The Memo: Harris reaches for center ground

Vice President Harris is making a big play for voters in the center ground, even if doing so risks sparking discontent among progressives.

The move toward the center is reinvigorating questions over Harris’s authenticity, especially given that she advocated for more left-leaning positions during her 2020 primary campaign.

But the vice president and her allies plainly see the risk as worthwhile, given that the election’s outcome will likely be decided by a sliver of independent-minded voters in six or seven battleground states.

The election forecast from The Hill and Decision Desk HQ currently gives Harris a 55 percent chance of prevailing in November, a finding that highlights just how tight the contest is likely to be.

Harris’s effort to win the center is being fought on a number of fronts.

She no longer supports a ban on fracking, as she did back in 2019. She is no longer pushing the health care concept known as “Medicare-for-All,” as she did in Senate and in the early stages of her primary campaign. Having once indicated that she wanted unauthorized border crossings to be decriminalized, she now says there must be “consequences” for people who make those crossings.

Beyond those specific details, there is a more generalized moderate tone now emanating from Harris and her campaign.

When she talks about immigration these days, it is often in a way that foregrounds her support for border security — and her record as attorney general of California, during which she notes she prosecuted gang members accused of human trafficking.

On Israel and Gaza — an issue that has bitterly divided the Democratic base — Harris emphasizes her backing for Israel’s right to defend itself, even as she acknowledges too many Palestinians have been killed. In her big CNN interview on Thursday, she declared her opposition to any suspension of U.S. arms sales to Israel.

In terms of domestic politics, Harris said in the same CNN interview that she would appoint a Republican to her Cabinet if elected, though she stressed she did not have anyone specific in mind. “I think it would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my Cabinet who was a Republican,” Harris told Dana Bash.

Meanwhile, Harris’s speech at the Democratic National Convention has an ostentatiously patriotic tone, emphasizing that her own rise would have been impossible, in her view, in any other nation. 

At the convention, and elsewhere, she often invokes the concept of “freedom”— a concept that tends to be cited more frequently by Republicans than Democrats — as she makes the case for economic fairness, abortion rights and gun safety.

There has been some criticism of these moves, especially from pro-Palestinian activists on the Gaza question. 

But more broadly, leading voices on the left, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), are backing Harris, mostly for her ability to stop what they see as the catastrophe of a second Trump presidency.

Advocates of centrism within the Democratic movement are celebrating Harris’s recent tone without equivocation.

“I thought her acceptance speech was the most centrist Democratic acceptance speech I have ever heard, and that includes Bill Clinton in 1992,” said Jim Kessler, the executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a moderate group.

“She’s articulating Democratic centrism very well. She has moved to the center on issues where voters really want to see that — the border being Number One, but also on crime and by seizing on the word ‘opportunity’ and by making that the campaign’s economic watchword,” Kessler added.

Former Rep. Jason Altmire (D-Pa.) said he believed Harris’s moves were being made in a way that acknowledges “that elections are won by appealing to moderate voters.”

Altmire, who served three terms as a moderate Democrat, later wrote a book decrying America’s growing polarization. He contended that Harris’s “movement away from her prior positions, especially on the fracking issue is designed to appeal specifically in the states where the election will be won.”

But Altmire acknowledged that Harris could face real challenges because, he said, "the positions she held throughout her career are really very far to the left.”

Of course, many activists on the left would disagree with that assessment. 

During the 2020 primary, Harris faced skepticism among left-leaning voters who believed she was adopting some of their rhetoric as a matter of political convenience. “Kamala the cop” was a derisive label often used to underline these doubts by referring to her record as a district attorney in San Francisco and, later, her state’s attorney general.

Now it is Republicans and right-leaning independents who are expressing skepticism. That’s true even of Republicans who don’t hammer Harris as hard as Team Trump, which routinely refers to her as a “California radical.” Trump himself appears to have finally settled on the nickname “Comrade Kamala” for Harris.

Brendan Steinhauser, a GOP strategist, said that Harris might get some leeway from voters for shifts in position, but there are limits.

“People are used to politicians changing their message and shifting their positions as they move into a general election campaign,” he said. “But I think some of those — like the fracking — are going to hurt her more than others. If I was the Trump campaign, I’d continue to hammer that, especially in Pennsylvania but across the board.”

Matt Gorman, a GOP strategist who served as a senior adviser to Sen. Tim Scott’s (R-S.C.) presidential campaign, portrayed the risks for Harris in starker terms.

He said her new centrist tone supercharged the critique of her as a “fraud with no political core.”

Right now, Harris is willing to bet she can bat back those attacks and win the center — and with it win the White House.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.