As Democrats lurch into the last 15 weeks of the campaign with a new nominee, they may be hoping that Kamala Harris can offer them something like a clean slate, a fresh start to pivot toward a message that will recapture the trio of Midwestern battlegrounds (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin) that will decide this presidential election. But Harris has a lot less room to pivot than they might hope for, little time to do it in, and no proven capacity to even try.
There are really two Harris records. One is her own record as California attorney general (2011–16), U.S. senator (2017–20), and presidential candidate (2019). The other is the Biden-Harris record since 2021, in which she has done nothing to distinguish or separate herself from the general policies of the administration, its outcomes, and its long-running cover-up of the president’s decline.
The Harris record is arch-progressive in ways characteristic of a California Democrat from the most left-wing part of the state. About the only thing that seems remotely centrist about her record, if you squint, is that her zealous use of prosecutorial powers distinguishes her from a subsequent generation of defund-the-police activists and Soros-backed prosecutors. But even leaving aside the problems in her law-enforcement record, she undercut that in 2020 by directing supporters to donate to a fund to bail out rioters.
The Biden-Harris record, while it is larded with progressive excesses, has at least avoided some of the pure, uncut leftism that Harris backed previously, such as abolishing private health insurance, banning fracking, and adding justices to the Supreme Court. But the Biden record is enormously unpopular, associated with runaway inflation and a porous southern border.
Harris can run away from one of these records, if she tries hard enough. But it will be very hard to run away from both at once and forge an entirely new political persona more in line with the politics of the Midwest. Given a year and a half to campaign, Harris could undoubtedly find some ways to separate herself from standard progressivism and go forth with her own signature proposals. She could explain where she has changed her mind from past stances, and why; she could at least implicitly criticize her own administration’s record on particular points. Doing so in just over three months will be a very tall order. And in the interim, she will be cross-pressured by progressives who used their leverage over a weakened Biden to extract concessions, and will try the same with Harris. It’s much more likely that Harris will just have to run the fall campaign on factory settings.
All of this will require remarkable political skill and a sensitive feel for the political center of the electorate. If so, Harris is the wrong person for the job. In her first election to statewide office as attorney general, in 2010, she got 46.1 percent of the vote and won by 0.8 percent. As a Democrat in California. Sure, it was a red-wave year, but she was the only statewide Democrat who couldn’t manage a majority. When she ran for the Senate in 2016, California’s unique system kept Republicans off the November ballot; Harris got 39.9 percent of the vote in the June jungle primary, and then was able t0 run against a fellow Democrat, Loretta Sanchez, in the fall. In 2019, her presidential bid collapsed without visible support anywhere. In 2020, she joined a ticket that was already ahead in the polls (further ahead than it finished on Election Day) and was scarcely visible in the fall campaign. Nothing in her record suggests any experience in or facility for appealing to moderate non-coastal Democrats, let alone independents or disaffected Republicans.
