Democratic Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett said during a Monday podcast that former Vice President Kamala Harris’ background as a prosecutor hurt her standing with black men during the 2024 campaign.
Harris received 77% of the black male vote in 2024, compared to 82% for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and 79% for Joe Biden in 2020, according to CNN exit polls. Crockett, on “The Chuck ToddCast,” said she believed “misogyny” influenced male voters of all races, but particularly said she thought her career as a prosecutor alienated black male voters. (RELATED: ‘Never Seen Anything Like This’: Crucial Voter Groups Fleeing Democrats, Says Stunned Fmr Clinton Pollster)
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“The very first polling briefing that we had, with a pollster that I trust a lot — he briefed the black caucus, and he said that one of the issues that he was running into with black and brown communities was that she had been a prosecutor … There was definitely some resume stuff that disallowed her from being able to build the type of rapport of trust within these marginalized communities that historically have been targeted,” Crockett said.
Host Chuck Todd noted that Harris took heat for her prosecutor past during her 2020 presidential campaign.
“So literally, early numbers that we were given — and I promise you, I really do trust this pollster — said that. So if you think back to my DNC [Democratic National Convention] speech, one of the things that they actually — the guidance that I was given — was to actually lean into her being a prosecutor,” Crockett added. “And I’m like, ‘Oh hell no.’ I’m like, ‘That is not helpful.’ Right? And so when I did it, I did a bit of a swing on it, right, as a criminal defense attorney. And I explained, like, this is the kind of prosecutor all would have wanted, right? Like, so I built it that way.”
“But I did talk to some people— even a prominent rapper — who was like, ‘I’m gonna support her, but I don’t feel comfortable openly endorsing her, but I’m gon’ vote for her.’ And I’m like, ‘Why?’ And so he told me that one of the issues was just kind of, like, the prosecutor thing … I think that what had been baked in about the vice president was that she was a prosecutor,” she continued. “They did not know very much beyond that. And when you’re talking about 107 days of a campaign, it’s kind of hard to get that across.”
While Harris was the San Francisco district attorney from 2004 to 2010, her prosecutors secured nearly 2,000 convictions for marijuana-related offenses, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. She also previously advocated for prosecuting truancy cases, with the policy leading to the prosecution of parents whose children were often missing from school, according to NBC News.
Former President Barack Obama in October urged black men to support Harris while speaking at a Pittsburgh-area campaign office, asserting he believed a factor for their hesitation was they weren’t “feeling the idea of having a woman as president,” according to CNN. He received backlash from Democrats in response.
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