by Steven Richards
In the weeks since Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, the California politician has shifted her policies—sometimes quietly, even under the radar —on key issues to distance herself from her liberal past.
White House officials told Politico that these shifts are part of a strategy to undermine the argument that she is a leftist politician, a reputation they believe stems from the positions she took in the 2020 Democratic primary, but which they say do not truly represent Harris’ positions.
“That primary was a distorting experience for a lot of people,” said one senior White House official, according to Politico.
Yet, this strategy runs the risk of exposing the vice president to criticisms that she is only moderating her liberal stances to appeal to key swing state voters. In fact, her 2024 rival Donald Trump has already moved to paint her as the “number one most radical left Democrat in the entire Senate.”
Indeed, critics including the Republican National Committee, have begun to label Harris as a flip-flopper. “It’s a classic bait-and-switch—but Kamala’s years of support for the farthest-left policies can’t be masked when she’s on the record repeatedly defending them,” the RNC said in a press release reviewed by Just the News.
The Kamala Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Just the News.
Here are four key policies that defined Harris as a radical leftist upon which she has changed her position as she seeks to look more moderate for the general election:
Once in favor of banning fracking: Now, not so much
During the height of the 2020 primary campaign, Harris proudly stated at a CNN town hall focused on the “climate crisis” that she was in favor of banning fracking—a method of extracting natural gas from the ground.
“There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” she said at the town hall. “And starting with what we can do on Day One around public lands, right?”
“And then there has to be legislation, but, yes, and this is something I’ve taken on in California. I have a history of working on this issue and to your point, we have to just acknowledge that the residual impact of fracking is enormous in terms of the health and safety of communities,” she added.
Now, as Harris is competing to win over key swing state voters, her campaign confirmed to The Hill that she no longer supported a ban on the practice. One important swing state, Pennsylvania, is the second largest producer of natural gas.
After her rise to the nomination, Trump began criticizing Harris for her past position, but her campaign, in what has become a pattern of rewriting history, called these claims false.
“Trump’s false claims about fracking bans are an obvious attempt to distract from his own plans to enrich oil and gas executives at the expense of the middle class,” a campaign spokesperson told The Hill.
Demanded defunding the police
In a June 2020 interview, at the height of the George Floyd protest movement, Harris unequivocally claimed she supported reimagining public safety as protestors called for defunding the police.
“Defund the police, the issue behind it is that we need to reimagine how we are creating safety,” Harris said in the June 2020 radio interview, according to the Associated Press. “And when you have many cities that have one third of their entire city budget focused on policing, we know that is not the smart way and the best way or the right way to achieve safety.”
“For too long, the status quo thinking has been, you get more safety by putting more cops on the street,” Harris said. “Well, that’s wrong, because by the way, if you wanna look at upper middle class suburban neighborhoods, they don’t have that patrol car.”
Now, as the 2024 campaign ramps up and crime is polled as an important issue for most Americans, Harris has sought to rewrite the public’s perception and emphasis her own past a prosecutor while her campaign officials push back on the contention that she supports defunding law enforcement.
“Her position has always been that you can both be tough and smart on crime, and it requires funding police, but it also requires funding rehabilitation and things that might criminal justice system safer,” Mitch Landrieu, co-chair of the Harris campaign told CNN’s Pamela Brown. “You can do both.”
Eliminating private insurance: “That’s not what I meant.”
Before she ran for president the first time in 2020, then-Senator Kamala Harris co-sponsored liberal Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-for-All bill that would have seen the elimination of private insurance in favor of a government-run system.
Harris was the first Democratic Senator to sign on to the bill with Sanders, telling voters at a town hall in California that she intended to sponsor the bill because “it’s just the right thing to do.”
When she ran for president in the 2020 primary, Harris reiterated her support for a Medicare-for-All system.
“I believe the solution—and I actually feel very strongly about this—is that we need to have Medicare for all. That’s just the bottom line…it is inhumane to make people go through a system where they cannot literally receive the benefit of what medical science can offer because some insurance company has decided it doesn’t meet their bottom line,” she said at a CNN town hall in Iowa.
Harris later reversed herself on the hardline position during the primary campaign, claiming that she was open to other policies and eventually explained in another interview with tapper that “that’s not what I meant” when it came to her position on eliminating private insurance.
So far, though, Vice President Harris has not outlined her official 2024 position on a “Medicare-for-All” system, but there are signs that she may be moderating her views on this policy as well. The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Just the News about her healthcare positions.
Evidence of a shift come from Harris’ support of President Biden’s efforts to expand participation in the Affordable Care Act. A record number signed up for 2024 coverage under the law, which indeed facilitates coverage from the private insurance market.
Decriminalizing illegal immigration
During the 2020 campaign, Vice President Harris’ immigration positions were among the most liberal in her party. For example, during 2019 Democratic primary debate in Miami, Harris raised her hand in affirmation when the moderators asked the candidates if they would be in favor of decriminalizing border crossings.
She also expressed support for providing illegal immigrants with taxpayer-funded healthcare under her plan.
As part of the administration, Harris has worked alongside President Biden, who on his very first day in office reversed many of Trump’s immigration-related executive orders. Next, he assigned Harris to handle addressing the root causes of immigration, which earned her the label “border czar” from the media.
Suddenly, Harris and a compliant media are denying she was ever given a leadership role in the border crisis.
However, after years of pressure on the border, Biden recently implemented new executive orders which angered the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party. This order included restrictions on asylum claims and were intended to reduce border crossings.
In a shift from the liberal end of the spectrum, Harris’ presidential campaign has confirmed that the vice president will seek to maintain Biden’s immigration policies and signaling that she supports a secure border.
“I think at this point … the policies that are … having a real impact on ensuring that we have security and order at our border are policies that will continue,” her campaign manager told CBS News.
Harris has yet to face any interviews that question her shifting positions, and has not held an unscripted press conference where she might be asked about her series of U-turns.
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Steven Richards is a reporter for Just the News.
Photo “Kamala Harris” by Kamala Harris.
