As a Democratic senator from California in 2019, Kamala Harris launched a presidential campaign that fizzled before voting even began. She dropped out of the 2020 race two months before the Iowa caucuses.
Harris’s 2024 campaign for president is profoundly different. As vice president, she’s on track to inherit the nomination from President Joe Biden, who withdrew from the race on July 21. She’ll avoid anything resembling a primary election and a battle with other candidates. That gives Harris a chance to position herself as far more moderate — and perhaps more electable — than she seemed in 2020.
Back then, Harris took liberal stances on many issues, making her barely indistinguishable from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, two other presidential candidates who outlasted her until Biden clinched the Democratic nomination. Here are four of the biggest issues Harris supported then that she has backed away from now:
Medicare for All
Harris backed this Bernie Sanders plan, which would have ended private health insurance and enrolled every American in a government program similar to Medicare. Biden did not support Medicare for All in 2020, calling instead for expanding the Affordable Care Act to cover more people. Biden did, in fact, sign legislation doing that, though the ACA expansion expires at the end of 2025. Harris has backed away from Medicare for All and now seems to support new legislation to make the ACA expansion permanent, as Biden does.
A fracking ban
Last time around, Harris supported the “Green New Deal.” This would have banned the fossil fuel drilling technique known as fracking, which has generated a massive boom in US oil and natural gas production during the last decade. Biden did not support the Green New Deal, instead calling for some cutbacks in fossil fuel development along with large subsidies for green energy.
Biden did, however, sign a huge green energy bill into law, and, at the same time, oil and gas production has hit new records under Biden. Soaring gasoline prices, which hit $5 in 2022 and correlated with a plunging approval rating for Biden, underscored the political necessity of keeping energy plentiful and affordable. The Harris campaign, not surprisingly, now says she no longer wants to ban fracking.
A government makeover of energy and transportation
Other elements of the Green New Deal were so ambitious about ridding the economy of fossil fuels that they would have necessitated a de facto government takeover of the transportation and energy sectors. Biden has pushed toward similar environmental goals, but has mostly used incentives such as tax credits instead of forcing disruptive change by law or regulation. That’s a big difference. Bringing change through market incentives is likely to be much smoother than having the government dictate outcomes.
Opposing Jerome Powell
Harris and several other liberal Democratic senators voted against Powell as chair of the Federal Reserve in 2018, saying he was too friendly toward the banking industry. He got the job anyway and ended up helping steer the US economy through the 2020 COVID downturn. Biden reappointed Powell to a second term, which runs through 2026. If Harris became president, there’s no reason to think she’d move to fire Powell. But her stance in 2018 revealed an anti-corporate bent that could unnerve investors if it resurfaces when it's time to appoint the next Fed chair in 2026.
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Politicians do change their views and rebrand themselves from time to time. So Harris may be able to convince voters she has evolved toward Biden’s more centrist views while serving as his second in command.
“I wouldn't put any credibility on prior positions of candidates,” Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, told Yahoo Finance in a July 29 interview. “Kamala Harris has a strong pro-growth agenda. She’s close to a lot of folks in Silicon Valley, really supports the innovation economy. So I'd really focus on what she does going forward.” Polis also points out that Republican nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have changed their positions on a wide variety of issues.
Yet the battle is on over who best defines Kamala Harris: Her own campaign, which would do so benignly, or the Trump campaign, which seeks to discredit her.
“The key question for maintaining enthusiasm will be who defines Harris over the next 30 days,” political analyst Bruce Mehlman wrote on July 28. A worst-case outcome for Harris, he points out, would be something akin to the “Swift-boating” of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004, when some veterans who served with Kerry during the Vietnam War accused him of dishonesty about his record, helping sink his presidential bid.
On the plus side for Harris, she’s been relatively aligned with Biden on repealing the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy, the broad goal of addressing climate change, and social issues such as abortion. She’s also commanding vast amounts of attention, providing a better chance to set the terms of conversation leading up to Election Day on Nov. 5. With the right strategy, the new and improved Kamala Harris could erase memories of the old model.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @rickjnewman.
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