For House progressives, it’s practicality over policy for Harris

House progressives were quick to line up in support of Vice President Kamala Harris’s bid for the Democratic nomination, despite the candidate’s pivot to the center on a range of key policy issues.

For many progressives, a quick coalescing around a candidate to defeat former President Trump took precedent over policy dogma, but that doesn’t mean they’ve made a sweeping endorsement of any nascent Harris platform.

“I would not interpret this as a rubber stamp of any policy or platform,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who staunchly backed President Biden until his decision to step aside from the race. “I think, really, this is about having as much stability as possible leading into the November election so that we defeat the threat of Donald Trump.”

When Biden announced that he would back out of his bid for a second term following his disappointing June debate with Trump, Harris hit the phones, reaching out to key constituencies inside the House Democratic caucus and elsewhere on Capitol Hill.

House progressives, who regularly buck mainstream Democrats on policy and politics, largely fell in line, avoiding a fight when the party could least afford one. The Congressional Progressive Caucus’s campaign arm endorsed Harris within hours of Biden stepping aside.

“There were a lot of conversations in private before the president decided to step aside, and what would happen if that were to happen,” Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal said last week. “I had a spreadsheet of where everyone was, and I knew that there was going to be quick support, so we called a quick vote from the [Congressional Progressive Caucus] PAC and within two hours we had more than sufficient votes to be able to endorse here.”

Jayapal added that she’s not weighing in on Harris’s potential vice presidential pick at the moment, but she laid out progressive priorities for a pick: "somebody that is a good progressive with strong labor, pro-union credentials, somebody that comes from some of the Midwestern states that we need to make sure we win.”

Progressives broadly said that their support for Harris is one of practicality. The party was reeling amid the increasingly ugly fight over whether Biden, with questions circling about his age and ability, should stay in the race. The Democratic National Convention was only weeks away. Democrats had to unify around a decision one way or another, and there wasn’t much appetite for a nomination battle.

House progressives clashed with the Biden administration early on in the president’s tenure, pushing Biden to include more Green New Deal policies in the White House’s 2021 infrastructure bill. Divisions have since healed, and progressives predict a Harris administration would be similar to Biden’s on policy.

“I would assume that if you liked what Joe Biden did in many areas, on investing in infrastructure and making things in America, and trying to help invest in renewables and negotiating for prescription-drug prices, all those sorts of common-sense economic issues, you’re going to be happy with Vice President Harris’s agenda as well,” Rep. Mark Pocan, a former co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, said last week.

Over her career, Harris’s relationship with progressives has been mixed, as she at times drew support for her policies on guns, police, and health care, but also drew criticism for her record as a prosecutor, first as a San Francisco district attorney and then as attorney general of California.

Harris opposed the death penalty but fought against a court ruling that would ban it in the state, saying it was legally flawed. She advocated for job programs inside prisons but was criticized by progressives for her handling of the rise in incarceration rates and cases of wrongly convicted people. Harris pushed for the prosecution of truancy cases that threatened parents with penalties in an effort to get children into class.

Still, Harris made some progressive impact during her time as California’s top cop. She resisted the state’s “three strikes” policy, in which a defendant convicted of a third felony could go to prison for 25 years to life.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Texas progressive and one of the first to back Harris for the nomination after Biden dropped out, defended the vice president's record as a prosecutor to reporters last week, pointing to Harris’s policies toward low-level and first offenders.

“So if you are talking about a prosecutor who was progressive, that is what she was even back then,” said Crockett, who came to Congress on a police-reform platform. “And so I think that this is the type of prosecutor that you want, someone that would absolutely do what the creed says, which is to seek justice, not convictions, and that’s who Kamala Harris was as a prosecutor.”

Harris has jettisoned past progressive stances from her short-lived 2020 run for the Democratic presidential nomination, largely falling in line with the Biden’s administration’s policy positions.

Harris supported a mandatory gun-buyback program during her 2020 bid but has not called for implementing the program since. She remains a supporter of an assault-weapons ban.

During her 2020 run, Harris backed a ban on fracking, which Trump noted during a rally in North Carolina last week. The Harris campaign aligned with the Biden administration’s position last Friday, telling The Hill that she would not support a ban on fracking. Fracking is a key economic driver in swing states like Pennsylvania.

Trump’s campaign released its first major ad against Harris on Tuesday, attacking the candidate for her record on immigration. Harris has tacked toward the center from her 2020 campaign here as well, supporting the Biden administration’s budget request for increased border-enforcement funds.

And Harris, who cosponsored Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All Act of 2017, has dropped talk of single-payer health care.

Crockett said she expects Harris to focus more on abortion rather than Medicare-for-All.

“I think she’s going to focus specifically on health care, but when it is on health care, I think right now she’s going to be laser-focused on reproductive health,” Crockett said.

Progressives have not abandoned efforts to influence Harris’s platform, though, and they expect vigorous negotiations with a potential Harris White House.

“It’s the Democratic Party; these arguments are going to happen,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I think it’s important to say that these are conversations that are going to happen, because that is the nature of the party. It is the nature of a progressive movement that is rooted in policy commitments. But I do think that what we're seeing right now is a rallying for stability.”