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Kamala Harris owes her general election strategy to having avoided the Democratic primaries.
It wasn’t just Biden’s withdrawal that was crucial for Kamala, but its timing. Had Harris been forced to run in the 2024 primaries, she likely wouldn’t have survived. If she had, she would have been unable to run away from her past positions now.
Despite being vice president in the current administration, Kamala Harris is trying to cast herself as a candidate for change. Nowhere has that change been more evident than in her positions on several politically sensitive issues.
When Harris was in the Senate, she cosponsored the extremist environmental legislation the Green New Deal. She also supported banning fracking — something noted both in her first post-nomination interview with CNN and then in her debate with Donald Trump.
When Harris was in the Senate, she also excoriated the Trump administration over its efforts to stem illegal immigration. She visited the border in California to demonstrate her opposition and she castigated the Immigration and Nationalization Service over accusations (later proved to be a hoax) that it had whipped people trying to enter the U.S, illegally.
When called out on these in her Aug. 29 CNN interview Harris said “the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed.” When these same reversals were noted in the Sept. 8 presidential debate Harris stated: “So my values have not changed.”
In addition to these notable reversals, Harris also accentuated her past as a prosecutor, saying: “So I'm the only person on this stage who has prosecuted transnational criminal organizations for the trafficking of guns, drugs, and human beings,” and even her gun ownership: “Tim Walz and I are both gun owners.”
Regardless of whether you accept Harris’s explanation of her position reversals, she is clearly trying to run more toward the center and away from her own leftist past. Harris could not have even attempted to make such a case had she been forced to run in the Democratic primaries.
In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson decided to not seek reelection. Vice President Hubert Humphrey picked up the administration’s standard, ran in the Democratic primaries, and won the Democrat nomination. Had President Joe Biden withdrawn at the beginning of 2024 — instead of after winning the essentially uncontested primaries — the 1968 scenario would have repeated itself.
An open 2024 Democratic contest would have brought another flood of aspirants — just as in 2020. The contest would again have been waged on the political spectrum’s left — as in 2020 — because that’s where the Democrats’ majority resides.
According to Gallup, 54 percent of Democrats identify as liberals — an all-time high. Not only are they on the left, they are on the far left: another Gallup poll found in 2020 that just over three-quarters (76 percent) of Democrats would support a socialist for president if their party nominated one.
And with a 2020-repeat, Kamala Harris would likely have lost again — just as she had four years earlier.
Carrying the administration’s mantle, Harris would have been hobbled by its slew of policy liabilities, which Harris would have had to defend to the political left.
Nor would she have had the entire Democratic apparatus behind her — or its money: Harris’ inability to put together a winning staff in 2020 and her lack of money were both elements that drove her from the race before she reached the starting line.
But even had Harris survived the Democrats’ nomination contest, the process would have driven her so far left that she could not then have successfully moved herself back to the center just months later.
Harris could never have won the Democratic nomination by saying she no longer wanted to ban fracking, no longer supported decriminalizing illegal immigration, by accentuating her background as a prosecutor and that she owned a gun. And these would not have been her biggest liabilities.
She would have had to tie herself in knots trying to address the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war — an issue on which Americans rate Biden extremely poorly.
Regardless of whether you accept that Kamala Harris has indeed changed her positions — something Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) does not buy — she would not have been able to attempt it in the first place. Harris’s current general election strategy would have been undermined before it even began.
The establishment media would have naturally tried to close arms around whomever the Democrats nominated; however, ignoring Harris’s previously stated goals would have been impossible, had her left positions of 2020 been reiterated in early 2024 for months, not far removed at all from the general election.
Kamala Harris 2024 is only viable now because Kamala Harris 2020 is mostly forgotten. Kamala Harris 2024 wants to keep it that way, which is why she is running away from her own past. She could never have done this without Biden’s help.
Harris owes Biden for his withdrawal. but she owes him even more for its timing.
J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987 to 2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004 to 2023.
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