When asked about her apparent evolution, Ms. Harris said the political environment had shifted — not her core ideology.

“I was swimming against the current, and thankfully the currents have changed,” she said. “The winds are in our sails. And I’m riding that just like everybody else is — because it’s long overdue.”

Ms. Harris said the work of social justice activists, particularly Black Lives Matter protesters, had opened eyes across the country to realities of racial injustices. She was always aware of these injustices, Ms. Harris said, but she was working in a system that did not have the political will to correct them.

And she pointedly said her critics should remember the tough-on-crime political environment that dominated in the 1990s and early 2000s, during much of her career as a prosecutor. “If I want to get competitive about it,” she said, “I’d say to them, well, what were they saying about the system back in the ’90s? What were they doing to change the system in the ’90s?”

“But hey, if you’ve got, in the year of our Lord 2019, all the major candidates running for president of United States pushing for reforming the system? That’s a good thing,” she added.