Vice President Kamala Harris has leaned into the prosecutorial experience she once downplayed. Congressional Democrats are highlighting their embrace of law enforcement. And the party has uniformly sought to blame Republicans for an illegal immigration crisis that unfolded on Democrats’ watch and followed the implementation of Democratic policies.

The Democrats’ messaging pivot reflects the massive shift in the politics around crime, judicial norms, and law and order in just the past few years. Polls show voters have soured considerably on permissive criminal justice reform and open borders. But the Biden administration and Democrats at the congressional and state levels have offered few actual policy changes to match their rhetorical shift. 

“My guess is that they have looked at where they are most vulnerable in public polling in the swing states, and it is that there’s a significant public concern about safety, which is related both to crime and the open border, and so Democrats want to get on the right side of that issue,” Charles Lipson, a political science professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, told the Washington Examiner. “But they don’t want to say anything substantively about imprisoning criminals, even violent criminals, about changing bail laws, and certainly not going back to ‘broken windows’ policing, so what they’re trying to do, and indeed I think what most of Kamala Harris’s campaign is trying to do in general, is to present an attractive facade with nothing behind it.”