Pramila Jayapal makes the progressive case for Kamala Harris

Americana: What’s your overall strategy for 2024?

Pramila Jayapal: Obviously, we want to win back the gavels. A second piece is that we have a number of frontline red-to-blue members who are progressives, and it’s in our interest to make sure that they are getting the support that they need. And a third piece is that the CPC made it an explicit strategy, during Build Back Better, to build consensus for populist issues like universal childcare, raising the minimum wage, and expanding Social Security and Medicare. People were with us, across the conference, and we want to reward that behavior — people like [Pennsylvania Rep.] Susan Wild, who have been really valuable in very difficult districts.

With supporting Harris and the DCCC — this has been about people really valuing the progressive base on every front, including the tremendous resources that progressive donors and members can contribute. We’ve been able to just do amazing things. We’ve made 120,000 calls just this cycle for our endorsed candidates, and in swing states. We’re doing twice-weekly phone banks with the Harris-Walz campaign. That is also a very intentional way of making sure that I’m using my campaign and my platform not only to reelect me, but to make sure that we are helping to flip the house, to keep the White House, and to keep the Senate.

Americana: What’s the difference between a progressive agenda in 2025 and what you came in with in 2021? Since then, obviously, there’s been an effort to shrink the numbers of progressives in Congress.

Pramila Jayapal: We have a day one agenda that we have been pushing. We did a lot of work in the lead up to the 2020 campaign, then the Biden/Harris administration to make sure that it was our agenda that got implemented. And I think you saw the results of that when we had the trifecta. We’ve got the same thing this time around, and so many of the pieces of Build Back Better that we were able to get through the House and fell short in the Senate. Big structural reforms are a big piece of what we want to do, and they’re popular. Expanding Social Security and Medicare — adding dental and vision to Medicare coverage — is extremely popular in frontline districts.

Americana: Where does Medicare for All fit into this mix? One of the Republican attacks on the vice president is that she wanted to ban private insurance by passing it. And she didn’t return to Medicare for All after 2020.

Pramila Jayapal: Obviously the dynamics around this are still relevant, because we haven’t built the full number of votes that we would need to pass Medicare for All in Congress. That’s just true. However, I think we are seeing the real cracks in the system as these private insurance companies try to privatize Medicare. We put lowering the eligibility age into Build Back Better — that’s something I put in as a co-chair of the Biden Sanders Unity Task Force in 2020. And we’ve used our Medicare for All PAC to do educational stuff for our candidates who are interested in supporting it. We’re actually in the middle of a poll right now. We have a two-tier strategy there: Fight the privatization and expand Medicare. And there’s a lot of support across the Democratic caucus for doing those things.

Americana: What’s your reaction, overall, to how the vice president has shifted? This is a less progressive agenda than we heard from her in 2019 on multiple fronts.

Pramila Jayapal: I think she has done a remarkable job. Despite some areas where I might want something different, she’s been making this about middle class families, about lifting everybody up, about energizing people to see themselves both in her and Tim Walz. For a very truncated campaign, I am not of the opinion that a bunch of detailed policies are necessary. Her focus on housing, right off the bat, I thought was incredibly important. Unveiling a manufacturing strategy, the focus on corporate price gouging, the focus on progressive taxation; all of those things are very much in line with where we are.

Americana: What has been the impact of the Gaza issue on mobilizing progressives? Are you finding much dissatisfaction with how the vice president’s talking about it? How often are you finding voters who say: I can’t possibly vote to endorse a genocide?

Pramila Jayapal: I think there was a big opening when she came in, because she is not Joe Biden, and she comes at this issue with a very different sort of perspective — and, I think, a deep empathy for the suffering of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people. I think she has been much better at articulating that.

But it’s tough. I’m definitely hearing that from some people. That’s part of the reason I’m barnstorming the country — not to say to people that they’re wrong in any way, but to say that we have to think about how we change US policy towards the Middle East and towards Israel, in particular with our military assistance. How do we make sure that we are adhering to humanitarian law and to our own domestic Leahy laws? That is never going to happen under Donald Trump.

I was just talking to a young African American woman who was saying to me, you know, the thing that people need to understand is we are waking up with social media pictures and videos and feeling the trauma, so deeply, of what is happening to children in Gaza. It feels like we would not be comporting with our values if we were to continue that direction. And that’s the argument we have to make.

Americana: The vice president’s also changed the way she talks about immigration and crime. What do you say to one of these voters who thinks: Oh, Democrats have the same immigration position as Trump now? They just want border security, even without a path to citizenship.

Pramila Jayapal: I worked on this for a decade before coming to Congress, and I’m the ranking member on the immigration subcommittee, so I’m following this very closely. What you’re seeing is the effect of years of Donald Trump and extreme Republicans bashing immigrants. So I understand why the vice president is trying to take this on. I think my complaint about Democrats is that we often run away from the issue instead of talking about it. I don’t think she’s doing that. At the [Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute] gala, she talked about the need for a path to citizenship.

Ultimately, I think it’s smart to talk about the fact that Republicans tanked the border bill that was written by the second most conservative Republican in Congress — even if that’s not the bill I wanted. I still think it’s smart to point out the hypocrisy of Republicans who have kept this issue out there. It’s more important for them to leave it out there as an unsolved issue so that they can bash immigrants over and over again and dehumanize them. If we suspended the filibuster or got rid of the filibuster so we could pass humane immigration reform — that, to me, is a number one priority.

Americana: I have the same kind of question about crime. Ending the death penalty’s not in the Democratic platform anymore. Harris is not taking a position on the California initiative that would roll back some criminal justice reforms; every other ad I see is about crime, with some Willie Horton story. Are you concerned with how the conversation there has shifted?

Pramila Jayapal: I’m worried about Republicans coming into office and completely destroying our country. I do think that there is, sometimes, a sense that progressives aren’t able to govern. She has a good background to take on the crime question because of her prosecutor days. But I also think she is being careful. She’s not taking on things that are going to backfire on her in the next 40 days.

What’s hurt us so much, on crime, and on immigration, is all of the misinformation. Trump has had a bully pulpit to spread that, and people like Elon Musk helped. That has been so destructive to people actually understanding what the facts are. Numbers at the border are at the lowest level ever; crime has gone down in major cities across the country. Every time I speak up and tell the truth about Seattle, it’s very difficult to get that message across.

I want to say one thing: The biggest base of swing voters is actually young people, folks of color, immigrants across the country, who feel like they’re not really part of the Democratic Party, or their voices don’t matter. We don’t invest a lot of time or energy as a party in making sure that those folks turn out — and they are the margin of difference. It’s not that we don’t need independent swing voters, we do, but we don’t spend enough time thinking about how to make sure that our base does not — they won’t swing to Trump, but they will swing right onto to the couch.