that by focusing on addressing the root cause of migration, you’re going to work on issues the border is really not the same,” Ruiz Soto said in an interview. “They’re both important.”

“The work that Vice President Harris has been doing has been mostly window dressing, really,” said Julie Kirchner, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigration nonprofit.

Early in the Biden administration, Harris was tapped to lead a national strategy that would improve conditions in three Central American countries — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — and encourage migrants to stay.

The Root Causes Strategy includes five pillars: addressing economic issues, combating corruption and bolstering democracy, improving human and labor rights, reducing violence and combating sexual and gender-based violence.

Speaking in Guatemala alongside President Alejandro Giammattei in June 2021, her first foreign trip as vice president, Harris was blunt with migrants: “Do not come. Do not come.”

“The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders,” she said, drawing criticism from those who said it ignored people’s right to seek asylum at the border.

This March, the White House said it was on track to meet its goals set in 2021 to give $4 billion to the Central American countries in four years. The strategy of engaging with Central America is not a new one across different administrations, Ruiz Soto said. Like past in White House’s strategy’s, this administration’s hasn’t been developed equally across the countries.

“This has been a recurring problem of U.S. relations in Central America,” Ruiz Soto said, “there hasn’t been a consistent partner.”

Ruiz Soto said other members of the administration, such as Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, have been “more visible and important” on the southern border. He said that the “root causes” strategy was effective in addressing different issues within those countries.

The White House added that Harris has continued working on the strategy, having worked with the private sector to generate more than $5.2 billion in investments for job creation, internet access and bringing people into the formal financial system to increase economic opportunity in the region.

“Not to say that those efforts aren’t important in some respects, but that’s not managing our border,” Kirchner said in an interview on Thursday, “that’s not securing our border, that is not stemming the chaos.”

Immigration has become a focal point of the 2024 election.

“First, she was put in charge of the U.S. border security. She never showed up,” Trump alleged at a rally Tuesday.

PolitiFact rated Trump’s statement as false, given that Harris’s task was to address root causes of migration from three Central American countries, not the border.

“Vice President Harris is proud to be President Biden’s running mate,” Rhyan Lake, deputy communications director for Harris on the presidential campaign said in a statement sent to The Bee Thursday. “No matter what false attacks Trump and his extreme allies make, she will continue to defend the Biden-Harris record and prosecute the case against Donald Trump.”

Harris on abortion

Immigration was not one of Harris mainstay issues before taking the office of vice president, said Dan Morain, a veteran California journalist and author of the biography “Kamala’s Way.”

“Immigration was not her issue,” Morain said in an interview on Wednesday. “She had been to the border. She had talked about transnational gangs. This was an issue that she talked about as California Attorney General, but it wasn’t one of her go-to issues.”

On the other hand, he said, it makes sense that Harris would be a leader for the administration on abortion issues.

“Without a doubt, women’s health issues, that’s been a recurrent issue for her,” Morain said.

Since 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned the 49-year precedent of federal protections set by Roe v. Wade, abortion access has been a key campaign issue for Democrats. Harris has traveled the country as part of her Fight for Reproductive Freedoms Tour talking about abortion access, warning about what a second Trump administration could do to abortion rights and calling state laws limiting access “Trump abortion bans.”

Since the Supreme Court decision in 2022, the White House said, she has held more than 90 events in 21 states, bringing together elected officials, health care providers, faith leaders, students and advocates.

Even before Harris became District Attorney of San Francisco, she specialized in prosecuting child sexual assault cases in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. She continued prosecuting domestic violence perpetrators, child abusers and sex traffickers as chief of the Division on Children and Families at the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office.

Throughout her time as California Attorney General and a senator, Harris worked on efforts for women’s rights, maternal health and other related issues.

The White House listed several other issues that Harris has led on — including gun violence prevention, diplomacy, climate change and criminal justice reform — in response to questions about this story.

Harris before being VP

To learn more about Harris’ stances on specific issues, it’s useful to look at her years as a state and local official.

Harris has been criticized for changing, or at least muddling, her positions on some major issues prior to the vice presidency.

She was San Francisco’s top prosecutor from 2004 to 2011, then California attorney general from 2011 until 2017. Harris was elected to the Senate in 2016 and served there until being sworn in as vice president in January 2021.

She ran for president in the 2020 campaign cycle before being tapped as Biden’s pick for vice president. She’s the first woman and Black and South Asian American vice president.

Throughout her career, Harris promoted herself as a tough-on-crime attorney. At the 2016 Democratic convention, she told a New York delegation she was California’s “top cop,” a moniker that many in the state’s communities of color criticized.

When she became a U.S. senator in 2017, Harris became a leading voice in a bid to reform the nation’s criminal justice system, notably after George Floyd was killed by a police office in Minneapolis in 2020. The White House said that Harris spent her career trying to make the criminal justice system more just through this work — trying to reduce recidivism, rebuild after prison and improve children’s civil rights in the juvenile justice system.

Some other evolving Harris positions:

▪ Health care. Probably the biggest stumble of her brief presidential campaign in 2019 involved her position on Medicare for All.

Soon after joining the Senate, she supported the Medicare for All plan of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt. Harris tweeted “It’s just the right thing to do.”

She reiterated that view two years later when she started her presidential run. “I believe the solution — and I actually feel very strongly about this — is that we need to have Medicare for All. That’s just the bottom line,” she told a CNN town hall.

In June, during the Democrats’ first debate, Harris raised her hand when moderator Lester Holt of NBC asked “Who here would abolish their health insurance in favor of a government-run plan?”

But after the debate, Harris said she misinterpreted the question. “In my vision of Medicare for All, it includes private insurance where people can have supplemental insurance,” she said.

A month after that, she wrote in a post on Medium, “We will allow private insurers to offer Medicare plans as a part of this system that adhere to strict Medicare requirements on costs and benefits.”

▪ Legalizing marijuana. She opposed a 2010 California ballot initiative to legalize pot. But as part of her criminal justice reform package in 2019, she had a different view.

“It is past time to end the failed war on drugs, and it begins with legalizing marijuana,” she said, adding emphasis with the italics.

The Biden administration started the federal process of rescheduling weed from the most tightly regulated Schedule I to less regulated Schedule III in May.

And at a White House event in March, Harris reiterated a position she’s held recently: “Nobody should have to go to jail for smoking weed.”

▪ Death penalty. Harris has long opposed the death penalty, and was embroiled in controversy as a San Francisco prosecutor when she would not seek the punishment against a suspect accused of killing a police officer.

When she ran for attorney general in 2010, many in the law enforcement area opposed her. She worked on that relationship, and four years later, after a federal judge ruled California’s death penalty unconstitutional, Harris appealed the decision.

“It is not supported by the law, and it undermines important protections that our courts provide to defendants,” she said at the time. “This flawed ruling requires appellate review.”

Her 2019 campaign platform included seeking a federal moratorium on the death penalty.

If Harris were to become the Democratic nominee instead of Biden, her past quotes and record would come under even more scrutiny than they are now.

“She can try (to boast about her record) but there’s a lot of videotape out there,” said Brad Coker, managing director of Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy in Florida. “We live in an age where you can go on the internet and find anything she said in public.”