The biggest lesson Kamala Harris should take from Joe Biden

Former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo said you campaign in poetry; you govern in prose. The lyricism of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign is apparent, shining as her speeches and rallies speak more to ideals than ideas. Less clear are the exact words she intends to transfigure into law, should she be sworn in next January.

In part, this is because Harris is unique in recent presidential history, having been catapulted into a general election without first having spent the previous months competing for attention, donors and votes in a primary field. Rather than having her stand out in a crowd and then unify the party, her ascension compressed that effort into a dense, hot few weeks in July and August. Her attention is now fully on barnstorming the purple areas of swing states, focused less on appeasing the progressive base of the party than on winning over whichever voters are still making up their minds about how to vote in November — or if at all.

The result has been a campaign that’s burning through the fuel the base provided when she became the nominee. The goal is to convert that energy into enough moderate votes to eke out a win against former President Donald Trump. In the process, she has steadily shed the stances she took when vying against 19 other candidates to court the progressive left in 2019. But should she find herself the next occupant of the Oval Office, she’d be wise to look to her predecessor as an example for how to deliver progressive wins as a “moderate.”

President Joe Biden ran as the most moderate candidate that year, a position that the former vice president argued made him the most likely to beat the incumbent Trump. Once he’d become the presumptive nominee, however, Biden did something unusual: He moved to the left. Knowing his weakness among progressives, his team formed a task force with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to hash out a policy agenda for the nominee. Sanders told NPR at the time that the “goals of the task force were to move the Biden campaign into as progressive a direction as possible, and I think we did that.”

That’s an uncharacteristic understatement from Sanders. Once Biden was elected, his advisers turned to another adage in politics — “never let a crisis go to waste” — to load up the emergency Covid relief package with progressive policy goals, including a temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit. He followed that up by proposing a massive infrastructure package, intended not just to build roads and bridges, but also to transform a social safety net that had seen Republicans cut and fray its strings over the decades.

Much of the Build Back Better plan fell to the wayside, thanks to the stubbornness of Democratic moderates and united GOP opposition. Other policies and priorities — like voting rights and abortion rights — were waylaid in Congress, first by Republican filibusters in the Senate, then by Republicans’ reclaiming a majority in the House. But the pieces of his agenda that Biden did manage to pass have been major investments in progressive policy areas like climate change, as well as the more traditional infrastructure spending.

Harris finds herself in a much different position as we head toward November. Having tried to win over progressives in 2020, she has a different segment of the electorate to mollify than Biden did. Politico captured this dynamic last week in an analysis of where the two had spent their time campaigning this year. Biden mostly shuffled among major cities attempting to shore up crumbling support among the left, while Harris has spent time in places like western Pennsylvania, speaking to white working-class voters whom Trump considers his.

Policywise, this has meant shying away from some of the positions Harris took before assuming the vice presidency. Her campaign has disavowed her support for a mandatory buyback program for assault weapons, for example, as well as her previous openness to expanding the Supreme Court. Any former support for “Medicare for All” or banning fracking has been tucked into a box and shelved in the darkest recesses of the Naval Observatory. These are still good policies, in my view, but not the sort of thing Harris wanted to have in the spotlight.

Layered on top of her previous policies are the intrinsic biases that she needs to overcome among skeptics who see her race and gender as a potential liability — rather than a strength. It’s apparently much easier for a typical voter to look at Harris and believe that a Black female Democrat is much more liberal than her current agenda or background as a prosecutor would suggest. How else does one explain why 47% of respondents in a recent New York Times-Siena College poll said she is “too liberal or progressive,” while 49% thought that Trump of all people is neither too liberal nor too conservative?

Should she win, however, the question becomes how she chooses to use whatever mandate she has. Does she continue to play toward the middle if Democrats somehow reclaim the House and keep the Senate? Will she be more focused on appeasing moderate Republicans and the supposed “center” than shoring up democracy against Trumpism? We can make guesses, but, like Biden, we can’t know for certain until she can pull the levers of power herself.

It is an encouraging sign that she picked Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate. Walz also won office after initially campaigning as a center-of-the-road Democrat. But when both houses in the state Legislature went blue in 2022, he didn’t hesitate to use that slim majority to advance progressive legislation. As Walz said last year at the end of a remarkable legislative session: “Minnesota is showing the country you don’t win elections to bank political capital — you win elections to burn political capital and improve lives.” 

It’s an instinct that Biden’s advisers harnessed to his benefit and one that Harris should embrace, as well, should she become president. It will be all the better for the country if she finally finds a way to govern that still hits the ear like a sonnet.