During a presidential primary debate five years ago, then-Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard skewered Kamala Harris as a hypocrite who transformed from a tough-on-crime prosecutor to a progressive reformer. Harris was widely seen as failing to effectively defend herself, helping create an image of her as a politician who goes where the winds blow.
The clash raised questions about whether Harris — who had earned a reputation as a fierce interrogator while needling Republicans at Senate hearings and clotheslining Joe Biden at a 2019 debate — could fight back when she was the one on defense.
Some of Harris’ allies and former aides say that the vice president learned from it — and that her widely praised face-off with Mike Pence late that election cycle in 2020 proves she has improved as a debater.
Harris’ success at the debate on Tuesday, when she will face off for the first time against former President Donald Trump, may depend on which debater shows up — the one who took on Pence, or fell to Gabbard.
Gabbard, who has left the Democratic Party and reinvented herself as a MAGA celebrity, is now helping Trump prepare for his showdown with Harris. Rania Batrice, who briefly served as Gabbard’s campaign manager during her presidential run and has since disavowed her, predicted that the former lawmaker will counsel Trump “to take a page from her 2019 playbook and lean into the hypocrisy angle.”
That advice would fit with the battle lines drawn by the Trump campaign in recent weeks. The former president and his team have repeatedly attacked Harris as a liberal flip-flopper, despite the fact that Trump has himself changed course on a number of issues, including, most recently, abortion. But Harris has given him an opening, having shifted her views on Medicare for All, fracking and other policies since her first presidential run.
At the 2019 debate in Detroit, Gabbard laced into Harris’ time as attorney general of California, saying she “put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.” She also accused Harris of blocking evidence “that would have freed an innocent man from death row” and keeping “people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor.”
Some of Gabbard’s critiques were deemed misleading by fact-checkers. Harris dismissed them on stage, but with no chutzpah. She stumbled through an answer in which she said that she was proud of her record of “significantly reforming the criminal justice system of a state of 40 million people, which became a national model.”
The result was devastating for Harris, who in the prior debate had landed a punishing and memorable blow to Biden over busing for school desegregation.
Harris’ team wasn’t surprised by Gabbard’s attack, according to interviews with six Harris’ 2020 campaign alumni and allies granted anonymity to describe her thinking then and now. In the days before it occurred, Gabbard had been targeting Harris with critiques of her prosecutorial record, many of them wildly off-base, but on topics like crime and punishment. The broadsides threatened to undermine Harris with progressive voters who she was seeking to court.
But in debate preparations, Harris’ staffers were divided over how to handle Gabbard, with some advisers arguing she should forcefully respond and others seeing it as dignifying an opponent whose polling and fundraising was so anemic that she wouldn’t last long in the primary. When the moment came, Harris ultimately sided with the latter.
In remarks to a TV anchor in the aftermath of the Gabbard exchange, Harris suggested that she didn’t want to punch down on the low-polling Gabbard.
“This is going to sound immodest, but obviously I’m a top-tier candidate and so I did expect that I’d be on the stage and take some hits tonight,” Harris said. “When people are at 0 or 1 percent or whatever she might be at, so I did expect to take some hits tonight.”
But by not engaging, Harris gave the impression that she wasn’t willing to fight for herself. In the days after that 2019 debate, Harris acknowledged to her team that it was a mistake, and one she would not make again, former aides said. And in ensuing debates, she leapt at opportunities to mix it up in the multi-candidate field.
A Gabbard spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Trump’s campaign declined to comment about debate strategy, only pointing to a recent statement by his senior adviser, Jason Miller, that “we’ll see you in Philadelphia next Tuesday.”
Even now, some of her allies dismiss the skirmish with Gabbard as a one-off that bears no resemblance to the upcoming debate with Trump. And while the Gabbard moment remains a sore memory for Harris some alumni, several point to the debate with Pence in 2020 as a counterweight.
She attacked him for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and famously said, “Mr. vice president, I’m speaking” when he interrupted her.
Current and former aides and allies who know Harris were insulted to even be asked about Gabbard, dismissing her anew as an attention-seeking also-ran who is willing to help Trump try to play mind games.
“I’m sure every debate teaches you something,” said a former Harris aide. “Obviously, being on stage with someone who is so completely untethered to reality or the facts in a Democratic primary was a unique experience.”
Some Democrats outside of Harris’ camp expressed anxiety about the upcoming debate, noting that she has only participated in one major sit-down interview since becoming the Democratic nominee. But others said they were confident, pointing to Harris’ strong campaign rollout and what they described as a star-studded team advising her ahead of Tuesday.
JA Moore, a Harris ally who traveled to 2019 primary debates with her team and has stayed in touch with her, said the vice president has vastly upped her game since being decked by Gabbard: “I strongly believe she’s going to unsettle Trump.”
And James Carville, the Democratic strategist who was a top adviser to former President Bill Clinton, said Harris performed well against Pence and described Harris’ preparations for this debate as “really good.”
“She’s grown a lot in the last four years,” he said. “I’ll just come out and declare: I have high expectations.”
Batrice, the former Gabbard campaign manager, sharply rebuked her former boss as herself a hypocrite, saying that “not seeing who Tulsi Gabbard really was and is might be one of my biggest regrets.”
Still, the moment hangs over Harris’ rocketing momentum. “When Tulsi Gabbard can land a basically unanswered direct hit on ‘hypocrisy,’ something has gone terribly wrong,” Batrice said. “Obviously, she has to be prepared.”
