Washington, DC – Vice President Kamala Harris will journey to the Democratic Nationwide Conference subsequent week with the backing of main progressive organizations, a nod to the celebration unity she has impressed.
However that marks a shift for Harris, who has not at all times loved a heat relationship with the progressive wing of her celebration.
Nonetheless, many progressives see Harris’s candidacy within the 2024 presidential race as a possibility to chart a extra leftward course for the White Home.
“Vice President Kamala Harris has a singular relationship with the progressive motion,” stated William Walter, govt director of Our Wisconsin Revolution, a battleground state group dedicated to “defending progressive ideas.”
Walter instructed Al Jazeera that Harris isn’t any progressive dream lady: she has struggled to convey the identical authenticity and readability of message as progressive icons like Bernie Sanders.
“However many progressives acknowledge that democracy is actually on the poll this November,” he stated, referring to the menace he perceives from Harris’ Republican rival, former President Donald Trump.
Step one, Walter defined, is to stop Trump from regaining the White Home.
“As soon as we cease that, I feel that’s when the actual work begins. That’s once we’ll have to begin placing strain on the Democratic Celebration to grow to be the working-class-focused celebration that we’ve been up to now.”
A presidency that places the folks first
Harris’s meteoric rise because the Democratic nominee has been unorthodox, to say the least.
In late July, her boss, President Joe Biden, abruptly withdrew from the presidential race and endorsed Harris.
Biden, thought of a centrist, had been courting middle-leaning voters within the months main as much as his exit. However when Harris took over the Democratic nomination, his marketing campaign took a unique path and adopted a distinctly populist angle.
On Friday, for instance, he unveiled a sweeping financial plan geared toward “decreasing prices for American households,” together with eliminating medical debt for a lot of Individuals and banning “value gouging” on meals.
The coverage proposals additionally included subsidies for first-time homebuyers and a $6,000 tax credit score for households with newborns, protecting the primary yr of a kid’s life.
Harris additionally embraced Trump’s proposal to remove the federal tax on suggestions, an thought common amongst service staff. Her marketing campaign has highlighted her work expertise on the fast-food chain McDonald’s as a logo of her middle-class roots.
In her first marketing campaign speech, Harris struck a populist word. “As a result of we’re a people-driven marketing campaign,” she stated, “that’s how we all know we’re going to be a people-first presidency.”
She has pledged to champion progressive priorities, together with inexpensive housing, elevated entry to baby care and paid household depart.
However whereas she has been supported by progressive leaders, Harris has shifted to the middle on different points.
For instance, when he first ran for president in 2019, he supported Sanders’ Medicare for All laws, which might have established a “single-payer system” and eradicated personal insurers.
This yr, nonetheless, his marketing campaign has stated it is not going to assist a single-payer system and can as a substitute concentrate on different mechanisms to scale back well being care prices.
And regardless of plans to handle local weather change — one other progressive precedence — Harris has been reluctant to assist a ban on fracking, a controversial technique of extracting oil and pure gasoline.
Harris the prosecutor
One other level of competition between Harris and the progressive motion is her expertise in felony justice.
On the marketing campaign path, Harris has drawn on her previous as San Francisco district legal professional and California legal professional basic, the state’s high legislation enforcement company.
She has argued that her expertise as a prosecutor makes her the best candidate to defeat Trump, who has 34 felony convictions.
“In these roles, I confronted off in opposition to perpetrators of all types,” he instructed a crowd this month in Detroit, Michigan. “So pay attention, Detroit, after I say: I do know Donald Trump’s varieties.”
However Harris’ historical past as a prosecutor has beforehand been seen as a legal responsibility amongst progressives, who largely favor felony justice reform.
Throughout her 2019 presidential marketing campaign, for instance, memes circulated on-line that learn, “Kamala is a cop.” Progressives expressed concern in regards to the harsh insurance policies Harris had adopted as prosecutor, together with one that might have introduced felony prices in opposition to dad and mom of youngsters who repeatedly skipped college.
Critics argued that such insurance policies would assist gasoline mass incarceration, which disproportionately impacts folks of colour.
However Harris’ defenders have argued that her tenure as prosecutor was way more sophisticated than critics painting. At one level, she even proposed diverting police funding to different authorities businesses.
Democratic strategist Ameshia Cross instructed Al Jazeera she believes the criticism of Harris on the time was a results of the cultural second.
The USA was within the midst of a reckoning over police violence in opposition to Black folks in 2019 and 2020, and social actions like Black Lives Matter have been on the rise.
“Throughout Kamala Harris’ first marketing campaign for the White Home, when she was within the primaries, one of many greatest knocks she took — in addition to anybody who had expertise as a prosecutor — was associated to Black Lives Matter, policing points, and accountability on the subject of progress and police reforms,” Cross defined.
“I feel it actually took away a number of his energy, significantly with youthful voters.”
However for some racial justice activists, issues about Harris’ dedication to police reform have lingered.
“Police accountability, police reform and stopping the killing of Black and Brown kids stays an pressing problem,” Chivona Newsome, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Larger New York, instructed Al Jazeera.
Newsome argued that Harris has didn’t show she is critical about police reform. He pointed to the police killing of Sonya Massey, an unarmed black lady who was shot in her house on July 6, as a grim reminder of the continued urgency of such reforms.
“In 2020, Biden and Harris had everybody chanting ‘Black Lives Matter,’” she stated. “However after they received workplace, nothing was completed.”
As a result of Harris entered the 2024 presidential race so late, she didn’t should compete in state-level primaries, a course of Newsome believes may have compelled the vp to take a stronger stance on felony justice reform.
The nationwide Black Lives Matter group has to this point declined to endorse Harris, citing the shortage of an everyday major season.
‘Incremental and progressive modifications’
The 2024 race presents different new challenges for Harris’ marketing campaign as she seeks to enchantment to left-leaning voters.
Progressives have clashed with Biden over his assist for Israel’s conflict in Gaza, with some questioning whether or not Harris will depart from her boss’s pro-Israeli insurance policies. Considered one of her marketing campaign advisers has already dashed hopes that she would conform to an arms embargo in opposition to Israel.
Nationally, some segments of the progressive left worry that donors like Barry Diller, the founding father of the Fox Broadcasting Firm, and Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, may strain Harris to desert antitrust campaigns in opposition to company monopolies.
Diller and Hoffman have been publicly pushing for Harris to switch Federal Commerce Fee Chair Lina Khan — an antitrust advocate — if she enters the White Home.
That is an space progressive supporters might be watching intently within the coming weeks, in accordance with Alan Minsky, govt director of Progressive Democrats of America.
The group, which has chapters in 31 states, has endorsed Harris. It’s the first time the group has endorsed a candidate within the basic election. A powerful 92 p.c of its members voted for Harris in a proper ballot.
“I feel from our activists’ perspective, the start line was not what we noticed in 2019. The place to begin was what we noticed within the Biden marketing campaign,” Minsky stated.
“When Biden stepped down and Harris took workplace, we felt an enormous groundswell of assist from our base for Harris, and that included lots of our activists.”
Minsky stated Harris’s observe document suggests she may characterize progressive insurance policies higher than Biden.
For instance, he drew a comparability between Biden and Harris on single-payer well being care: Biden by no means supported it, Harris did.
“It’s higher to have somebody who as soon as supported the mission and clearly thought it by, even when they later backed away from it,” Minsky stated.
He additionally sees Harris as a part of a broader shift by the Democratic Celebration towards a extra progressive financial agenda, away from a extra neoliberal platform that favored privatization and deregulation.
Nonetheless, Minsky stated that if Harris wins the presidency, he hopes just for “incremental, incremental modifications that may get us towards what actually must occur.”
“We don’t intend to be mere cheerleaders,” he stated of his group. “We anticipate that Kamala Harris, as president, is not going to come into workplace able to pursue our agenda, which we’re satisfied is the agenda that the American folks need and the very best agenda for society.”
