Kamala Harris’s Police Reform Push Becomes Running Mate Tryout

Kamala Harris’s push for police reform in the Senate is shaping up as an audition for the job of Joe Biden’s vice president, as she makes herself a highly public voice for change after years as a no-nonsense prosecutor.

By promoting a bill to ban police chokeholds and make other changes -- and by publicly clashing with a senior Senate Republican over the legislation -- Harris has put herself front and center in the debate over congressional efforts to change police behavior.

The reform debate burnishes the former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general as a social-justice activist. It also protects the Biden campaign from potential criticism of her efforts while in those jobs to slow innocence bids and punish parents whose children were truants, among other contentious actions.

It’s put Harris, 55, front-and-center as Biden chooses a running mate. She’s become a top Biden surrogate, co-hosted one of his most successful fundraisers, appeared at a health care event on Friday with Jill Biden, and spoken on late-night talk shows about the need for police reform.

“She’s inoculating herself,” said Cornell Belcher, a strategist who was the Democratic National Committee’s lead pollster in 2006 and served on the polling teams of both of former President Barack Obama’s campaigns. “She’s finding her voice and her footing in this space. She’s talking about how these sorts of injustices are why she went into the line of work that she went into. Without the spotlight of a presidential race, she’s having a better time defining who she is.”