Progressives embrace Harris despite early pivot to the center

Top progressives in Congress are embracing Vice President Kamala Harris despite a tack to the middle in the early days of her run for president.

Harris has attempted to reverse or clarify many of the liberal views she espoused five years ago, during her run in the 2020 presidential primary. On Friday, her campaign disavowed her previous support for a ban on fracking, while a campaign spokesperson told the Washington Examiner she would not pursue the forced buyback of military-style assault weapons or single-payer healthcare, an issue she has waffled on for years. 

At a campaign rally in Atlanta on Tuesday, Harris promised to sign into law a bipartisan compromise on the border that was opposed by Republicans, but also progressives.

The pivot suggests Harris will run in the more centrist image of President Joe Biden, who dropped out of the race earlier this month following his disastrous debate performance. It also suggests Democrats see a liability in her comments as Republicans seek to define her as a “San Francisco radical.”

The attempts to insulate Harris from those critiques have not cost her with progressive heavyweights, however, even those who had been holding out for commitments that she would embrace an agenda that champions their top priorities.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who ran to the left of her in the 2020 primary, declined to say whether he was disappointed with the shift, merely quipping at the Capitol on Tuesday, “I’m disappointed that I’m late to a vote.”

But he endorsed her run for president on Saturday, just as Harris’s campaign was distancing itself from her prior policy stances.

Other progressive lawmakers, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), gave Harris latitude for rejecting single-payer healthcare. Harris embraced Sanders’s Medicare for All proposal in 2019 and was a co-sponsor of the bill two years earlier, but eventually rejected the idea of eliminating private plans, a position her campaign reiterated on Tuesday.

“It’s not where we are right now,” Warren, another original co-sponsor who ran against Harris in the 2020 primary, told the Washington Examiner. Instead, Warren, who supports the bill to this day, espoused an incrementalist approach focused on preserving the gains Democrats made under Biden and, before him, President Barack Obama.

“I see it as we need, as Democrats, to fight for every change that we can make that lowers costs for American families, and to push back against the Republicans who want to take away healthcare, take away student loan debt cancellation, take away $35 insulin, take away the improvements that we’ve been able to get,” she said.

The support reflects the pragmatic inclination of progressives during the Biden era. Sanders lost two runs for president crusading against the Democratic establishment but has proceeded to use his political capital to exact concessions from the party.

In 2020, that was a policy blueprint he crafted with Biden to guide his presidency after Sanders agreed to drop out of the primary. With Harris, Sanders held out his endorsement until a full week after she clinched the delegates to replace Biden in the hope she would provide “specificity” on her views.

His wish list items include expanding Medicare to include dental and vision as well as a nationwide cap on rent. It is not clear what commitments, if any, Harris made to earn Sanders’s support.

Harris had embraced most progressive priorities during her 2020 run for president. She was part of a crowded Democratic field trying to differentiate themselves by running further to the left, a reputation she bolstered with her voting record in the Senate.

But this time, she enters the presidential race in the throes of the general election, when candidates often moderate their views to appeal to a broader electorate.

The abandonment of aspirational pieces of legislation such as Medicare for All may not be satisfying to the progressive voters who want to see a wholesale overhaul of climate and healthcare policy. But they do allow her to dangle enough changes to satisfy her base while neutralizing, to some extent, the warnings of Republicans who say she would crash the economy or take away rights with her proposals.

On firearms legislation, for example, Harris still supports a ban on assault-style weapons, as well as universal background checks and red flag laws.

Former President Donald Trump has already signaled he will use Harris’s prior positions to pillory her as a radical, while video footage from the 2020 primary, already being used by Republicans in campaign advertising, could overwhelm any effort by Harris to tack to the middle.

“She pledged to ban fracking — no fracking, oh, that’s going to do well in Pennsylvania, isn’t it?” Trump said Saturday at a rally in Minnesota. “Remember, Pennsylvania, I said it. She wants no fracking. She’s on tape. The beautiful thing about modern technology is when you say something, you’re screwed if it’s bad.”

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) downplayed Harris’s evolution on healthcare, calling her views today a matter of building a winning coalition. Meanwhile, other Democrats have brought up Trump’s own attempts to moderate his campaign, including his rejection of a federal abortion ban.

“I think that what she’s saying is, she’s gonna be president of the United States, she has to deliver compromises and find something that works,” Booker said of Harris. “So, she’s gonna do everything she can to expand healthcare access to people. I don’t think that’s a big change.”

Haisten Willis contributed to this story.