Why the Kamala Harris of 4 years ago could haunt her in 2024
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A file photo from January 2019 showing Ms Kamala Harris kicking off her 2020 Democratic presidential campaign at an outdoor rally in Oakland, California.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
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WASHINGTON – When she ran for president the first time, Ms Kamala Harris darted to the left as she fought for attention from the Democratic Party’s liberal wing.
After she dropped out, social and racial justice protests swept across the country in the summer of 2020, and Ms Harris joined other Democrats in supporting progressive ideas during what appeared to be a national realignment on criminal justice.
One presidential cycle later, with Vice-President Harris less than a week into another race for the White House,
Former president Donald Trump is calling out her past positions and statements at his rallies, and on July 29, his campaign began reserving time for television advertisements that are likely to resurface videos of Ms Harris.
“The archive is deep,” said Mr Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and ad maker who is working with Mr David McCormick, the Republican Party’s Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, among other campaigns. “We will run out of time before we run out of video clips of Kamala Harris saying wacky California liberal things. I am just not sure that the rest of this campaign includes much besides that.”
The first television ads to attack Ms Harris for her past statements came not from Trump’s campaign but from Mr McCormick, who is challenging Senator Bob Casey.
The 60-second ad, which Mr McCormick’s campaign began airing, resurfaces a laundry list of statements that Ms Harris made in 2019 and 2020.
She said then that she opposed fracking; would “think about” abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency; called the idea of adding more police officers “wrong-headed thinking”; entertained the idea of allowing felons to vote; said she supported a “mandatory buyback programme” for some guns; and called for the elimination of private health insurance.
Fracking is a particularly tough issue for Ms Harris. Banning it was a plank in her energy platform in the 2020 primary race. But fracking remains a key element of the economy in Pennsylvania, perhaps the most important battleground state in 2024.
“She pledged to ban fracking – no fracking, oh, that is going to do well in Pennsylvania, isn’t it?” Trump said at a rally on July 27 in Minnesota. “Remember, Pennsylvania, I said it. She wants no fracking. She is on tape. The beautiful thing about modern technology is when you say something, you are screwed if it is bad.”
The Harris campaign said on July 26 that the Vice-President no longer wanted to ban fracking, a significant shift from where she stood four years ago, but one that is consistent with the policies of President Joe Biden’s administration.
The Harris campaign will rebut most of the Republicans’ attacks by arguing that they are exaggerating or lying about her record, said a campaign official briefed on the plans who was not authorised to discuss them publicly. Her campaign plans to lean into her record as a local prosecutor and state attorney-general to burnish her image as a candidate with deep ties to law enforcement.
In addition to changing her position on fracking, campaign officials said she now backed the Biden administration’s budget requests for increased funding for border enforcement; no longer supported a single-payer health insurance programme; and echoed Mr Biden’s call for banning assault weapons but not a requirement to sell them to the federal government.
“Kamala Harris spent 20 years as a tough-as-nails prosecutor who sent violent criminals to prison,” said Mr Brian Fallon, a Harris campaign spokesman. “Her years spent in law enforcement and her record in the Biden-Harris administration defy Trump’s attempts to define her through lies.”
On July 29, as Mr Biden prepared a speech in Texas calling for term limits and ethics guidelines for Supreme Court justices,
Ms Harris, in a statement released by her campaign, endorsed Mr Biden’s proposal, which does not call for adding additional justices to the court.
Officials with Ms Harris’ campaign also said they hoped to use the liberal cultural fervour around her candidacy to make the election a referendum on the future versus a past that Democrats argue Trump represents.
Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, have themselves been on multiple sides of many issues, not least of which is Mr Vance’s past stance as a prominent critic of Trump.
There is ample video of Trump making remarks unhelpful to his 2024 campaign. In 2016, he said women who sought abortions should face punishment, and as president, he tried to bar immigrants from several predominantly Muslim countries and enacted a policy of separating immigrant children from their families at the southern border. He also was caught on tape bragging about groping women.
Mr Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic think-tank, said he was not worried that Ms Harris had once espoused left-wing ideas. She has evolved, he said, into a Biden-style Democrat with more centrist views.
“There is a tremendous difference in changing one’s policy ideas and changing one’s principles,” Mr Bennett said. “She has not changed her principles. She still thinks climate change is an existential threat – she just doesn’t think the Green New Deal is the way to address it.”
Since she joined Mr Biden’s ticket in 2020, Ms Harris has seldom put forward policies that differ much from his. She is no longer pushing for a single-payer healthcare system, and her campaign said on July 26 that she would maintain Mr Biden’s pledge not to raise income taxes on people making less than US$400,000 (S$537,000) a year.
But one issue on which Ms Harris has already put some daylight between herself and Mr Biden is abortion rights. Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v Wade, the President had said he would sign legislation restoring a federal right to abortion if such a Bill came to his desk.
In her early speeches as a presidential candidate, Ms Harris has offered to go a bit further.
“When Congress passes a law to restore reproductive freedoms, as president of the United States, I will sign it into law,” she told an audience in Wisconsin last week, using a broader term that suggested such legislation could extend beyond abortion rights to things like protecting in-vitro fertilisation or contraception.
Ms Harris’ first presidential campaign was undone in part by staff turmoil that resulted in public finger-pointing and scathing resignation letters even before she dropped out of the race.
Former aides interviewed for this article, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their current employers, said Ms Harris’ campaign had been undermined by a combination of unsteady leadership from its senior staff and too much influence on the candidate from her family members.
But during that race, Ms Harris also often appeared as if she were not sure what she believed. In a CNN town-hall event the day after what was widely viewed as a successful campaign roll-out in Oakland, California, she appeared tentative while discussing healthcare policy, eventually saying she would eliminate private health insurance and institute a single-payer healthcare programme.
But for all her liberal policy proposals in the 2020 campaign, Ms Harris was frequently viewed through her biography. She leaned into her record as a former prosecutor and California attorney-general, but many voters were well aware of her status as a black and South Asian woman who had marched with her immigrant mother in civil rights demonstrations in California.
“I don’t know that the policy stuff is what people were talking about – it was all biography,” said Mrs Sue Dvorsky, a former Iowa Democratic Party chair who backed Ms Harris in the 2020 campaign. “She has always been complex policy-wise, but I think people look at her and expect a thing. She is going to talk about law and order and being a prosecutor.” NYTIMES
