Vice President Kamala Harris has in recent days disavowed nearly every policy position she claimed to hold as a failed candidate during the 2020 Democratic primary. Harris now claims she doesn't want to ban fracking, abolish immigration enforcement, confiscate guns, or end private health insurance—all positions she espoused while attempting to please left-wing activists.
Harris campaign spokesman Brian Fallon, who supports defunding the police, told the New York Times that noticing the candidate's flip-flops on key issues was part of Donald Trump's sinister plot to "define her through lies." In fact, Harris's alarming ignorance and lack of ideological conviction was something that concerned Joe Biden's campaign team during the VP selection process in 2020.
According to Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, authors of This Will Not Pass (2022), Democratic pollsters determined that voters were more likely to view Harris negatively when exposed to attacks highlighting her reputation as a "flip-flopper with no core." It was a reputation she acquired over the course of her failed primary campaign, when she reversed herself multiple times on Medicare for All and other policies she did not fully understand.
Polls financed by liberal billionaire Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, revealed that one of the "most damaging" lines of attack against Harris was portraying her as a "political chameleon who had changed her positions on a range of issues and had guffawed on the radio about smoking pot after spending years prosecuting drug crimes."
Harris's inability to articulate a clear policy vision stood out during the Biden campaign's search for a running mate. Martin and Burns wrote that Biden himself "privately and repeatedly shared versions of a common observation about Harris: She doesn't seem to know who she wants to be." In other words, Harris "often seemed to be guessing at the answers her party's activist class wanted to hear."
Nevertheless, Biden ultimately chose Harris because she was the only non-white woman who ran in the primary. "Harris was neither the candidate who most greatly impressed Biden's vice-presidential search committee, nor the person his advisers saw as most immediately prepared for the presidency," Martin and Burns wrote. Biden's team even came to see her ideological vacuousness as an asset, believing she would "just as readily move back to the center if called upon to do so."