Vice President Kamala Harris managed to become the presumptive Democratic nominee in record time after President Biden was forced to drop out of the race, and now, with breathless speed, she is dramatically reversing positions that she once claimed were strongly held when she last ran for president. Whether these new positions last longer than the old ones is something voters won’t know until after the election.
When Harris entered the Senate in 2017, it was the heyday of anti-Trump resistance on the left. With the aging socialist Senator Bernie Sanders having given eventual loser Hillary Clinton a run for her money in the prior year’s primaries, there was a growing belief that the next Democratic nominee would have to appeal to his movement. As a freshman senator with presidential aspirations and with a prosecutor image that alienated some on the left, Harris wasn’t going to miss a beat. In a short period of time, she racked up a voting record that ranked her as the most progressive U.S. senator.
Harris was one of 16 co-sponsors of Sanders’s socialized health-care plan branded as “Medicare for All,” which would have cost $34 trillion over a decade, according to the left-wing Urban Institute. It would also have necessitated kicking about 180 million people off their private insurance plans. She also signed on to the Senate version of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s radical Green New Deal.
In 2019, as the Democratic primaries took off, there was fierce competition to the left of Joe Biden. Harris dug into her support for banning private insurance before (unconvincingly) trying to take it back. She called for banning fracking and offshore drilling. She said those who crossed the border illegally shouldn’t be treated as criminals and called for getting rid of ICE and starting from scratch. She advocated banning AR-15s and confiscating them (under the euphemism “mandatory buybacks”).
What were once seen as necessary stances to woo a rabid progressive base in the 2020 primaries are now general-election liabilities. And so, for about 100 more days, Harris wants to be unburdened by what has been.
The New York Times reports, “In addition to changing her position on fracking, campaign officials said she now backed the Biden administration’s budget requests for increased funding for border enforcement; no longer supported a single-payer health insurance program; and echoed Mr. Biden’s call for banning assault weapons but not a requirement to sell them to the federal government.” This is an implicit acknowledgement that Biden’s unpopular presidency is still less politically radioactive than Harris’s even more left-wing 2019 platform.
There are two advantages Harris has that could help her pull off these extraordinary flip-flops. One is that she was able to essentially secure the Democratic nomination by acclamation, and so she will get a free pass from within her party. Had she been in a protracted primary fight, she would have to weigh the risk of blowback against any attempts to move to the center. The second issue is that the press has shown itself to be embarrassingly in the tank for Harris, and it is unlikely she will be subject to as much scrutiny for the reversals as a standard candidate.
On the other hand, there are so many video clips of her stating her prior stances in such an unequivocal way (for instance, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking”) that her prior positions will be easy to cut into ads and plaster all over the airwaves — as Donald Trump and Republicans are already doing. Furthermore, it will be harder for her to pose as moderate when she is still taking some of the extreme positions she staked out in 2019, such as her endorsement of Court-packing just this week (by way of imposing term limits that would disproportionately apply to conservative justices).
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