The Scene
Over the summer, a group of former Nikki Haley supporters who now back Kamala Harris told her presidential campaign how she could close the deal with frustrated Republicans.
Harris could “emphasize ironclad support for Israel’s security.” She might “commit to appointing at least one reasonable Republican to a high-level Cabinet position.” And why not talk about “energy dominance,” after picking a “moderate” running mate?
The Haley Voters Working Group didn’t get everything on the list; Harris bypassed Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, picking the more progressive Tim Walz as her running mate. But this week, Harris campaigned alongside Liz Cheney, and Walz told a debate audience that she’d have an “an all [of the] above energy policy” and keep “producing more natural gas and more oil.” And the vice president said in her first major interview in August that she’d include a Republican in her cabinet.
Mission accomplished.
“They’re moving toward policies the center of the country embraces,” said Robert Schwartz, the co-founder of Haley Voters for Harris, and now a senior advisor to the Haley Voters Working Group. “There were some things on the list that they were gonna do anyway, but it’s been fun to see them move in our direction.”
To the frustration of progressive Democrats, most of them biting their tongues until the election, the Harris-Walz campaign entered the election’s final stretch with the party’s most conservative messaging in years.
Harris didn’t just stand with Cheney; she called the former House GOP conference chair “an extraordinary national leader” and “true patriot.” She didn’t just recant her old pledge to ban fracking; she told Pennsylvania media that she cast “the tie-breaking vote to open up more fracking leases.” And she’s promised to maintain the “most lethal fighting force in the world.”
The Trump campaign has labeled all of this a ruse — a San Francisco liberal’s makeover, just in time for early voting. Trump campaign spokesman Stephen Cheung derided Cheney this week as “a stone-cold loser” shilling for “a weak, failed and dangerously liberal” Harris. In swing states, the campaign and its allied PACs continue to pound Harris over progressive positions she took during her doomed 2020 presidential campaign, but abandoned in the White House.
They are matched by paid Democratic messaging that has reintroduced Harris as a “border state prosecutor” who’ll deliver a “middle class tax cut,” and by interviews and speeches where the Democratic ticket boasts that they own guns and — in Harris’ case — won’t hesitate to use them.
The View From Progressives
The Democrats most frustrated by Harris’s messaging are not threatening to bolt the party or abandon Trump. They do worry that other people might, and that Harris is not doing everything she could to keep the working class voters who drifted right after 2016.
Our Revolution, the progressive group founded by Bernie Sanders after his 2016 primary bid ended, polled 1300 activists in swing states last month, to gauge whether Harris had a problem. The result, first provided to Semafor, was that one in four activists knew someone who was considering a third party protest vote. The group would focus on contacting 1.2 million people who’d supported Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in primaries, hoping that Harris would make that job easier.
“You can’t take progressives for granted, which I think the campaign is doing,” said Our Revolution executive director Joseph Geevarghese. “When I think about Wisconsin, I think about Foxconn and Trump’s broken promise to bring it there. I think about Scott Walker starting a war on public sector unions. I don’t think about campaigning with Liz Cheney in the birthplace of the Republican Party. “Anti-war activists, who have demanded Harris support an arms embargo on Israel, have grown particularly frustrated. Last month, the Uncommitted Movement of anti-war Democratic delegates announced that it could not endorse Harris, and its members would make their own minds up, after the Harris campaign refused to add a Palestinian-American speaker to a DNC line-up with numerous anti-Trump Republicans.
“The base of the Democratic Party does not get super excited about Vice President Harris pursuing Dick Cheney harder than she’s pursuing voters for whom Gaza is the top policy issue,” said Abbas Alawieh, a co-founder of the group, in a call about the decision. “That is a flawed approach, given that the majority of voters in our country want a stop to the unconditional flow of weapons to not just Benjamin Netanyahu, but to endless wars. Dick Cheney is the poster child for endless wars.”
Jason Call, the campaign manager for Jill Stein’s Green Party presidential bid, argued that “the real Kamala Harris continues to reveal who she is,” making it easier to attract frustrated ex-Democratic voters.
“For Harris to campaign with Liz Cheney while trumpeting Dick Cheney’s endorsement at every opportunity is a perfect illustration of how the parties of war and Wall Street are fundamentally converging and leaving working people behind,” said Call.
The View From Republicans
The pro-Harris Republican rebuttal to this is simple. The left is making demands that could cost Harris. Moderate and conservative voters are just asking her to beat Trump.
Endorsers like Cheney have even played up their differences (“We have plenty of policy disagreements with Vice President Harris,” she said in Wisconsin) to underscore that Trump is a unique national emergency that transcends debates over party platforms. Even on substantive issues where Harris has moved toward them, like energy, the shift had little to do with their influence and far more to do with things like surging energy prices after the Ukraine war and swing state job distribution.
Former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh, a Republican who’s campaigned in swing states for Harris, said that the voters he met were interested in “defending democracy,” and didn’t have many other litmus tests. Promising to be a conventional president who governs for everyone may be enough.
“She has made things easier. She’s not a crazy lefty. She’s been inclusive. Her convention speech was Reagan-esque in many ways,” said Walsh, as he headed to a Georgia event with former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, another pro-Harris Republican. Walsh had done the same work when Joe Biden led the ticket; Harris, he said, was making the job much easier by exciting young voters and liberals.
“Just the pure excitement and vibe of her will get the left jazzed and voting,” said Walsh. “So it makes sense for her to reach out to the middle. The case for Biden was harder, because you didn’t have that natural enthusiasm.”
David’s view
The progressives who don’t like the Harris campaign’s approach disagree on what needs to change. Some believe that there are popular, pro-labor Biden policies that Harris doesn’t talk enough about, enabling Trump to rush into the gap with his promises. (Trump and Vance repeatedly claim that they, not Biden, put a cap on insulin prices for seniors, which is a bit of a tell here.) Some are focused tightly on Arab-American voters, warning that Biden and Harris are getting played by Benjamin Netanyahu, who wants Trump back in the White House and would benefit if anti-war voters give up on the Democrats.
I see two things happening here. One: The electorate has moved right on immigration and crime since 2016, when Hillary Clinton distanced herself from the Obama administration’s deportation policies, and since 2020, when anger at Trump’s family separation policies peaked. Democrats have taken their openings when Trump has been callous or dishonest about immigration; Walz said in his debate with Vance that the GOP ticket exploited the city of Springfield, Ohio to “dehumanize and villainize” Haitians with temporary residency status. But the broader context is Trump gaining with non-white voters even as he promises “mass deportation,” and Democrats having to concede ground in response.
Two: Democrats are reaching out to the voters who make the fewest demands. That doesn’t mean they’re ignoring their traditional base, but it does explain why they don’t feel safe relying on them alone. Bailing out the Teamsters’ pensions didn’t help them secure the union’s endorsement; it’s at best an open question whether Biden marching in a picket line with UAW and Harris backing striking longshoremen will help them with rank-and-file members. Democrats can mitigate their decline with union voters on economic issues, but they can’t, in a few weeks, abandon the environmentalism or cultural liberalism that has moved many of them toward Trump.
Similarly, anti-war organizers insist that Harris could shift votes if she broke with the Biden administration’s support for Israeli war funding, and polling shows that it could be popular even as it would set off an explosive political fight. But soft Republican voters and their advocates are asking for no change at all. What’s the harm in thanking them for that freely-offered support and seeing how deep that sentiment runs?
Notable
- In the New Yorker, Eyal Press asks whether Harris is avoiding the mistakes of the Hillary Clinton campaign, which reached out to Republicans but took union laborers for granted. She’s certainly improved on the optics: “Clinton didn’t visit a single union hall in Michigan or Wisconsin after she became the nominee.”
- In the Washington Post, Liz Goodwin and Jacqueline Alemany look at why the vast majority of progressives are grinning and bearing it. “On immigration and the war in Gaza, in particular, members to the left of Harris’s stances are avoiding harsh critiques as she faces Trump, hoping to hash out their differences after the election.”