Washington, DC – Vice President Kamala Harris will journey to the Democratic National Convention subsequent week on the tailwinds of endorsements from main progressive organisations — a nod to the celebration unity she has impressed.
However that marks a shift for Harris, who has not all the time loved a comfortable relationship with the progressive wing of her celebration.
Nonetheless, many progressives see Harris’s candidacy within the 2024 presidential race as a possibility to chart a extra leftward course for the White Home.
“Vice President Kamala Harris has a singular relationship with the progressive motion,” mentioned William Walter, the manager director of Our Wisconsin Revolution, a battleground state organisation that pledges to “stand for progressive rules”.
Walter informed Al Jazeera that Harris isn’t any progressive dreamboat: She has struggled to convey the identical authenticity and readability of message as progressive icons like Bernie Sanders.
“However a number of progressives recognise that democracy is sort of actually on the poll this November,” he mentioned, referencing the menace he perceives in Harris’s Republican rival, former President Donald Trump.
Step one, Walter defined, is to cease Trump from retaking the White Home.
“As soon as we stop that, I believe that’s when the actual work begins. That’s when we have to begin pressuring the Democratic Celebration to develop into the working-class-centred celebration that we have now been previously.”
‘Individuals-first presidency’
Harris’s meteoric rise because the Democratic nominee has been unorthodox, to say the least.
In late July, her boss, President Joe Biden, abruptly withdrew from the presidential race and threw his assist behind Harris as a substitute.
Biden — seen as a centrist — had been courting middle-ground voters within the months earlier than his exit. However when Harris took over the Democratic ticket, her marketing campaign went in a special path, embracing a distinctly populist angle.
On Friday, as an example, she unveiled a sweeping financial plan geared toward “reducing prices for American households”, together with by the elimination of medical debt for a lot of People and bans on “worth gouging” for groceries.
The coverage proposals additionally featured subsidies for first-time homebuyers and a $6,000 tax credit score for households of newborns, protecting the primary 12 months of a kid’s life.
Harris additionally adopted Trump’s proposal to remove the federal tax on ideas, an concept in style with service business staff. Her marketing campaign has performed up her historical past working on the fast-food chain McDonald’s, as an emblem of her middle-class roots.
In her first marketing campaign speech, Harris flashed a populist streak. “As a result of we’re a people-powered marketing campaign,” she mentioned, “that’s how you recognize we will likely be a people-first presidency.”
She has pledged to champion progressive priorities, together with inexpensive housing, elevated entry to childcare and paid household go away.
However whilst she has been embraced by progressive leaders, Harris has moved to the centre on different points.
For instance, when she first ran for the presidency in 2019, she supported Sanders’s Medicare for All laws, which might have established a “single-payer system” and completed away with non-public insurers.
This 12 months, nonetheless, her marketing campaign has mentioned she is not going to assist a single-payer system and can focus as a substitute on different mechanisms for reducing healthcare prices.
And regardless of plans to deal with local weather change — one other progressive precedence — Harris has baulked at supporting a ban on fracking, a controversial methodology of extracting oil and pure gasoline.
Harris the prosecutor
One other level of rivalry between Harris and the progressive motion is her background in legal justice.
On the marketing campaign path, Harris has leaned into her previous because the district lawyer of San Francisco and the lawyer basic of California, the state’s prime legislation enforcement official.
She has argued that her background as a prosecutor makes her the best candidate to defeat Trump, who has 34 felony convictions.
“In these roles, I took on perpetrators of all types,” she informed a crowd this month in Detroit, Michigan. “So hear me, Detroit, once I say: I do know Donald Trump’s kind.”
However Harris’s historical past as a prosecutor has beforehand been seen as a legal responsibility amongst progressives, who’re largely in favour of legal justice reform.
Throughout her 2019 presidential marketing campaign, as an example, memes circulated on-line declaring, “Kamala is a cop.” Progressives expressed concern about hard-knuckle insurance policies Harris had embraced as a prosecutor, together with one that will have levied legal prices towards mother and father of repeatedly absent schoolchildren.
Critics argued such insurance policies would assist to gas mass incarceration, which disproportionately impacts individuals of color.
Harris’s defenders, nonetheless, have argued her tenure as a prosecutor was way more difficult than what critics painting. At one level, she even proposed diverting police funding to different authorities companies.
Ameshia Cross, a Democratic strategist, informed Al Jazeera she believes the criticisms towards Harris on the time have been a results of the cultural second.
The US was in the course of a reckoning over police violence towards Black individuals in 2019 and 2020, and social actions like Black Lives Matter have been on the rise.
“Throughout Kamala Harris’s first run for the White Home, when she was within the main, one of many essential hits that she took — in addition to anyone who had a prosecutorial background — was associated to Black Lives Matter, policing points and accountability when it got here to progress and police reforms,” Cross defined.
“I do assume that it actually took a number of the wind out of her sails, significantly when it got here to younger voters.”
However for some racial justice activists, the priority about Harris’s dedication to police reform has endured.
“Police accountability, police reform, stopping them from murdering Black and brown youngsters continues to be a urgent challenge,” Chivona Newsome, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Larger New York, informed Al Jazeera.
Newsome argued that Harris has not proven she is severe about police reform. She pointed to the police killing of Sonya Massey, an unarmed Black girl shot in her residence on July 6, as grim reminder of the continued urgency of such reforms.
“In 2020, Biden and Harris rolled the tide as a result of everybody was screaming ‘Black Lives Matter’,” she mentioned. “However after they received the workplace, nothing has been completed.”
As a result of Harris entered the 2024 presidential race so late, she didn’t should compete in state-level primaries — a course of Newsome feels might have pressured the vice chairman to take a stronger stand on legal justice reform.
The Nationwide Black Lives Matter organisation has up to now declined to endorse Harris, citing the shortage of an everyday main season.
‘Incremental, progressive modifications’
The 2024 race presents different new challenges for Harris’s marketing campaign because it courts left-wing voters.
Progressives have clashed with Biden over his assist for Israel’s warfare in Gaza — and a few query whether or not Harris will break from her boss’s pro-Israel insurance policies. One in every of her marketing campaign advisers has already doused the hope she would embrace an arms embargo towards Israel.
Domestically, some segments of the progressive left fear that donors like Barry Diller, the founding father of Fox Broadcasting Firm, and Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, might push Harris to desert antitrust campaigns towards enterprise monopolies.
Diller and Hoffman have been publicly pushing for Harris to interchange Federal Commerce Fee Chair Lina Khan — a champion of monopoly busting — if she enters the White Home.
That’s one space that progressive supporters will likely be intently watching within the coming weeks, based on Alan Minsky, the manager director of Progressive Democrats of America.
The group, which has chapters in 31 states, has thrown its weight behind Harris. It’s the first time the organisation has ever endorsed a candidate within the basic election. A powerful 92 p.c of its members voted to endorse Harris in a proper ballot.
“I believe the best way our activists have checked out it, the baseline was not what we noticed in 2019. The baseline was the place we noticed the Biden marketing campaign,” Minsky mentioned.
“When Biden stepped down and Harris stepped up, we felt an enormous groundswell of assist from our base from Harris — and that included a lot of our activists.”
Minsky defined that Harris’s historical past signifies she might higher characterize progressive insurance policies than Biden has.
As an example, he drew a comparability between Biden and Harris on single-payer healthcare: Biden by no means supported it. Harris did.
It’s “higher to have any individual who as soon as supported it and clearly has thought it by, even when she ultimately turned away from it”, Minsky mentioned.
He additionally sees Harris as half of a bigger flip by the Democratic Celebration in direction of a extra progressive financial agenda — transferring away from a extra neoliberal platform that favoured privatisation and deregulation.
Nonetheless, Minsky mentioned that, if Harris wins the presidency, he expects solely “incremental, progressive modifications that may set us in direction of what does really want to occur”.
“We don’t imply to be only a easy cheerleader,” he mentioned of his organisation. “We anticipate that Kamala Harris as president is not going to enter workplace poised to fulfil our agenda, which we’re adamant is the agenda the American individuals need and the very best agenda for the society.”