Democratic lawmakers are giving Vice President Harris a pass on her policy flip-flops and efforts to tack toward the political center, confident she’s still a progressive at heart and will fight hard to achieve their goals on tax policy, climate change and other priorities.
Even the Senate’s most liberal Democrats say they aren’t worried about Harris backing away from her previous support for “Medicare for All” or a fracking ban because they believe she will push hard to rein in insurance and pharmaceutical companies or to crack down on fossil fuel consumption.
“I’m from Massachusetts, she’s from California. On climate, on abortion, on racial, LGBTQ issues, we are absolutely in agreement on her agenda,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a leading Senate progressive who has co-sponsored Medicare for All, the Green New Deal and other ambitious liberal policy goals.
“That’s why Elizabeth Warren and I are so passionately campaigning for her and supporting her,” he said, referring to fellow Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D.), who ran against Harris in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
With the general election only 50 days away, leading progressives on Capitol Hill are too alarmed by the prospect of a second Trump term to complain about Harris’s reinvention as a centrist. They expect she’ll back them up in policy fights if elected president.
Harris at various points in her short campaign has moved toward the center as Republicans have attacked her as a liberal and as polls suggest Trump is seen as the less ideologically extreme candidate.
Harris said she felt “very strongly” about Medicare for All in 2019 as she positioned herself for a presidential run and even said she would eliminate private insurance plans before quickly dropping that stance.
At her debate with Trump, Harris declared she does “absolutely support” private health care options and did so during her time as vice president.
Harris also says she would sign into law the bipartisan border security deal negotiated earlier this year by Senate Democrats and Republicans, even though it called for spending money to complete construction of the southern border wall. Her campaign has also come under scrutiny for showcasing Trump’s border wall in one of its ads.
Harris released a tax proposal that moves to the center from what President Biden proposed.
The architect of the Senate’s Medicare for All bill, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), however, said he doesn’t have a problem with her policy shifts and said he still views her as a progressive.
Asked during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether Harris had abandoned her progressive ideals, Sanders said she is saying what she needs to say to beat Trump.
“No, I don’t think she’s abandoning her ideals. I think she’s tried to be pragmatic and doing what she thinks is right in order to win the election,” he said.
Some Republicans accuse Sanders of saying the quiet part out loud with those statements.
They argue Harris is more to the left than her recent public statements suggest, and moderators at last week’s debate between Trump and Harris should have pressed her more on the positions she took in the 2020 presidential campaign, when she was competing with Sanders and Warren.
The Harris campaign did not respond to several requests for comment.
Democrats who spoke with The Hill largely echoed Sanders’s comments, saying they are happy for Harris to say what she needs to say to win. In the end, they think if she is elected, she will be a progressive.
Markey said he believes Harris will try to back efforts to reduce health care costs through subsidies and regulation, but he’s not looking for any specific pledges from Harris or explanation about why she backtracked from Medicare for All.
He and other liberal leaders are more worried about the likelihood that Trump would make another attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act to grumble about Harris’s attempts to frame herself as a moderate in this year’s general election.
“The first goal right now has to be, right now, to protect the Affordable Care Act,” he said of former President Obama’s signature achievement.
He said Harris would be a “big proponent of ensuring of an expansion of health care in our country” and that he “absolutely” considers Harris a progressive leader.
Democrats who want to crack down on the consumption of fossil fuels aren’t worried about Harris abandoning her support for a fracking ban.
They believe she’s open to supporting bigger investments in clean energy and even taxing carbon pollution.
“I want her to be a pragmatist and I want her to win. Nothing’s more important for the climate than winning” the presidential election, said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), who’s not worried about Harris’s decision to now support some fracking.
“She needs to convey that she’s going to take aggressive climate action but she also needs to be cognizant that there are a lot of people who rely on the current system and we just have to be practical about it,” he said.
Schatz said the election of Harris will in no way slow the progress made during the Biden administration in shifting to a green-energy economy.
“I don’t have any doubt that Kamala Harris would be a great president for climate action but I don’t think we should be asking her to say certain magic words and I certainly don’t think we should be demanding that she take unpopular positions in key states,” he added.
Democratic strategists warn that Harris would have hurt her chances of winning Pennsylvania had she stuck to her support for a fracking ban.
Progressive lawmakers have expressed some disappointment that Harris broke with Biden’s tax proposal, which he included in his fiscal 2025 budget proposal, to raise the capital gains tax rate for top earners to 44.6 percent.
Harris, instead, has proposed increasing the long-term capital gains rate for the top tax bracket from 23 percent to 28 percent — well below Biden’s goal.
“It’s not how I would have done it but she’s moving in the right direction. While Donald Trump and the Republicans are trying to lower the capital gains tax rate, she’s trying to increase it and that’s very much the right direction,” said Warren.
Some progressives, however, are disappointed the Harris campaign thinks she needs to move to the center to be more competitive against Trump. They think she would win more votes by advocating for bigger and bolder reforms.
“What’s interesting about Harris to my view is I think the Harris’s campaign assessment that they will benefit by moving to the center or to the right on a variety of issues by being less bold and more centrist. That is a strategic assumption that I think is probably mistaken,” said Bob Borosage, a progressive activist and co-director of Campaign for America’s Future.
“In a country where 70 percent wants a real change and thinks we’re on the wrong track, the more you make yourself look like somebody who’s doing modest reforms as opposed to somebody who wants dramatic change, the more you’re endangering or weakening your position electorally,” he argued.
“It’s a striking calculation. It’s worrisome in the sense that it might be electorally mistaken,” Borosage added.