The “prosecutor vs. felon” line isn’t the slam dunk Team Harris thinks it is

Since launching her presidential bid, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and its supporters have been eager to frame this election as one of a prosecutor versus a felon. It was among the themes of the first night of the Democratic National Convention on Monday. “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. This is the story of Donald Trump,” a deep-voiced narrator said in a video that blared to the audience at the United Center in Chicago. “We need a president who has spent her life prosecuting perpetrators like Donald Trump.”

The video was a play on what has become a part of Harris’s stump speech, in which she burnishes her legacy as a prosecutor. “I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she told a crowd in Philadelphia on August 6. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who scammed consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” Others have made the contrast between the two candidates more explicit. “The script writes itself: the prosecutor against the convicted felon,” California Sen. Alex Padilla told Vox last month.

The framing aims to create a stark split screen between Harris and Trump, showing how they both fall squarely on opposite ends of the law. But it’s not clear that this line of attack is effective, and there are real downsides to propagating the simplistic story of good versus evil in the context of prosecutors and felons.

That’s because it’s not always such a clear contrast. Prosecutors, for example, have a history of bending the rules to get a conviction, and thousands of people have been sent to prisons for crimes they did not commit. Which brings us to the term “felon,” a label that stigmatizes more than it describes — and does a real disservice to efforts to reform a broken justice system.

Let’s get something out of the way up front: Calling Trump a felon is not unfair to Trump personally. While there are millions of people who’ve been mistreated by the US justice system, Trump is not one of them. He has spent years, if not decades, skirting the law, yet he has still evaded any meaningful personal consequences for his misdeeds. Indeed, after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States, his status as above the law has the US judiciary’s seal of approval. 

But for others — particularly those living on the margins of society — the label “felon” can be a mark of injustice. It reduces a full human, even one who’s rehabilitated, to one of their worst moments, and it further stigmatizes people with a felony conviction as inherently dangerous and undeserving of a second chance.

“Nearly 20 million American citizens have a felony conviction, and 1 in 3 people across our country have some sort of record. Labeling people as ‘felons’ or using the word as a badge of honor for political purposes is a slap in the face to the millions of impacted individuals and families,” Desmond Meade, president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, wrote in a Time op-ed last month. “The truth is the label doesn’t harm Trump, as much as it harms the millions of other people living with felony convictions.”

“Felon” doesn’t hurt Trump — but it can hurt millions of others

When she ran for president in 2020, Harris tried to dub herself a “progressive prosecutor” — a label that didn’t stick because her record had some tough-on-crime bona fides that didn’t sit well with many progressive voters.

This time, however, Harris and her supporters don’t seem as shy about touting some of the tougher elements of her record as district attorney and attorney general. That’s why the “prosecutor versus felon” framing seems to be taking hold with little concern about how it might alienate some progressive voters or criminal justice reform advocates. 

The problem with the way a lot of people use the word “felon” — as some of Harris’s supporters are doing — is that it’s often used not just as a neutral descriptor but as an insult. And it’s an insult that leans on society’s existing prejudices about who “felons” are.

Take this telling example from the Trump campaign. Despite representing a candidate convicted of 34 felonies, the campaign — in one of its opening attacks against Tim Walz — criticized the Democratic vice presidential nominee for “embracing policies to allow convicted felons to vote.”

The Trump campaign is comfortable attacking “felons” despite Trump’s felony convictions precisely because of the tropes associated with the word “felon.” The campaign clearly knows that for many people, especially its supporters, the word isn’t associated with people like Trump — no matter how common white-collar crime is. 

“When most Americans think about who is in the criminal legal system, they envision somebody who is Black, who is poor, who is somebody who is ‘not like us,’” said Insha Rahman, director of Vera Action, a criminal justice reform advocacy group. “There’s an othering there that is inherent in calling somebody a ‘felon.’ It doesn’t stick to Donald Trump because he doesn’t fit those characteristics that are in people’s minds, but the danger is that it will stick to others and reinforce that stigma the more it’s thrown around.” 

American politicians have long weaponized the stigma around the term felon to bar millions of people from voting through the years, even after serving their sentences. And felony disenfranchisement laws, many of which cropped up during Reconstruction, were specifically designed to undermine Black voter blocs. That’s why campaigns to uphold felony disenfranchisement laws often lean on racist tropes, labeling people with felony convictions as inherently dangerous to society while disproportionately disenfranchising Black, brown, and poor people. 

When an average person is labeled a “felon,” the word carries a lot more weight throughout their life than it does for Trump. Once people leave prison, reentering society has many barriers, and the stigma that comes along with being seen only through a felony conviction makes it difficult to reintegrate into society. From voting rights to housing to employment and educational opportunities, people with felony convictions face harsh discrimination. 

Over the last decade or so, many organizations have been pushing people to stop using the word “felon” to describe individuals because of the way it reduces a person’s identity to a single category. Media outlets have also been discouraged from using the term. Bill Keller, the founding editor-in-chief of the Marshall Project, for example, wrote in 2016 that “Words that not long ago were used without qualms may come to be regarded as demeaning: ‘colored,’ ‘illegals.’ ‘Felon,’ which makes the person synonymous with the crime, is such a word.”

So how should Harris talk about Trump’s crimes?

One of the obstacles to boiling the election down to “prosecutor versus felon” is that Harris’s own record as a prosecutor underscores exactly why those labels aren’t so black and white. And while some voters may relish watching a prosecutor at work, others in her coalition — specifically progressive voters — are only reminded of her tough-on-crime bona fides that they’re not fans of. That’s particularly true of cases where she pushed to uphold wrongful convictions that had been won through prosecutorial misconduct.

“I do think that [the prosecutor versus felon] framing glosses over a lot of the nuances of what prosecutors do,” said Wanda Bertram, a communications strategist at the Prison Policy Initiative. And it’s coming at “a time when we have really only just begun to see the gains from electing actual progressive prosecutors.”

None of this means that Harris should avoid mentioning Trump’s crimes. To the contrary, that’s exactly what her campaign should focus on when drawing a contrast between the candidates. But to do it effectively, Democrats need to move past broadly painting Trump as a “felon” and talk more specifically about what Trump actually did — and how his corruption defrauded voters.

“The problem with reducing a race between two candidates to the prosecutor versus the felon is it’s turning the election and the choice voters have in front of them into a soundbite instead of an actual judgment on the values and the platform and the policies that either candidate runs on and owns,” Rahman, of Vera Action, said. “And voters deserve more and want more than soundbites.”

While the video that played at the DNC Monday night looked like a cheesy ad from a law-and-order campaign, it also highlighted why Trump has been held liable in civil court and convicted in criminal court for his misdeeds. “He lies, he rips off workers, he sexually abuses women,” the video said. “He cheats in business, he cheated on his wife with a pornstar and paid her off so the American people wouldn’t find out during an election.”

The more specific Harris is, the more effective her message will be. After all, being convicted of a felony doesn’t disqualify someone from running for public office, and it shouldn’t mean that someone is inherently unfit to serve anyway. But the specifics of what Trump did — the lies and the fraud — make a more compelling case against him than any one label could.