Kamala Harris has sharply shifted her positions on several key issues since 2019, when she ran a brief and unsuccessful presidential campaign. The worst political interpretation is that she’s a shape-shifting opportunist who changes her message based on the audience she’s addressing.
But maybe that’s a good thing. The British economist John Maynard Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind.” As the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024, Harris’s situation is notably different than it was in 2019, when she was trying to break out of a pack of mostly progressive Democrats wooing the left. She doesn’t have to do that in 2024. What she has to do now is win centrist voters in swing states to defeat Republican nominee Donald Trump and clinch the White House.
Voters can legitimately ask if Harris is now pitching moderate policies she doesn’t actually support and will move back toward the left if she gets elected. She could. But the progressive policies Harris backed in 2019 weren’t realistic in the first place. She has migrated to ground that’s much easier to defend because it aligns much more closely with public opinion.
Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during the first presidential debate at National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pa., on Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images) ·(The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Harris jumped on the Green New Deal bandwagon in 2019 as part of an effort to drive action to address climate change during the Trump administration, which was moving in the opposite direction. The Green New Deal never had a chance of passing Congress as legislation or getting enacted in its original form. It would have dramatically disrupted the energy and transportation sectors and banned the revolutionary “fracking” drilling technique that has generated a surge in US oil and natural gas production. Energy costs would have soared, enraging voters. At best, the Green New Deal was a symbolic statement of resolve to do something about global warming.
President Biden and his fellow Democrats have, in fact, done something about global warming. The misnamed Inflation Reduction Act that Biden signed into law in 2022 is the biggest set of green energy incentives ever enacted in the United States. That legislation is also much smarter than the Green New Deal. It incentivizes green energy adoption but doesn’t penalize fossil fuel use or ban any type of energy.
Harris, in fact, is now staking out a more centrist stance on energy than Biden himself, who was never a supporter of the Green New Deal. In the Sept. 10 debate with Donald Trump, Harris pointed out that oil and natural gas production has hit record highs during the last two years, something Biden never mentions. That should be a bragging right for any president who wants credit from voters for plentiful, affordable energy. Harris is lunging for that credit.
That’s obviously a sop to voters in Pennsylvania, which sits atop part of the Marcellus Shale formation that is rich with oil and gas. There are thousands of fracking jobs in Pennsylvania, a swing state Harris basically must win to reach 270 electoral votes and take the White House. She needs to adjust her positions to win those votes.
There’s a good chance she’ll stick with those positions instead of abandoning them once the campaign is over. Biden burned himself by talking loosely about “ending fossil fuels,” which brought public blame squarely on him when gasoline prices hit $5 per gallon, the highest level ever, in 2022. High gas prices were largely due to tight oil supplies amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but Biden’s rhetorical hostility to fossil fuels seemed suspect too. High prices sent his approval rating plummeting, and it never recovered.
Harris seems to have learned that lesson. Her message on energy is more balanced than Biden’s, an ”all of the above” approach more akin to Barack Obama’s, as Yahoo Finance’s Ben Werschkul reported. Obama was president when fracking took off and US energy production exploded, something Obama praised during his presidency. Harris can justify that shift by pointing out that the facts have changed: In 2019, when she wanted to ban fracking, there was no Inflation Reduction Act to boost green energy. Now there is.
There’s been a similar change on healthcare during the Biden administration that Harris can cite to explain her moderation on that issue. In 2019, Harris backed “Medicare for All,” a Bernie Sanders brainchild that would be a huge government-run healthcare plan covering everybody. Like the Green New Deal, Medicare for All would have brought massive disruption, in this case to the employer-provided insurance market.
Biden didn’t support Medicare for All in 2020. Instead, he called for changes to Obamacare that would make more people eligible and expand coverage. Congress passed such changes and Biden signed them into law in 2022, which has helped push the total number of Americans covered under Obamacare to a record high of 45 million. So once again, the facts have changed: Biden signed into law improvements in healthcare coverage that make Medicare for All less necessary. Those changes to Obamacare expire at the end of 2025, and rather than the unrealistic Sanders plan, Harris now backs the more modest goal of making the new Obamacare subsidies permanent.
If she’s liberal to the core, Harris could always flip back to progressive stances that excite the most liberal voters, even as they alienate centrists. But she might enjoy being a moderate. It's a lot easier to back plausible ideas that make sense, and it might even help you get elected.
