The “But Harris Ran As a Moderate” Evasion

Unpacking a post-election canard.

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Vice President Harris and former Congresswoman Liz Cheney on the campaign trail. (Photo: Sarah Rice/Getty Images)

In the weeks since Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris, Democrats and their allies have begun the long process of trying to determine why they lost. Some of these conversations have been productive and have pointed to factors that we at The Liberal Patriot have been writing about for some time: the party’s governing woes, longstanding support for neoliberal economics, misperceptions about the electorate, ideological shift away from the median voter, and reluctance to pick fights with the left wing of the party, including interest groups and donors—all of which likely played some role in fracturing their coalition this year and allowing Republicans to win the popular vote for the first time since 2004.

Some of the discourse, however, has taken a different track, specifically resisting the charge that Harris and the Democrats have veered too far left or idea that the party should moderate its stances on some social and cultural issues. This view was perhaps best summarized in a recent monologue by comedian-turned-pundit John Oliver:

If what you want is a centrist campaign that’s quiet on trans issues, tough on the border, distances itself from Palestinians, talks a lot about law and order, and reaches out to moderate Republicans, that candidate existed—and she just lost… I’m not sure how you reach out to moderate Republicans more than appearing with Liz Cheney multiple times.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but the general idea that Oliver and several other prominent writers and pundits on the left are promulgating is that Harris took deliberate steps to appeal to the middle of the electorate and avoid discussions about identity, and yet she lost anyway. Thus, it’s silly to attribute her loss to a perception among voters that she was too liberal or too focused on identity politics.

But this critique misses some key dynamics at play in this election. To be sure, Harris did sound like a moderate for much of the campaign. She touted the popular accomplishments of the Biden administration like caps on insulin prices, promoted policies to help lower housing costs, played up her career as a prosecutor, vowed to be tough on crime and the border, and mostly eschewed hot-button culture-war topics like race, gender, and the Israel-Hamas conflict.

However, a mere five years ago ago, Harris adopted—or at least sympathized with—a host of objectively radical and unpopular positions, including decriminalizing border crossings, defunding the police, abolishing ICE, banning fracking, confiscating guns, allowing convicted felons to vote from prison, and requiring all new car sales by 2040 to be electric (to name just a few). As the party’s 2024 nominee, she was reluctant to disavow these past positions or fully account for her reversals on them, saying only, “My values haven’t changed.”

This left many people unsure of her true beliefs. It also left a vacuum for Republicans to hit her repeatedly over those past views and claim that her attempt to cast herself as a “moderate” was a charade. One Trump campaign ad that memorably captured this argument highlighted comments Harris had previously made in support of using taxpayer funding for sex-reassignment surgeries in prisons, including for detained migrants. The spot concluded: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Some understandably decried the ad for picking on transgender Americans, but it was clearly making a broader point that seemed to resonate with many voters—that Harris wasn’t the moderate she purported to be and that she cared more about being on the right side of progressive interest groups than advocating for the vast majority of the country. And it turned out to be extraordinarily effective. According to the New York Times, pre-election focus group tests by the pro-Harris super PAC Future Forward found that the ad shifted the race 2.7 points toward Trump after viewers watched it, as it “cut to the core of the Trump argument: that Ms. Harris was ‘dangerously liberal.’”

Similarly, in a post-election survey, Blueprint tested several reasons why voters may not have chosen to support Harris, including the claim that she was “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class.” Among all voters, this was the third-most-cited reason for not voting for her, but even more telling: it was the top reason cited by swing voters who broke for Trump. (Meanwhile, among the least compelling claims in the survey? “Kamala Harris is too conservative.”)

A subsequent Blueprint survey confirmed Harris’s core problem was that many voters simply didn’t think she had genuinely changed her past positions.¹ According to their findings, swing voters who chose Trump believed that Harris supported:

• Using taxpayer dollars for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants (83 percent)

• Requiring all cars to be electric by 2035 (82 percent)

• Decriminalizing border crossings (77 percent)

• Banning fracking (74 percent)

• Defunding the police (72 percent)

The other argument Oliver made to support his contention that Harris ran a moderate campaign was that she made several public appearances with Liz Cheney, a Republican stalwart whose father was a Democratic bogeyman just two decades ago. Earning crossover support like that might normally signal a candidate is expanding their appeal to some nontraditional voters. And to be sure, early post-election data indicate that Harris may have won a slightly greater share of Republican voters (seven percent) than Trump won of Democratic voters (four percent).

But Harris didn’t have to do anything meaningful to earn Cheney’s support, like make policy concessions, because Cheney’s dislike of Trump was strong enough that she was likely always going to side with Harris. This then prompts a question: how many Republican voters was Cheney actually able to bring along with her? Americans who shared her anti-Trump animus and whose votes were driven by it likely didn’t need any convincing to support Harris. So, if Cheney wasn’t forcing Harris’s hand on certain policies in exchange for her endorsement or bringing a new type of voter into Harris’s tent, it’s not clear that she boosted Harris’s “moderate” appeal at all.

One final thing that hurt Harris’s attempt to fashion herself as a moderate was her refusal to distance herself from President Biden. Though Biden ran to the right of most of the 2020 Democratic primary field, he made a conscious decision at the beginning of his presidency to swing left. He demonstrated this early on by hiring staffers who had previously worked for Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders while shunning moderates like Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers, veterans of Obama’s White House—all in an effort to ingratiate himself with the party’s progressive faction.

This was also evident in how he governed. Biden made a concerted effort to push policy ideas that thrilled the progressive wing of the party, such as the COVID stimulus package early in his administration, which has since been linked to the subsequently higher rate of inflation. He also acquiesced to their demands on a liberalized asylum policy and student debt forgiveness, neither of which went over well with the public. Biden additionally took controversial actions related to race and social justice. One of his first acts as president was signing several executive orders related to advancing “equity,” one of which called for “an ­ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”

Perhaps all this is why polls in the early part of summer, just before Biden dropped out, showed that more voters saw Biden as “ideologically extreme” than said the same about Trump—and why Harris’s insistence on embracing him during the campaign may have hurt her. Indeed, Blueprint’s polling found that among the other main reasons voters chose not to support Harris was that they viewed her as too closely tied to Biden.

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There appear to be voices on the left that are reluctant to acknowledge some hard truths about the state of the Democratic Party and why it has struggled to consistently win or build an electorally dominant coalition. The reality is that although Americans are open to many of the economically populist ideas the party supports, they are also on average more culturally moderate or even conservative than the Democratic base. And the evidence is quickly becoming clear that unless the party adjusts to this—in both words and actions—it may continue to cost them votes.

1. This was something we flagged two months before the election.