As Kamala Harris seeks to become the first career prosecutor to win the presidency, she has faced persistent questions: What kind of prosecutor was she? And how would that background shape her presidency? Instead of fitting into the familiar categories, she has been campaigning as another first: the first white-collar-crime prosecutor in chief. Instead of policies to reverse mass incarceration, the signature objective of progressive prosecutors, her approach seems to be for more equal incarceration, a new twist on an old populist economic theme.

Ms. Harris’s campaign for president is translating — and maybe transforming — the tough-on-crime prosecutor archetype as the economy overshadows crime as the issue of the 2024 election. She is not only campaigning against Donald Trump as a white-collar criminal. She is also waging a populist campaign against white-collar crime and fraud, in contrast with Mr. Trump’s populism, which she describes as yet another kind of fraud. Her line about knowing “Donald Trump’s type” emphasizes America’s “fraudsters,” “cheaters” and “predators” of all kinds, and she pivots to her law enforcement record against banks, corporate fraud and white-collar crime as a prosecutor’s tools to address pocketbook issues.

Ms. Harris is leveling the economic playing field to achieve populist ends through America’s quintessentially conservative means: as a tough-on-crime prosecutor enforcing the law, implicitly threatening to lock “them” up, while telling crowds to stop the “lock him up” chants.

These themes were clearer in August, before and during the Democratic National Convention, but emphasized less recently. Undecided voters are still asking to know more about her and her policy specifics. As polls show that voters identify economic issues and inflation as the most important and Ms. Harris trails among voters who focus on the economy, she may need to return to the theme of law enforcement to promote economic opportunity and affordability.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about whether Ms. Harris fits into one of two categories of prosecutor: tough or progressive. Over her career as a prosecutor and as the California attorney general, Ms. Harris sometimes leaned into the labels “law and order” (especially in her 2003 race for San Francisco district attorney) and “progressive” (especially in 2019 and in some passages in her book “The Truths We Hold”). Some commentators have said that she has been “shifting” between the two, “repositioning” and “repackaging” herself, calling her “a political chameleon” or even “contradictory” on criminal justice.

But she has been consistently pragmatic and nonideological. A prosecutor’s approach should vary case by case and include an open-minded mix of policies.

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