What the Left Gets Wrong About Kamala Harris

Vice President Kamala Harris (D-CA)

It is sometimes hard to tell when you're online what is real-life hyperbole and what is just "this is only an online phenomona."  A 2021 Pew Research poll found that only 23% (just over one-in-five) Americans used Twitter, and while a significantly larger percentage used Facebook (a 2023 poll put it at 68%), only 30% claim to regularly get their news from the site.  When sharing opinions on social media, therefore, it's important to remember that it's not representative of most Americans, even if it can feel that way.

I say this because one of the most common election-themed issues on Twitter right now is around "far left" members of the platform actively hoping for either Donald Trump to win, or more to the point, for Kamala Harris to lose.  This has spilled to a degree into real-life.  The most prominent Democrat in the country to have actively refused to back Harris based on "progressive" politics (quotation marks are there for a reason that I'll get to if you finish this article) is Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), who has refused to endorse Harris in the presidential campaign despite the primary being long over.  Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, has been trying hard to help Harris lose Michigan so that Trump can win it (Stein has no shot at it), and has been campaigning as such.  Stein's bona fides as a progressive are suspect (she shows up once every four years to run for president, but in the in-between time the only thing I know she does is have dinner with Vladimir Putin), but she is certainly claiming to be a progressive in the election.

This would mark the third election in a row where certain factions of the far left are claiming that the Democratic nominee is too moderate, and therefore they won't endorse them.  The most common rationale for this is that by causing Clinton/Biden/Harris to lose, they will be able to get a more progressive nominee the next time.  I think this is maybe one of the dumbest misconceptions in politics, but it's prevalent enough that I wanted to go on the record as to why this is a problem.

I want to start this by saying something that the left gets correct-primaries are not as "open" as politicians profess.  This isn't about fairness or claiming that the DNC is out to get a candidate like Bernie Sanders (Sanders lost, twice, when he had every opportunity to win, particularly in 2020).  But I'm not going to pretend that there aren't weights in competitive primaries for Congress and governor's elections.  Congressional leaders and high-ranking Democrats will tip the scales.  Just ask Dina Titus what she thinks of Harry Reid.  Or Jeff Jackson what he thinks of Chuck Schumer.  Or Levi Tillemann what he thinks of Steny Hoyer.  Congressional leaders in all of these cases supported another candidate & signaled that they would get their support (and those candidates ultimately took the primaries), even as other Democrats were trying to make a go of it.  It is possible to overcome those leaders (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a very famous example of this), but it's not easy.

Those leaders, it's worth noting, think very differently about losses, which brings us back to Kamala Harris, and a reminder of where she stands in the history of presidential candidates.  Because if you look at the history of the Democratic Party nominees for president, Harris is very liberal.  Harris, unlike Joe Biden, is on the record as supporting the Green New Deal, supports free college, wants strict AI regulation, and backs marijuana legalization.  Harris is, compared to the country the most progressive Democratic nominee since at least John Kerry.  Were she elected, she would become the most progressive presidential candidate relative to the country since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to win the White House.  That's a fact, and a nearly century-old one.

And while the Far Left is in denial about this, the powers-that-be are not.  They know that someone as progressive as Harris, quite frankly, would normally be a hard-sell for the White House in an open primary.  It's why her campaign went nowhere in 2020.  But given she had an unusual path to the White House through Biden dropping out, they went with her and are given the opportunity to elect someone that normally wouldn't have had a shot at the nomination.  If you're an actual progressive (which I am), this is a present you should be pushing hard for-Harris is an opportunity we get maybe once a century, and to turn her down would be insanity.

But that's the thing about Far Left figures like Stein and others who support her-they don't care about power or change.  What they care about is getting to claim to be right, even if it means that things stay bad.  It's why they quickly abandoned someone like Ocasio-Cortez, easily the most famous and successful figure of their movement, the second she had to have the practicality of governing (even if she's pushing hard for a lot of very liberal legislation, some of which, like the Green New Deal, could become law if the Democrats were to win a trifecta in November).  Being an adult means compromise, and that means that you comprehend, say, that electing a Democratic moderate like Colin Allred in Texas this year is super valuable if it gets rid of very conservative Ted Cruz, even if your politics are more aligned with Tlaib's or AOC's than Allred's.

I also think the Far Left's thinking that a "progressive will win the nomination next time" is stupid because it didn't happen in 2020.  In 2016, they tried this line on Hillary Clinton, delivering enough votes for Stein in the Blue Wall states to tank Clinton's candidacy.  Four years later, progressive icons like Bernie Sanders & Elizabeth Warren ran for the White House...and lost to moderate Democrat Joe Biden.  They didn't lose because the DNC cheated-they lost because they couldn't run winning campaigns, and couldn't expand their viewpoint.  "Run a true progressive" in a red/purple district is a strategy that never works and a good example of that was down-ballot from Clinton, when Deborah Ross (NC), Katie McGinty (PA), & Russ Feingold (WI) were running.  All were to Clinton's left, all genuine progressives, and all to the left of their state's average politician; in Ross's case, she would've easily become the most progressive Democrat in the history of the US Senate from North Carolina.  All got strong financial backing and real campaigns...and the left couldn't deliver a win for any of them.  They were apparently too busy trying to punish Clinton for crimes to actually go out and prove that "running a true progressive" was a winning strategy...instead causing all of them to lose (two of which we have yet to win since), and in the process overturning Roe v. Wade.  That's again at stake in 2024, and that members of the Far Left are once again trying to sabotage the Democratic nominee to help Trump...I genuinely can't tell the difference between what they're doing and what MAGA is doing.  The movement is fond of quoting Orwell, so I'll close this article with the final passage from Animal Farm: "the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."