Most members of Congress, including former California Senator Kamala Harris, often draft legislation that serves as a signal to some of their constituents and donors, rather than as a genuine effort to pass meaningful laws. Kamala Harris introduced 132 bills and resolutions during her four-year tenure as a senator. However, many of her bills, including S. 4 (repealing Trump’s tax cuts) and S. 1095 (allowing illegal immigrants to work for members of Congress), were overtly partisan and lacked any realistic chance of becoming law. Introducing these bills was a strategic choice, aimed at portraying herself as a progressive champion. Only three bills Harris introduced became law. Despite the very progressive nature of most of Harris’s bills, she’s not, as I’ll explain, the “progressive Democrat” she often claims – or rather claimed – to be.
Kamala Harris got her start in politics in Alameda County (Northern California) as a Deputy District Attorney in 1990. Eight years later, Terence Hallinan, the San Francisco District Attorney, recruited Harris to serve as the Managing Attorney of the Career Criminal Unit. Harris focused her efforts on prosecuting gang members and violent criminals. Harris also expanded rehabilitation programs to give criminals a second chance. In 2003, Harris ran against Hallinan to be San Francisco’s District Attorney. Harris’s campaign revolved around increasing conviction rates, getting tough on crime, and improving relations with police unions while also implementing progressive policies such as rehabilitation, ending the War on Drugs, and ending the death penalty. She blended popular centrist positions with popular progressive positions to win by double-digits against Hallinan. Harris’s strategy worked, as she was able to win over part of Hallinan’s progressive base and also simultaneously win over moderates and conservatives in San Francisco.
In 2010, Harris ran to be California Attorney General and defeated the popular Republican District Attorney of Los Angeles by 0.85%. Harris was expected to lose, but she pulled off an upset victory. Part of her victory can be attributed to moderating her positions and aligning herself with the national Democratic party, which was a lot more moderate than the San Francisco Democratic party.
As I previously noted, Harris lacks consistent principles and aligns herself with whatever is perceived to be popular at the moment. When comparing her tenure as San Francisco’s DA to her tenure as California’s Attorney General, Harris completely reversed her position on the death penalty, the War on Drugs, and criminal justice reform.
For example, Harris campaigned on opposing the death penalty and initially opposed seeking the death penalty for a gang member who killed a police officer in 2004. Harris’s position set off protests in San Francisco, an appeal from California Senator Dianne Feinstein to seek the death penalty, and a demand from California Senator Barbara Boxer that the Justice Department or California Attorney General take over the case. Harris stuck to her principles and mostly opposed the death penalty throughout her tenure as San Francisco’s DA, even for mass murderers and terrorists. After Harris became California’s Attorney General, she reversed her position on the death penalty and successfully appealed a federal judge’s decision declaring California’s death penalty unconstitutional.
As San Francisco’s DA, she also criticized President Reagan’s War on Drugs and failed to utilize federal funding to pursue the War on Drugs, only to completely reverse her position when she became Attorney General. In this new role, Harris made fighting the drug cartels and locking up nonviolent drug offenders one of her top priorities. In fact, Harris locked up so many people that the United States Supreme Court intervened, but Harris remained defiant and kept people locked up past their terms. Being tough on crime is one thing, but locking up people past their jail terms so the state can use them as slave labor is another.
Kamala Harris ran to replace retiring US Senator Barbara Boxer in the 2016 election, declaring her candidacy on January 13th, 2015. Due to California’s top-two open primary system, she ended up running against another Democrat – Loretta Sanchez – in the general election. Harris defeated Sanchez in a landslide, in part because she had much more name recognition and was endorsed by Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Senator Barbara Boxer, and President Barack Obama.
Political scientists measure senators’ productivity by the number of bills passed, and Harris’s record was, to be frank, extremely unproductive: Recall that Harris got a grand total of three bills passed over four years. By contrast, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema got eight bills passed in 2019-2020 and Massacussetts Senator Elizabeth Warren got nine bills passed in 2017-2020. To be fair to Harris, the GOP controlled the Senate from 2017-2020. However, compromise isn’t hard, as Sinema and Warren demonstrated with their records. S. 729 reorganized a historical site in San Francisco. S. 3033 funded a study on how to count deaths from natural disasters so that the process could eventually be nationalized. S. 129 funded a monument dedicated to victims of a 1928 dam collapse. S. 3033 was arguably meaningful, but her two other bills weren’t. Most bills that Harris introduced, as I alluded to at the beginning of this article, were messaging bills with no realistic chance of passing.
GovTrack’s 2018 report card named Kamala Harris the fourth-most left-wing Senator during the 115th Congress, and their 2020 report card named her the second-most left-wing Senator (second only to Bernie Sanders) during the 116th Congress. Harris had long planned a run for the presidency, and viewed portraying herself as a progressive/left-wing figure as key to that. To do this, as a senator, Harris flip-flopped on criminal justice reform, drug policy, and for-profit prisons. Harris tried to rewrite history, embrace criminal justice reform, and embrace decriminalizing most drugs.
On private prisons, Harris contracted with a private for-profit prison company in 2014 so she could lock up more people as Attorney General, only to completely reverse her position and ruthlessly attack private prisons in 2017 as a Senator.
Kamala Harris’s most notable accomplishment as a senator was grilling Brett Kavanaugh during his SCOTUS confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Her exchange went viral and significantly increased her name recognition. Did this viral exchange actually accomplish anything meaningful? No, but for some people on the Left, it sounded nice.
On January 21st, 2019, Kamala Harris announced her candidacy for the presidency. The field quickly became crowded, with 29 major candidates contesting the Democratic nomination. Trump’s presidency had resulted in Senate Democrats shifting significantly to the Left on most issues, including on healthcare (Medicare for All), immigration (Abolish ICE), criminal justice reform (End Cash Bail, End Mandatory Minimums), climate change (Green New Deal), and social media regulation (Banning Trump from Twitter). As such, most of Harris’s competition was also pretty left-wing.
To set herself apart, Harris implemented the strategy of introducing left-wing messaging bills containing unrealistic proposals and portraying herself as more left-wing than any of her opposition. Harris’s policy proposals for her 2020 presidential campaign included banning fracking, restoring voting rights for convicted terrorists and rapists who are currently serving their prison terms, giving mass amnesty to all illegal immigrants, regulating social media to ban Donald Trump, and providing transgender surgeries for detained migrants who want transgender surgeries. To most people, most of these proposals sound out-of-touch. However, a large chunk of the Democratic base loved Harris’s proposals.
On the police, Harris had previously boasted about support for her from the police. Harris also previously cracked down on domestic terrorism. However, by this point, she had flipped her positions on these issues. Harris abandoned her “tough-on-crime” persona to win. I strongly doubt Harris believes in most of the positions she took, but she took these positions anyways because she thought it was a winning strategy.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard confronted Kamala Harris during the second Democratic primary debate on Harris’s flip-flops, in particular on the death penalty and drug law enforcement. Harris never recovered from Gabbard’s attack, and her poll numbers and fundraising numbers entered a period of perpetual decline until she dropped out in December 2019.
Joe Biden saved Kamala Harris’s career when he tapped her to serve as his vice president. Biden had already pledged to pick a woman to be his running mate, but following the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020, Biden pledged that his VP pick would also be an African-American. That pledge limited Biden’s options to Kamala Harris, Susan Rice, and a handful of other, low-profile politicians. Biden picked Harris over Rice due to a past controversy involving Rice and the 2012 Benghazi attack. Immediately following Kamala Harris’s selection as Biden’s running mate, Harris moderated her positions to match Biden’s positions. Despite Harris’s flaws and flip-flops, she and Biden managed to defeat Mike Pence and Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Vice Presidents normally don’t do much. Official duties often extend no further than casting tie-breaking votes in the Senate and waiting in the presidential line of succession. Due to Senate party control splitting 50-50 in 2021, Harris played an active role in casting tie-breaking votes for partisan legislation, including the Inflation Reduction Act.
On March 24th, 2021, Joe Biden tasked Kamala Harris with stemming migration on the southern border and made her the point person – a so-called “border czar” – for the administration’s immigration issues. This was an opportunity for Harris to lead on an issue that most Americans believe is important. Needless to say, she failed miserably. Given Kamala Harris previously wanted to decriminalize illegal border crossings and halt deportations – even those of criminals – it’s obvious that she wasn’t the best choice to fix the border.
After becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee in July 2024, Harris pivoted sharply to the right on immigration. She declined to take responsibility for the situation on the southern border and sought to blame Donald Trump for derailing a border bill that would’ve allegedly “secured the border” (multiple analyses confirmed that the border bill wouldn’t have secured the border). Some progressives believe Harris’s pivot to the Right is real and recently expressed outrage over this shift. I disagree with these progressives – like most issues, Harris adopts whatever she believes is the most popular position and never follows through.
On immigration, Kamala Harris has spent most of her professional life aligning with the far-left. As San Francisco’s DA, she trained illegal immigrants for jobs they couldn’t legally hold. As California’s Attorney General, she pushed to allow illegal immigrants to practice law despite pushback from President Obama. As a senator, Harris vigorously opposed the border wall and chanted “down, down with deportation” during a Los Angeles parade. Unfortunately, her consistency on immigration didn’t extend to her positions on the death penalty, the War on Drugs, private prisons, or policing.
Harris also reversed her positions on fracking and social media regulation when compared to her 2020 presidential campaign. On fracking, Harris wanted to ban fracking in 2019 – stating that “there’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking” on a CNN town hall. Now she says that she doesn’t want to ban fracking. On social media regulation, Harris wanted to ban Trump from all social media platforms, but now she and her campaign are tight-lipped on any social media regulation policy proposals.
People are allowed to change their positions as society evolves and arguments in favor of or against certain policy positions become stronger or weaker. However, Harris’s evolution on policy is anything but organic and sincere. As an example, Harris’s flip-flops are distinct from JD Vance’s flip-flop on Trump. Vance has faced criticism for changing his stance on Donald Trump; he referred to Trump as “America’s Hitler” in 2016 but is now Trump’s running mate. Vance’s position evolved in a linear manner, shifting once he recognized what he described as Trump’s policy successes. Vance also publicly acknowledged that he changed his position on Trump and admitted that his past position was, at least in his view, misguided. Harris, meanwhile, constantly goes back-and-forth on most of her positions and doesn’t publicly give reasons for doing so, nor does she acknowledge her mistakes.
Similarly, Harris’s flip-flops are distinct from Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leaving the Democratic party and endorsing President Trump, as Gabbard’s and Kennedy’s policy positions have for the most part not changed. If anything, Gabbard and Kennedy have remained more consistent on policy than most politicians. Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. still oppose forever wars. By contrast, the Democratic Party and most Democrat voters have become more pro-war and militaristic over the past eight years, while the Republican Party has become more anti-war. Gabbard and Kennedy, unlike most Democrats, stuck to their anti-war beliefs.
Recently, Bill Whitaker interviewed Kamala Harris for CBS’s 60 Minutes. Whitaker pressed Harris on how she “changed her position on so many things” and noted that “so many people don’t know what you truly believe or what you stand for.” Harris did not have an adequate response. Instead, she stated that she was the Vice President, is focused on building consensus, and that her values haven’t changed. This answer is the perfect example of Harris failing to own up to her past positions.
If the Democrats had picked almost anyone else to be their 2024 nominee, they’d likely be running about 10 points ahead of former President Trump. A Washington Post poll from 2023 showed Trump beating Biden by 4 points, Trump beating Harris by 3 points, and an unnamed Democrat (not Biden or Harris) beating Trump by 8 points. We’ve also seen this disparity play out in the Senate, where Democratic candidates for the Senate are polling ahead of Kamala Harris, sometimes by double digits, despite being on the same ballot. As for who could’ve been the Democratic nominee, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar are popular centrists, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is, despite his progressive background, also fairly popular. Who would have guessed that people like consistent politicians who keep their promises and don’t constantly flip-flop?
Kamala Harris doesn’t believe in anything and will say whatever is needed to get elected. She started off her political career by blending centrist and progressive positions as San Francisco’s DA, embraced the center as California’s Attorney General, embraced the far-left during the 2020 Democratic primaries, and has now re-embraced the center for her 2024 presidential campaign. Her strategy of flip-flopping has thus far worked throughout her career, but we’ll see if it works on Tuesday. If Harris loses to Trump, her flip-flops and her failure to acknowledge them will have undeniably played a role.
Photo credit: Nicole Neri/Reuters
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