As the Kamala Harris campaign lurches rightward, pundits want us to believe she’s just following the will of the voters. The facts don’t bear that out.
Vice President Kamala Harris laughs as Liz Cheney speaks on stage at Royal Oak Music Theatre in Royal Oak, Michigan, on October 21, 2024. (Nic Antaya / Washington Post via Getty Images)
Some alarming news is brewing for the Left. It turns out that after a brief flirtation with progressive and socialist politics, the United States is now turning back to the right.
“Five years ago, as a candidate for the Democratic nomination, Harris catered to the social justice Left. Now she tells Oprah she’ll shoot intruders with her Glock. That’s what I call progress,” the American Enterprise Institute recently celebrated, pointing to Harris’s moves to “catch up” with a more conservative voting public. “Kamala Harris is running to the center-right because America is center-right,” National Review blared last month. Dave Weigel argues that Democrats have “adjusted to an electorate that’s shifted to the right” by making several major policy concessions “that they didn’t want to, or think they needed to, in 2016 and 2020.”
Don’t be so sure.
It’s not that there’s nothing to this. Immigration has become a more important issue to voters across the board, and far-right ideas like mass deportation, gutting the right to asylum, or simply curbing immigration now have support from majorities or pluralities of Americans, even leaping in popularity among Democrats. And polling shows that the public has lagged or moved the other way on topics related to transgender Americans, who the Right has been somewhat successful at turning into a wedge issue.
But it’s a mistake to treat the Democratic Party’s rightward lurch under Kamala Harris as an accurate measure of the country’s politics as a whole, or even to treat support for Donald Trump or Joe Biden and Harris as a proxy for ideology. (To be fair to Weigel, he takes care to take note this and other nuances.)
Take the issue of raising the federal minimum wage. Harris never talks about it: not at the debate with Trump, not in her first sit-down interview in August, not in the Univision town hall she just did. Though it might be part of the Democratic platform, for all intents and purposes, it has been dropped from her campaign and presidential agenda.
Does this mean the country has turned against a $15 or higher minimum wage, a major left-wing priority that was one of the Bernie Sanders campaign’s (and, later, Biden’s) flagship policies? Obviously not, as we can see not only from robust recent polling that shows the measure is wildly popular across party lines, but from the results of state and municipal ballot measures that have routinely seen Americans directly vote to hike the wage — including in deep red Florida, 60 percent of whose voting residents backed raising the wage to $15 four years ago, at the same time they elected Trump and a spree of Republicans downballot.
This isn’t the only such example. There are a host of progressive policies that poll well across the board that Harris either refuses to take up, like adding dental coverage to Medicare and lowering the program’s eligibility age, or doesn’t ever talk about, like a national rent cap. In a political system where both parties beg for money from corporations and the ultrarich, treating what policies those parties do and don’t support as a reflection of the will of the voters doesn’t make much sense.
Harris’s rightward lurch on foreign policy isn’t justified by meeting the electorate where it is either: polling consistently shows that voters, especially in swing states, are worried about the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East escalating, see preventing that escalation as a higher priority than total military victory, oppose Israel’s war and favor an arms embargo on it, and prefer the United States generally shrink its global footprint to focus on domestic problems.
These are all positions traditionally espoused by left-wing voices, and they’re also positions that Harris is on the opposite side on. Several of them are actually much closer to what the public has been (wrongly) told are the positions held by Trump, who is consistently trusted on foreign policy more than Harris.
In fact, the clearest and most consistent takeaways from election-related polling are not that voters think Harris is too far left and that Trump’s policy platform is what Americans want. It’s that voters are most concerned with the cost-of-living crisis that we’ve all taken to calling “inflation” as shorthand, that voters are drawn to Trump largely for this reason, that they want to hear more from Harris about what she would actually do as president to solve this, and that they don’t think she would break from President Joe Biden, whose years in power they associate (not unfairly) with feeling poorer.
At the same time, we’re only two years out from a midterm election in which Republicans, convinced that voters had turned against socially liberal views on abortion and LGBTQ rights, failed miserably to capitalize on an unpopular incumbent president by making what turned out to be an alienating conservative assault on both issues central to their identity. Even now, a left-populist candidate is within striking distance of beating a Republican for a Senate seat in Nebraska, a state that hasn’t voted blue since 1964 (yes, by taking a more conservative position on immigration, but also by running on a more liberal position on abortion).
Meanwhile, Trump and his campaign organization are not exactly acting like he’s running for president in a country that’s lurched rightward.
Trump has spent the bulk of this year running away from Project 2025, the deeply unpopular policy blueprint of radical right-wing ideas that members of his first administration devised in partnership with the Heritage Foundation, and which the campaign once proudly touted and has many overlaps with his official campaign documents. He’s renounced the GOP’s politically toxic stance on abortion, to the point of wrenching control of the platform-writing process and angering the party base with a more centrist position. The biggest takeaway from the vice-presidential debate was how Trump running mate J. D. Vance pretended to be someone else with a whole different set of beliefs.
That’s all before we get to the fact that, despite Trump’s resilience in the polls, his campaign has gone from consistently leading to being neck and neck in the popular vote, even trailing — and that Harris, in spite of running a far more conservative campaign, is not exactly running away with it either.
In fact, Trump’s resilience in the polls is in large part explained by the time he departed from right-wing economics.
Commentators have scratched their heads over why voters seem to have a nostalgia for Trump’s final, chaotic year as president in 2020. One obvious reason is that a Democratic-led Congress passed, and Trump signed into law, a hugely expensive welfare state expansion that, despite the hardship of the pandemic, was transformative for many people: income inequality narrowed on a historic scale, debts were paid off, money was saved, and many had the newfound financial security to find new, more rewarding, and lucrative careers.
Almost all of that expanded welfare state gradually disappeared under Biden.
Even on immigration, the issue voters have most dramatically moved rightward on, things aren’t as clear-cut as they might seem. Current public opinion on this hasn’t come out of a vacuum. Part of it has been a migrant crisis that is more and more visible to the average voter on their streets, and record arrivals at the border earlier in the year. But part of it is also a high-profile Democratic retreat on the issue, which has seen the party adopt a defensive crouch, abandon its Trump-era positive case for the benefits of immigration, and inadvertently elevate the issue by picking a high-profile fight over it instead of one over Trump and the GOP’s weaknesses (raising Social Security benefits, for instance). We can’t know how differently things would have looked after this path not taken. But it’s absurd and ahistorical to argue it would have had no effect.
So no, it is not really true that the country has lurched right, and certainly not that the rightward shifts we’ve seen are simply part of some organic process of the electorate coming to its senses. But we can say one thing for sure: the Democratic establishment is turning rightward, and it is determined to do so after a short-lived experimentation with mildly progressive governance under Biden. Whether Harris wins or loses in November, the result will be spun to argue there is no alternative.