Why Kamala Harris’s Politics Are So Hard to Pin Down
One person’s savvy pragmatist is another’s craven political operator.
One person’s savvy pragmatist is another’s craven political operator.
By David A. Graham
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).
Read: The Kamala Harris problem
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.
Read: Kamala the prosecutor
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.
Read: The White House’s Kamala Harris blunder
“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.
