The left heaped pressure on Vice President Kamala Harris over the weekend to stand firm in her radical positions on major legislative issues.
The radicalized wing of the Democrat party appears to be concerned about Harris’s seeming pivot to the middle. Last week, anonymous Harris campaign sources tried to walk back at least four far-left policies that Harris supported, outlined here.
Harris, as the most far-left U.S. senator in 2019, according to GovTrack’s scorecard, must wrangle with her radical allies as she seeks to win independent voters in the so-called Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The left, however, remains adamant that Harris must carry its agenda into the general election, causing further division within the party amid running mate considerations.
Politico Playbook reported the infighting on Monday:
Harris has been able to keep a low profile on many issues that cleave Democrats. But in the short period it took for her to lock down the party’s presidential nomination, she has already staked out positions on a pair of key issues — climate and abortion policy — that buck progressives who hoped she would go further than President Joe Biden.
Harris is also facing pressure from the left to maintain — or surpass — Biden’s regulatory offensive on “corporate greed” and antitrust policies while business groups and moderate Democrats want a friendlier approach across economic issues, including cryptocurrency.
It’s a friction Democrats are eager to avoid airing in public after weeks of infighting over Biden’s fate and almost certainly part of the calculus in picking a No. 2 in the next few days.
The vice president is trying to straddle both her radical left allies and a political tact to the middle, a risky strategy that might explode when she selects a running mate the left opposes, such as Gov. Josh Shapiro. “[Harris] believes real leadership means bringing all sides together to build consensus,” a Harris campaign spokesperson told Playbook in a statement.
It remains unclear if consensus can be reached on the plethora of radical issues the left insists Harris must champion. Those positions include:- Making abortion a federal issue
- Banning fracking
- Continuing the war on American energy
- Increasing red tape through by empowering the administrative state
- Sympathizing with pro-Hamas protesters against Israel
- Enacting socialized medicine
- Expanding taxpayer-funded housing
- Making college free
- Doubling down on Bidenomics
Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who has yet to endorse Harris, likely to hold leverage over her campaign, appears to be the loudest voice among Harris’s far-left allies. He commissioned a poll that allegedly found voters in Blue Wall states desperately want a radical agenda.
Sanders told Punchbowl News on Monday:
What I want to make sure — and what this all is about — is to get the point not only to the vice president but to every Democratic candidate that if you run on issues, economic issues of concern to the working class of this country [that] we have ignored for too many years, you can win this election.
“That’s the main thrust of this poll,” he insisted. “I think the overwhelming economic evidence is that the reason we’ve had inflation in recent years has everything to do with corporate greed,” Sanders said.
Independent polling contradicts Sanders’ claims. A glaring disparity exists between the policies that voters support and radical policies. The discrepancies, exposed by a recent Harvard/Harris poll, spring from the official Republican platform. Pollsters recorded the voters’ opinions of the platform, which contradicted the left’s positions. The survey sampled 2,196 registered voters from July 26-28. The margin of error for the survey is ± 2.1 percent.
Below are a few of the policy differences between the voters’ and the left’s positions:
- Secure our elections, including same day voting, voter identification, paper ballots, and proof of citizenship
- Keep men out of women’s sports
- Cancel the electric vehicle mandate and cut costly and burdensome regulations
- Carry out the largest deportation operation in American history
- Make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far
More is here on the discrepancies.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
