Kamala Harris, at the age of 38, left a plum city attorney role in San Francisco to run for office and has never looked back. In rapid succession, she ascended from district attorney to California attorney general, then to the U.S. Senate and vice presidency. She is now the establishment favorite to serve as the Democratic presidential nominee this year.

How would Harris govern? What does she believe?

It’s a question that stumps even Democratic insiders who have worked with her for years. In her current role in the Biden administration, she handles a mixed portfolio, from the border to abortion rights to national security. Few would say she has left a lasting mark on policy.

Her time as a local elected official suggests a wide spectrum of views. Harris ran a ruthless campaign in her first bid for office in 2003, ripping incumbent Terrence Hallinan as a friend to criminals. “It is not progressive to be soft on crime,” Harris said on the campaign trail, promising to get tough on gangs and prosecute even anti-war protesters. Her campaign distributed flyers mocking her opponent for lenient plea deals, complete with images of tattooed gang members and homicide chalk lines.

As a city prosecutor and later as state attorney general, Harris led a harsh intervention against chronic truancy, justified by the fact that a high proportion of violent criminals were high school dropouts. She pushed for criminal penalties for parents whose children missed too much school. She also pushed for the transfer of undocumented youth charged with felonies to ICE for deportation.

In the sometimes insular world of San Francisco politics, she was a moderate or even conservative voice on public safety and crime issues.

But in the Senate and on the national campaign trail, Harris walked back her previous tough-on-crime record in the shadow of the Trump presidency. Harris championed decarceration efforts and even gestured toward support for the “Abolish ICE” movement. ​​“We need to probably think about starting from scratch,” she told MSNBC. Unlike her first campaign, Harris’s presidential campaign, in line with the rising status of identity politics in progressive circles, stressed her focus to “expose racial disparities in the criminal justice system.”

As I’ve documented in previous investigations of Harris’s record, her rhetoric sometimes failed to match her record. She was among the first to create a district attorney-level environmental justice unit to prosecute polluters in low-income, minority neighborhoods. Yet, her office instead went after small-time defendants, none of whom had spilled a drop of hazardous material in the communities she claimed to protect.

Harris’s campaign has juxtaposed her record with that of Trump. In some cases, the shots are fair-minded. Harris as attorney general prosecuted predatory for-profit college companies that had gamed the government loan system to saddle students with debt despite providing low-quality educational programs. In contrast, Trump previously ran a high-cost “Trump University” program that delivered pricey courses on learning his real estate secrets. He later settled for $25 million over claims that he deceived customers – a fact hammered by Harris during her campaign.

Harris, in one of her television ads, said she “prosecuted sex criminals – [Trump] is one.” That history is a bit more complicated. Harris did prioritize child abuse and sex abuse cases as a prosecutor working in the Bay Area, but when it came to systemic abuse in the Catholic Church, she punted. She declined a request by victims to share personnel records that could have helped bring justice to cases past the statute of limitations.

Over the last few hours, since President Biden’s decision and the flood of Democratic endorsements for Harris to replace him, reporters have provided an avalanche of coverage revolving around Harris’s racial and gender identity.

“Harris could become first Black woman, first person of South Asian descent to be president,” headlined the Associated Press, reporting on Harris’s heritage. Born to a Jamaican economist father, she was raised primarily by her mother, an immigrant from India who eventually settled in Berkeley to study cancer research.

Even in this dynamic, there are two Kamalas.

In her first bid for office, Harris leaned into her Indian background. She introduced herself to the local press as “Kamala Devi Harris,” using her full name. “In terms of Indian culture, my name represents the beautiful lotus flower,” she said at one of her first campaign events. “I grew up with a strong Indian culture,” she told Asian Week in 2003. 

By the time she ran for the presidency in 2019, the mention of her Indian background had been removed from her campaign. An archive of her website shows that her biography listed her as the “second African American woman in history to be elected to the U.S. Senate.” There was no hint of her South Asian lineage.