Why Kamala Harris’s Politics Are So Hard to Pin Down
9 min read
The Trump campaign says that Kamala Harris is a radical leftist. The far left fears that she’s a neoliberal cop. They can’t both be right.
But pinning down exactly where the vice president and Democratic nominee for president sits on the political spectrum is not so easy. She has gone from her first state-level election to the top of the presidential ticket in 14 years, far faster than Joe Biden, and she spent much of that time in positions that don’t provide an extensive record on a wide range of policy issues. During her 2020 presidential bid, she took some positions to the left of her prior record—several of which she’s now walked back in her current bid for president.
Robert L. Borosage, a progressive strategist and writer, told me that Harris’s career offers a good sense of her views on some discrete issues, but less of her overall vision.
“What she hasn’t had to do, and what she failed to do in 2020, was define a coherent, compelling message about where she wanted to take the country and how that was authentic to her,” he said. “That’s a big deal. And that remains to be seen.” This ambiguity is something that Donald Trump’s supporters have seized upon, pointing to the absence of a detailed platform on her campaign site (though Trump’s own platform is not exactly heavy on policy details either).
So far, most Democrats are excited about Harris: A recent poll found that 79 percent of them support her as nominee. (She is also running better with independents than Biden was.) Harris’s continued success may depend on the extent to which she is able to convince voters that she is a principled pragmatist, rather than a weather vane. To a great extent, these are simply different ways to describe the same political choices—one positive, the other pejorative. Whether a politician is seen as pragmatic or craven tends to be determined, in good part, by their charisma. During the 2012 presidential race, Mitt Romney—who had vacillated on various issues over the years—came to be seen as lacking conviction. In 2008, however, Barack Obama’s lofty rhetoric and personal appeal allowed Democrats across the spectrum to see their politics reflected in him, enabling him to unite the party.
As I spoke with figures hailing from different parts of the Democratic continuum, I was struck by how many of them had high hopes for Harris—if not confidence that she was perfectly aligned with them, then a belief that she could be molded to fit their preferences. That echoes the approach taken by Biden, who has managed to remain near the center of the Democratic Party over several decades. Progressives see a Biden who has been nudged left and believe Harris can be too. (Her selection of Tim Walz as running mate, rather than the more moderate Josh Shapiro, has delighted them.) Moderates and centrists see her as continuing Biden’s tradition of flexible and effective policy making unbeholden to ideology.
For most of her career, Harris’s political persona has been based not on an allegiance to any particular wing of the party but on her identity as a prosecutor. As a district attorney and later as a state attorney general in California, she sometimes refused to weigh in on matters that she believed were not in her purview. When she did, she was not doctrinaire. Her first campaign was a 2003 run for San Francisco district attorney against the incumbent, Terence Hallinan—her former boss. Hallinan positioned himself as a “progressive prosecutor” before that label existed, and Harris ran against him less as a law-and-order candidate than as an avatar of good governance and technocratic reform. She did take one notable left-leaning stance: She said she would never seek the death penalty.
That pledge was tested almost immediately after Harris defeated Hallinan and took office, when a San Francisco police officer was shot and killed on duty. Harris faced intense pressure to try for the death penalty for the killer. At the officer’s funeral, with Harris present, Senator Dianne Feinstein called the murder “the special circumstance called for by the death-penalty law.” Other leading Democrats agreed. Harris, however, held firm on her campaign commitment. (The killer was eventually convicted and sentenced to life without parole.) Even so, when she later became attorney general, she defended California’s prerogative to execute people in a lawsuit.
Where Harris’s detractors see callow triangulation, her defenders see earnest searching for solutions. Those defenders point to a long history of Harris making what they view as strategic, savvy decisions without getting bogged down by ideological fidelity. In a 2016 profile, the journalist Emily Bazelon noted that Harris was fond of saying she rejected false choices. In a 2010 book, Smart on Crime, Harris and her co-author attempted to sidestep a tough-on-crime–versus–progressive-reformist binary, arguing that policy makers could improve safety without draconian tactics. Corey Cook, a political scientist at Saint Mary’s College of California, told me that in Harris he sees a person who has an unchanging set of principles but is agnostic about how to enact them.
“She has a strong belief in human rights. She has a strong commitment around diversity and equity, right? She has a strong justice orientation,” he said. “But she’s very clearly a pragmatist. She’s somebody who looks for middle ground. She’s somebody who looks for, sort of, how do you make progress in smaller steps?”
When Harris ran for state attorney general, in 2010, she was considered the underdog. California is now thought of as the ultimate blue state, but the governor at the time was a Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and that year was bad for Democrats broadly. Her GOP opponent, Steve Cooley, was a well-respected district attorney in Los Angeles County, a metro area that dwarfs San Francisco. Harris beat Cooley not because of her ideological positioning, observers told me, but simply by outhustling him. She won by less than 1 percent of the vote.
Some members of both parties have used state-attorney-general offices as platforms for ideological warfare, but Harris did not, opting for a buttoned-up, less political approach. Her signature moment came when she rejected a national settlement with big banks over foreclosures, deeming it too small; she later settled for four times the amount California would have received.
“I think she was well in the mainstream, both of California and America,” former Governor Gray Davis, a moderate Democrat, told me.
When Barbara Boxer retired, in 2016, Harris easily won her U.S. Senate seat. For the first time, she was in a role where she had purview over a wide range of policy questions. Her voting record, according to DW-NOMINATE, a method developed by political scientists for scoring the votes of members of Congress, made her one of the very furthest left members of the Senate while she was there, exceeded only by Elizabeth Warren. Harris co-sponsored the Green New Deal and Senator Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All Act. She also voted against the USMCA, Trump’s replacement for NAFTA.
It’s an interesting data point, because few progressives claim her as one of their own and many of them distrust her; the party’s leftmost members of Congress were among those most eager for President Joe Biden to remain in the presidential race, after he gained their trust during his administration. Experts I talked with said that Harris’s DW-NOMINATE score far overstated her actual progressivism. (Once again, people are able to see her record in several plausible lights.) “Harris would not qualify as a member of the Squad,” the congressional scholar Norm Ornstein told me drily. “She’s certainly a liberal. She has no issues with a strong and assertive role for government. But she is far from being somebody who wants to destroy the private sector.” Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at the centrist Democratic group Third Way, argued that Harris was just faithfully representing her constituents. “She was a senator from California and so she took senator-from-California positions on stuff,” he told me.
Harris made her biggest splash not with legislation but on the Judiciary Committee, where she grilled Donald Trump’s nominees for the federal bench. At the 2018 confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, she brought the nominee up short with a reproductive-rights question: “Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?” she asked, a pointed reference to abortion restrictions. The fact that her sharp questioning, rather than any bills, are what made Harris’s name exemplifies how the focus for Democratic legislators during the Trump presidency was, above all, about resistance.
Her tough questioning of officials and nominees made her enough of a star that she decided to run for president in 2020. That’s where she got into the greatest trouble of her political career. In a large field of Democrats, her ideology (or absence of one) didn’t stick out. She was clearly not the most moderate candidate in the field (that was Biden), nor the youngest (Pete Buttigieg), nor the most liberal (Warren and Sanders). And the movement for criminal-justice reform after the murder of George Floyd further complicated Harris’s campaign. In every prior race, her résumé as a prosecutor had been an electoral asset. Now, for the first time, it was a liability.
Harris took up a series of positions that placed her on the left of the field, but they failed to win over left-wing primary voters, many of whom were already fans of Sanders, Warren, or Julián Castro, and who viewed some of her plans as ludicrously overengineered. Her big moment in the primary came when she attacked Biden’s record on school busing—but rather than push her advantage, she seemed unable to articulate what it was she supported and how it differed from Biden’s position. “One of the issues with her 2020 campaign was that she was trying to be everything to everyone,” Waleed Shahid, a strategist and former spokesperson for the Squad-aligned Justice Democrats, told me.
Harris withdrew from the race before any primaries, but Biden selected her as his running mate and she became the vice president. The Naval Observatory isn’t a great perch from which to define yourself politically. The White House sets policy, and the veep is obligated to support it. Her advisers grumbled early on that she was being given thankless portfolios, such as border security, that created political vulnerabilities but not opportunities. (Harris’s time as “border czar” has provided fodder for one of Republicans’ major attacks on her so far.)
“I don’t even know where Vice President Harris’s most passionate views are held. I can’t tell you what her signature policy proposal was,” Shahid told me. “In a lot of ways, it is symbolic of the larger trend in the Democratic Party of ideological confusion.”
Yet serving as vice president in the Biden administration has also in some ways solved this problem for her. First, it has handed her the Democratic nomination without her having to fight through a crowded primary like the 2020 one. The early weeks of her campaign suggest that she might be a more effective general-election candidate than primary candidate.
Second, it has given her a broad policy platform with which to identify. One of the paradoxes of the Biden administration, and a source of evident frustration for Biden himself, was that many of his policies were popular but voters evinced little trust in him or his ability to handle big issues. It won’t be simple, but Harris has a chance to capitalize on the popular parts of the agenda while shedding the negatives.
“She is the Biden administration right now, and she can’t be anything else, and I think people understand that,” Elaine Kamarck, a scholar of political parties at the Brookings Institution and a former Democratic staffer, told me. “The Republicans will try to dredge up everything she said prior to that, but the fact of the matter is her identity is now Biden.”
Maintaining broad appeal to different factions of Democrats and independents will not be easy, though the truncated campaign may make it easier. Besides, ideology may not be the paramount factor for most Democrats. Harris’s time as a prosecutor once again seems like an asset, as she promises to go after the convicted felon Trump, something that unites every faction of the party.
“Some people on the left and right want some ideological purity test. We don’t have time for that. We have our nominee,” Gray Davis told me. “She’s gonna give Trump a run for his money. He has no idea what he’s in for.”
If Democrats believe Harris can beat Trump, they may not care about much else, at least for now. The battles over policy can wait until after she wins.
