Donald Trump describes Kamala Harris as the most \u201cradical left\u201d person to run for president, a \u201cComrade Kamala\u201d who wants to raise taxes to fund a liberal agenda.<\/p>\n
But the most progressive members of Congress \u2014 many of whom served alongside Harris when she was in the Senate \u2014 paint a very different picture of the vice president.<\/p>\n
While they saw Harris as an ally on reproductive rights and voting rights, many liberals have far deeper relationships with President Joe Biden and his team after he embraced the left wing to push his legislative agenda. They fear that under Harris they would lose the unique access they had to the West Wing and are pushing the Democratic nominee to embrace more populist economic policies in the closing weeks of her campaign, noting that parts of her platform are less progressive than Biden\u2019s in 2020.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe does her thing and had her portfolio. Most of my efforts have been with President Biden,\u201d Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said when asked in an interview on what issues he saw the vice president as an ally.<\/p>\n
As she runs the shortest presidential campaign in modern U.S. history, Harris has both backed off some of her earlier liberal positions and embraced some centrist ones, notably on immigration, fracking and parts of her economic agenda.<\/p>\n
Despite that pivot, many progressive activists and lawmakers have held their fire and rallied behind her candidacy, seeing Donald Trump as the greater threat and hoping a united front will help defeat him. Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), another key progressive leader, had prominent speaking roles at the Democratic National Convention and are campaigning for Harris in swing states.<\/p>\n
But in interviews, several progressive lawmakers and staffers said they felt a stronger connection to Biden than to Harris, who has not worked as closely with them as vice president. They noted, too, that unlike Biden, Harris did not need to reach out to progressives to unify the Democratic Party after a bruising primary, instead focusing on appealing to voters beyond the Democratic base to win a general election. And some said they worry that she may not appoint a progressive as her chief of staff if she is elected.<\/p>\n
The result could be a fissure with the party\u2019s activist and progressive wing, potentially affecting her ability to govern.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think lots of people are holding their nose because they\u2019re, like, whatever it takes to get you to win,\u201d said one Democratic strategist who works closely with congressional progressives. \u201cI have no doubt they\u2019ll duke it out after the election.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a recent speech that appeared aimed at Pennsylvania swing voters, Harris\u2019s move to the center was clear. She stressed she is a \u201ccapitalist\u201d who wants \u201cpragmatic\u201d solutions to economic problems, such as a $25,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers, investments in manufacturing jobs and the reinstatement of the pandemic-era child tax credit. The rollout did not contain any items that are on liberals\u2019 wish list, such a Medicare and Social Security expansion or a commitment to a $15 minimum wage.<\/p>\n
And in a tough immigration speech last week, Harris renewed her calls for border security legislation and vowed to extend new asylum restrictions that have slashed the number of border crossings. That is a far cry from her 2020 presidential campaign, in which she called for decriminalizing border crossings.<\/p>\n
\u201cHer opponent is trying hard to paint her as a far-left San Francisco liberal,\u201d said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a moderate who worked closely with Harris in the Senate. \u201cI think that\u2019s a caricature.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Harris campaign spokeswoman declined to comment for this article.<\/p>\n
Sanders, a standard-bearer of today\u2019s progressive movement, called Harris smart and tough and said he is doing \u201ceverything he can do\u201d to get her elected. But he has not developed the same bond with Harris as with Biden, which dates to the two serving in the Senate together.<\/p>\n
After Sanders dropped out of the 2020 presidential primary, he worked closely with Biden\u2019s campaign to form \u201cunity\u201d task forces outlining a shared agenda that delighted liberals. Congressional progressives then worked closely with Biden and his team to pass much of that legislative wish list, including a sweeping climate change bill that also lowered prescription drug costs.<\/p>\n
Sanders and Harris haven\u2019t spoken one-on-one since her initial round of outreach to Capitol Hill shortly after Biden stepped aside from the race, according to two people with knowledge of the interactions.<\/p>\n
Biden and Sanders\u2019s odd-fellow alliance set the tone for a warm relationship between the president and congressional Democrats\u2019 left flank, which enjoyed unparalleled access to his top staff.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of the progressive caucus worked very closely with President Biden\u2019s team \u2014 that\u2019s why many of us were very loyal to him to the last day,\u201d said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.).<\/p>\n
Several progressive operatives and lawmakers noted that a compressed campaign timeline and the lack of a primary process precluded Harris from hammering out a shared agenda.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do believe and hope and expect that [Harris] understands how important progressives were to the Biden administration\u2019s victories,\u201d said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who chairs the House Progressive Caucus. \u201cI hope she sees how valuable that partnership and that work together was.\u201d<\/p>\n
At first glance, Harris would seem a natural progressive ally. She joined the Senate in 2017 and soon after ran for president, backing liberal policies such as granting undocumented immigrants access to lawyers, decriminalizing crossing the border without authorization and banning fracking. One nonpartisan ranking of Harris\u2019s voting and legislative record in the Senate from 2019 to 2021 pegged her as the second-most liberal senator, after Sanders. (The senator from Vermont, who describes himself as a democratic socialist, rejected that characterization, however, and has said Harris and he differ ideologically.)<\/p>\n
As vice president, Harris worked on expanding the child tax credit in a pandemic-era economic relief bill. She has also championed abortion and voting rights \u2014 two issues on which she has at times struck a more liberal posture than Biden. In 2022, Harris pushed Biden to back a carve-out to the 60-vote Senate filibuster rule to protect voting rights, and she recently called for doing the same to pass a law codifying Roe v. Wade.<\/p>\n
Progressives have largely held back criticism as Harris has touted endorsements from former Republican vice president Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz; embraced a tough Senate bill on the border that would significantly increase enforcement without providing additional pathways to citizenship; and mostly sided with the administration\u2019s existing policy on Israel as it wages war in Gaza and Lebanon.<\/p>\n
But some liberals have suggested that Harris release bolder economic policy proposals to reach voters who are concerned about economic security, arguing that doing so is key to victory.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the contrast should be clear that Democrats not only don\u2019t want to cut Social Security, we want to expand Social Security,\u201d said Sanders, who encouraged Harris to campaign on lifting the Social Security taxable income cap to increase benefits, which is not part of her platform. He also is urging her \u2014 so far, unsuccessfully \u2014 to make expanding Medicare coverage to include dental and vision and raising the federal minimum wage to $17 an hour a part of her pitch.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that expanding health care is crucially important, and it\u2019s something that I personally would love to see more,\u201d said Ocasio-Cortez, adding that she has had multiple conversations with Harris since Biden dropped out.<\/p>\n
The congresswoman argued that staking out clearer, more progressive positions is key to turning out younger voters \u2014 a group some polls suggest Harris is underperforming among compared with Biden four years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not going to win constituencies and really turn out the vote with pop culture alone \u2014 these are constituencies that are highly motivated on substantive issues,\u201d Ocasio-Cortez added.<\/p>\n
As vice president, Harris has been most closely aligned with the New Democrat Coalition, the largest Democratic caucus in the House, according to Rep. Ann Kuster (D-N.H.), who chairs the moderate faction. The group has been providing policy papers to Harris\u2019s team that have become the basis for her economic agenda.<\/p>\n
Kuster argued that ideological discrepancies among House Democrats have shrunk over the past four years \u2014 especially in the face of a potential Trump presidency.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur caucus is more unified than it has been since I\u2019ve been here \u2014 12 years \u2014 and part of that is because on the big issues, we totally agree,\u201d Kuster said.<\/p>\n
Privately, some Democrats are anxious about whom Harris might appoint as her chief of staff, given that the pick would signal how much she intends to bring liberals to the table. Several mentioned as an ally longtime Harris adviser Rohini Kosoglu, who while working for Harris played a role in negotiating the expanded child tax credit in 2021. And some are warily eyeing Harris\u2019s brother-in-law, Tony West, who recently took an unpaid leave from his job as Uber\u2019s top lawyer to advise her campaign and is seen as close to the business community.<\/p>\n
Liberals fondly remember their partnership with former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain and hope Harris will use him as a model.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do believe it is important who she surrounds herself with,\u201d said Jayapal, who regularly received phone calls from the president praising her TV hits. \u201cIt is important that she has a team as the president did and a chief of staff as the president did that really values progressives as part of the coalition.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet, on immigration and the war in Gaza, in particular, members to the left of Harris\u2019s stances are avoiding harsh critiques as she faces Trump, hoping to hash out their differences after the election.<\/p>\n
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), an outspoken critic of Israel\u2019s actions in Gaza, said her \u201conly hiccup\u201d with Harris\u2019s agenda is on foreign policy. But she\u2019s encouraged by Harris\u2019s Senate record, when she supported bills put out by the Progressive Caucus.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s about us organizing and seeing how far we can push her once she wins the presidency,\u201d Omar said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Donald Trump describes Kamala Harris as the most \u201cradical left\u201d person to run for president, a \u201cComrade Kamala\u201d who wants to raise taxes to fund a liberal agenda. But the most progressive members of Congress \u2014 many of whom served alongside Harris when she was in the Senate \u2014 paint a very different picture of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10484,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}