It's A Bad Idea For Harris To Abandon Progressive Policies

Kamala Harris has been renouncing progressive positions one-by-one. During her short-lived 2019 presidential campaign, Harris was a supporter of single-payer healthcare, a fracking ban, and a federal jobs guarantee. No longer. On July 26th, a campaign official told the Hill that Harris “will not seek to ban fracking if she’s elected,” even though she had previously said there was “no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” The following day, CNN reported that “the vice president no longer supports a single-payer health care system,” despite having co-sponsored Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All bill back in 2017. And on July 31, a Washington Examiner exclusive revealed that Harris has “changed her position” on a federal jobs guarantee—a component of the Green New Deal she backed in 2019—and no longer supports that either.

This is bad politics. In the 2004 presidential election, one of the dominant charges against John Kerry was that he was a “flip-flopper,” meaning he had opportunistically changed his positions for political convenience. (Republicans even made actual flip-flops listing the issues he’d been on both sides of: “For” on the left foot, “Against” on the right.) Brazenly changing your positions like this implies that you don’t actually believe in the things you say you believe in, and makes it very hard for voters to trust that what you’re saying at any given time is what you truly think.