In her campaign debut, Kamala Harris takes a turn to the left

Kamala Harris’s record in the Senate included supporting Bernie Sanders’s bill to outlaw private health insurance. Picture: AFP

Does Kamala Harris think she’s going to win this election by firing up the Democratic Party base?

That’s a serious question after watching her first campaign rally since President Joe Biden’s sudden withdrawal from the 2024 race.

On Tuesday outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Harris was introduced by an “educator” with a doctorate who said that thanks to the Biden-Harris administration, “I had almost all of my student-loan debt forgiven.”

And if that plank of progressive big government doesn’t appeal, Harris has others. The Vice-President said she sees a future where “every worker has the freedom to join a union”, and “every person has affordable healthcare, affordable childcare, and paid family leave”, and “every senior can retire with dignity”.

The promise is that Uncle Sam will deliver it all.

She also pledged to sign federal laws to ban “assault weapons” and override state abortion limitations.

This is a strange strategy. Harris is talking as if she’s running in the Democrat primaries and trying to beat California Governor Gavin Newsom for her party’s presidential nod. In reality she leapfrogged that fraught step and is going straight to the general election.

Biden’s abrupt resignation has handed her the great gift of the presidential nomination without the necessity of having to appeal to Democratic primary voters. Harris might enjoy more freedom to manoeuvre than any major-party nominee in a generation.

This gives her a rare opportunity to reintroduce herself to voters as she wants them to see her. What Harris stands for today is largely undefined, and she has about 100 days to answer the question.

But one of her vulnerabilities in November is that voters might view her, not without reason, as more of a left-winger than Biden.

Kamala Harris is talking as if she’s running in the Democrat primaries and trying to beat California Governor Gavin Newsom for her party’s presidential nod. Picture: AFP

Her record in the Senate included supporting Bernie Sanders’s bill to outlaw private health insurance.

She could instead be taking the opportunity to build a defence against what is surely the coming GOP assault to define her as a California progressive.

Yet in Milwaukee she sounded as if her main political task is to get Democrats enthused about finishing the pieces of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda that failed in the Democratic Senate. That means more government entitlements for healthcare, childcare, and more progressive culture war.

Swing voters? Who needs ’em. Perhaps she will grow into her candidacy and realise that her challenge is to put some distance between herself and Biden, broaden her appeal past her old California constituents, and talk directly to “double haters” and moderates in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and other states in play.

Here are some ideas. She could swear off the tax increases that progressives always want to enact. She could say the administration made a mistake on the border and pledge to fire secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

She could reverse her past support for a ban on oil and gas fracking, while arguing that consumers need low energy prices, and by the way the shale revolution means that the US is no longer at risk of energy blackmail from hostile petrostates.

She could say something nice about school choice, which would be a throwback to the Democratic Party position once taken by Barack Obama and senator Cory Booker.

Perhaps Harris is a true progressive believer and will run as one – in which case no one will be more delighted than Donald Trump.

She also said in Milwaukee that she’d “stop Donald Trump’s extreme abortion bans”, while claiming that Trump is planning to cut Social Security and Medicare.

But if voters don’t believe this, given how prominently Trump has moved the GOP on abortion and entitlements, what does Harris have left?