During the Democratic presidential primaries in 2020, Kamala Harris ran as a progressive, to the left of Joe Biden. She supported Medicare for All, a government-run health plan that would cover everybody, along with other policies similar to Bernie Sanders’s agenda. Biden backed more limited government interventions, and he beat Harris and all the other left-leaning Democrats by tilting to the center.

When Biden tapped the former California senator to be his 2020 running mate, it set Harris on a course to become the first female vice president. Now that Biden has withdrawn from the race, Harris is the most likely Democrat to win the presidential nomination at the party’s convention during the third week of August and potentially become America’s first woman president.

Though Harris started out more liberal than Biden, she’s likely to stick with nearly all of Biden’s policies as a candidate and — if she gets that far — as president, rather than reverting to her 2020 agenda. Here are four reasons why the 2024 Kamala Harris will be much more like Joe Biden than the 2020 Kamala Harris.

The expiration of some of the Trump tax cuts now dominates the political agenda. The Trump tax cuts for individuals expire at the end of 2025, and that’s a big f***ing deal, as Biden might say. That will likely be the biggest legislative fight of the next president’s term, whether it’s a D or an R.

If Harris or another Democrat is president, powerful legislators such as the members of the House Ways and Means Committee will likely be calling the shots on what happens with the Trump tax cuts. “Even if Kamala Harris comes in and she has a different agenda, it’s going to default to the House Ways and Means Committee Democratic tax package,” Henrietta Treyz, managing partner at investing research firm Veda Partners, said recently on the Yahoo Finance Capitol Gains podcast.

Biden’s tax blueprint for 2025 mirrors what the top legislators in the House and Senate favor: higher taxes for individuals earning more than $400,000 per year and a hike in the corporate tax rate. Trump and his fellow Republicans want to make all the 2017 tax cuts permanent and lower business taxes even more.

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What happens depends not just on who the next president is, but also which party has control of Congress. If Harris or another Democrat becomes president and the Dems also win control of Congress, taxes on the wealthy are almost certainly going up, with modest odds of a small tax hike on businesses. If there’s a GOP sweep, nothing will change and taxes will likely stay as they are. If there’s a split, there are many possible outcomes as the two parties negotiate.

Biden tried to impose some progressive policies — and came up short. In a way, that does Harris a favor by demonstrating the limits of what a president can do through executive action and making some progressive policies non-starters in 2024.

The most notable example of this is student debt relief. In 2020, Sanders and other progressives favored forgiveness of much or all student debt, while Harris had a complicated plan to forgive up to $20,000 in debt. Under Biden, there was never a realistic chance of legislation to cancel student debt, even though Democrats controlled Congress for Biden’s first two years.

Biden has tried to get the job done through executive orders, with courts blocking much of what he has tried to do. This much is clear: The president has limited power to cancel student debt without legislation authorizing it. That’s top cover for any progressive candidate in 2024 to say he or she will do it through executive action. We know now it’s not probable, which relieves the pressure on a progressive candidate to make unkeepable promises.

Medicare for All has disappeared as an issue. It was never plausible, given that it would obliterate the employer-provided healthcare system, which covers nearly half of all Americans and works well for many of them. Biden never proposed getting rid of that, and therefore never had to explain what would happen to people who liked their coverage and might have lost it. Instead, Biden backed and signed into law modifications to the Affordable Care Act, which has grown increasingly popular as it has covered more people. Harris would be crazy to resurrect Medicare for All, and one would hope she’s smart enough to know that.

Many of Biden’s policies are popular. Voters broadly support Biden’s plan to raise taxes on businesses and the wealthy to help stabilize Medicare and Social Security and get the mushrooming national debt under control. Biden also negotiated and signed two major bipartisan bills, one funding infrastructure and another meant to rebuild US semiconductor manufacturing.

Biden’s green energy bill, while partisan, has stimulated investment in at least as many red districts as blue ones, and isn’t likely to disappear even if Trump wins. Sadly for Biden, it’s the rambling, octogenarian man voters have turned against, not what he stands for. If Harris can rebrand the Biden agenda as her own, she’ll likely be a much better presidential candidate in 2024 than she was in 2020.

Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @rickjnewman.

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