Since she was handed the Democratic nomination for president late last month, Vice President Kamala Harris has struggled to comprehensively answer a relatively simple question: If elected, what will her administration do?
Although Harris has not been completely silent on issues of policy, her campaign still lacks a comprehensive platform, with no issues section appearing on her campaign website, for example. And much of what the vice president has said—largely through her press team—has been self-reversals, designed to distance the candidate from the positions she took the last time she ran for president in 2019.
"Shaking the etch-a-sketch" is not unusual behavior for a candidate pivoting to the general election. But Harris’s dramatic swings—from embracing Medicare for All and vowing to decriminalize border crossing to trying to sell herself as "tough on crime"—raise the question of what, if any, coherent ideology underlies the vice president’s views.
It might make more sense to understand Harris as motivated not by ideology but by political advancement. A review of Harris’s views suggest that they reflect what Democratic elites want to hear from their politicians rather than an attempt to persuade the electorate. If that model is accurate, then it offers predictive insight for what a Harris administration would do—that is, whatever the Democratic Party, as an institution, wants.
It is worth remembering where Harris was, ideologically, just five years ago. During her campaign for the 2020 nomination, Harris promised to ban fracking, decriminalize border crossings, and "eliminate" private insurance in favor of Medicare for All.
These views might be taken as evidence that Harris is a hard-nosed progressive, in the mold of Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) or Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.). But at the time, it looked more like Harris was following Warren and Sanders—who both briefly topped the polls—than leading.
A plurality of 2020 Democrats, for example, endorsed border crossing decriminalization. The field was evenly split on banning fracking. And Harris was among eight candidates, including fellow Sens. Cory Booker (D., N.J.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.), to support Medicare for All.
More importantly, these views were not at the time out of step with sentiment within the Democratic Party. Large majorities then supported Medicare for All. In a July 2019 poll, Democrats were evenly divided on border crossing decriminalization, with a majority of "progressive" Democrats supporting it. And even in shale-rich Pennsylvania, most Democrats opposed fracking.
Now, things look a little different. In the weeks since her campaign launch, Harris has explicitly flipped on fracking and single-payer health care and attempted to project a tough-on-the-border image. Does this represent a profound ideological transformation on Harris’s part?
Not necessarily. The electorate is just more conservative than it was four or five years ago. In 2020, for example, for the first time on record, Americans were more likely to prefer that immigration increase rather than decrease. Today, "decrease" beats "increase" by a factor of three. As of 2023, the share of Americans favoring more energy production is at its highest level in a decade. Medicare for All has vanished from the agenda of left-wingers in Congress, a response to a perceived shift in the possibility of the program.
Perhaps the most obvious transformation comes in Harris’s shifting views on criminal justice. Her campaign launch has emphasized her career as a prosecutor, both as San Francisco’s district attorney and as attorney general of California. Harris boosters have regularly cited her 2009 book, Smart on Crime, as evidence that she’s a tough-on-crime foil to "convicted felon Donald Trump."
But even on the issue she should know best, Harris’s views shift constantly. As attorney general, she oversaw the incarceration of nearly 2,000 people for marijuana-related offenses. In the Senate, she cosponsored the Marijuana Justice Act, which would have not only legalized marijuana, but given $11 billion to "communities most affected by the war on drugs." In 2011, San Francisco district attorney Harris supported a law that imposed jail time on parents whose children were truants; in 2019, candidate Harris apologized for that position. As district attorney, Harris promised never to use the death penalty; as attorney general, she defended capital punishment in federal court; as a candidate in 2020, she called for full abolition.
Here, too, Harris’s shifting emphasis is responsive to an electorate far more concerned about crime and less sanguine about "criminal justice reform." In the aughts, as the high crime of the ‘90s was within recent memory, Harris projected a tough-on-crime image. As those memories waned and the reform movement took center stage in the 2010s, Harris signaled a new progressivism. The surge in violence in 2020 through 2022 made far-left positions on crime untenable, so Harris simply dropped them.
It’s not unusual, of course, for a politician to try to work within the Overton window. But highly ideological politicians—like Sen. Sanders, for example—will sometimes stick to their guns, trying to shape the discourse rather than be shaped by it. Harris, her record suggests, is quite the opposite: Her policy positions are determined almost exclusively by what is electorally viable for a Democrat to believe. Her policy is dictated by electability, not the other way around.
This view of Harris fits, among other things, with her political career to date. Her rise—from San Francisco district attorney to United States senator—followed a well-trod path for California Democrats. Harris is a product of San Francisco’s Democratic political machine, an origin shared by influential figures like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and former House speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi. Harris’s elevation came in part through her close personal relationship with San Francisco power broker Willie Brown (the two dated for a time).
To reach a position of influence, Harris had to establish not just her ideological bona fides but her electability ones. Winning races in California—an effectively one-party state—also requires partisan skills. Harris’s election to the Senate came in a stand-off against fellow Democrat Loretta Sanchez (California’s top-two election system meant that no Republican advanced to the run-off). Harris’s victory was thanks in large part to endorsements from both the state party and national figures like Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Even the process by which Harris received her party’s presidential nomination reflects her partisan status. Millions of rank-and-file Democrats voted for Joe Biden as their party’s nominee; none voted for Kamala Harris. The latter’s rise—and the former’s fall—was entirely a product of the party infrastructure, as pressure from Democratic elders like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama pushed Biden out and secured Harris the nomination in record time.
The same can be said of her selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. The out-of-left-field selection of Walz was in part an effort to placate her party’s progressive wing, who saw Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, the early frontrunner, as too friendly to Israel.
Walz has been silent on the "Palestine" problem. He is friendly with anti-Semites like Rep. Ilhan Omar. His selection became a handout to a constituency that needed to be satisfied. In the process, Harris carefully avoided staking out a position on the issue that would offend the powers that be within the Democratic party.
Viewing Harris as a partisan, rather than an ideologue, perhaps blunts certain attacks against her from Republicans. At the same time, though, it suggests that a Harris administration will be even less willing than usual to buck the Democratic establishment on issues of policy. Harris’s lack of a platform is, in this view, not a surprise, as she won’t be the one setting the agenda in a hypothetical administration.
A vote for Harris, in other words, is a vote for the Democratic establishment—and whatever policies they want.
Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.