Sen. Kamala Harris started this year with a smooth rollout that had many insiders predicting she was the likeliest Democratic nominee in 2020. Now, as the fall campaign season kicks off, she finds herself well out of the top tier of candidates, struggling just to stay relevant.
Recent reports have centered on her plans to refocus her time, money, and organization in Iowa in hopes that a strong finish in the first primary state can vault her back into contention. “I’m f–king moving to Iowa,” she was overheard telling a Senate colleague, according to journalist Matt Laslo.
Writing about the strategic shift, Politico noted, “aides say a Harris turnaround depends almost entirely on Biden’s campaign crashing and burning.”
The problem is that due to a central strategic blunder, Harris is in a much weaker position to capitalize on any Biden collapse than she may have otherwise been.
The short version is that Harris decided to run only slightly to the right of Sen. Bernie Sanders even though there was a much bigger opening for her just to the left of Joe Biden. That decision has come back to haunt her. With Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sanders commanding the support of extremely liberal voters, Harris has nowhere to go. It did not have to be this way.
When Harris became a senator in January 2017, despite having been involved in California politics for over two decades as a prosecutor, her positions on many national issues remained undefined. Knowing that she was going to seek the presidency in 2020, it would have been perfectly plausible for her to position herself as a more traditional liberal.
Instead, she decided that her path to the presidency involved joining the stampede of presidential wannabes in the race to the far Left. This led her to be handcuffed into taking radical positions that she wasn’t prepared to defend. And with every equivocation and adjustment, she ended up alienating both sides by developing a reputation of being cynical and calculating.
One of the most prominent examples has come on the issue of healthcare. As a senator, she endorsed Sanders’ socialized health insurance bill. As a presidential candidate, she initially dug in by defending its ban on private insurance, declaring, “Let’s move on.” She later claimed that what she really meant was that she wanted to move on from all the inefficiency in the system, but that she didn’t support getting rid of private insurance, because she would allow “supplemental” coverage. This is even though the plan that she was touting barely left any room for such supplemental coverage.
During the first Democratic debate, she raised her hand in favor of eliminating private insurance, only to back off from the position again the next morning. Eventually, she was forced to release a healthcare plan that was more of an attempt to reverse-engineer a policy that could be squared with the rhetorical corner she had backed herself into than a serious proposal.
Another famous example was initially the high point of her campaign, when she mauled Biden in a debate for having opposed federally mandated busing. But then she backpedaled that position days later.
Sanders, the revolutionary, lost the nomination to Hillary Clinton, the incrementalist liberal, back in 2016. Yet somehow the lesson many Democrats took from that was that anybody hoping to run for president in 2020 needed to embrace much of his agenda.
Yet both Gallup and Pew surveys have found that a majority of Democrats identify as moderate or conservative. A July CBS battleground poll found that Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, by a two-to-one margin, identified themselves as ideologically moderate/conservative or “somewhat liberal,” as opposed to “very liberal.”
The way the Democratic presidential field has taken shape, however, these voters have been given a choice between accepting somebody much further to their Left or learning to live with a barely coherent elderly white guy who nonetheless seems relatively reasonable.
Harris at her best can be a dynamic politician who offers youth, diversity, and significantly more mental acuity than Biden. Had Harris positioned herself as more sober-minded liberal reformer, she may not be winning right now, but she’d certainly have more room to grow in the event that Biden falters.
Instead, she’s in a political desolation row, having given voters on all sides of the ideological spectrum reasons to view her suspiciously.
