Now that it is looking increasingly like Vice President Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee for 2024, her liberal past has come back to haunt her once more. Before becoming the vice president under President Joe Biden, Harris served as a senator for California. According to data from 2019, she was the most left senator, even to the left of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Using stats from Govtrack.us for the 2019 report card, Jeremy Redfern, the press secretary for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) highlighted such findings in a quoted repost of the governor.
DeSantis had been reacting to financial support for Harris from "the corporate media," highlighting how the vice president "is too vacuous, too liberal and too unaccomplished for the voters to buy the manufactured narrative."
While in the US Senate, nobody was to the left of Kamala Harris. Not even Bernie Sanders. https://t.co/djxj1k4grg pic.twitter.com/My6vAJWhVo
— Jeremy Redfern (@JeremyRedfernFL) July 22, 2024
When it comes to those senators most politically right, Harris indeed has a score of 0.00, while Sanders has a score of 0.02. She was also 97th among those senators who most engaged in bipartisanship when it comes to joining bills introduced by members of the other party.
Such a ranking was also noticed by the Make America Great Again Inc. PAC as well, in a press release that was sent out on Monday.
As the press release noted:
Kamala Harris was ranked the most left-wing senator in 2019, even more left-wing than Bernie Sanders, according to GovTrack, which is an independent government tracking website.
That year in the Senate, Kamala Harris co-sponsored legislation to protect illegal immigrants from deportation and backed Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All legislation. Kamala even backed banning private health insurance and giving taxpayer-funded coverage to illegal immigrants.
Kamala Harris is an extreme radical whose views are out of touch with voters.
She supports banning fracking, defunding the police, and compared ICE to the KKK.
Many, but not all of the complaints against Harris have had to do with her far-left, radical positions on immigration. Former and potentially future President Donald Trump held a press call on Tuesday in which he highlighted Harris' failure as the border czar, a role Biden bestowed upon her in March 2021.
In that time, Harris has only made one trip, sort of, as Trump reminded reporters that Harris "essentially she never visited the border as we know it," given her one trip was to El Paso in June 2021, "far away" from sites she should have visited. Trump has not only been to the border, but plans to go back, he shared, speaking to "whatever is necessary" when it comes to how many trips he'll talk.
A theme throughout the call referenced Harris' failures while emphasizing Trump's successes in keeping illegal border crossings down. She's also expressed a failure to care about the issue and has tried to explain away her actions on disregarding advice on handling the border.
Other participants on the call included Paul Perez, the current president of the National Border Patrol Council, as well as Brandon Judd, the immediate past president of such a group. As Judd said early on in the call, Harris has shown a "complete disregard to border security formed by either political ambition or incompetence."
In response to a question from Townhall after the call, about whether or not Harris has forgotten she was given such a role, Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign National Press Secretary, provided a response detailing how it's something Harris may want to forget, but the Trump campaign, and American people will not.
"Kamala Harris may want people to forget that she is Joe Biden's 'border czar', but the American people are paying the price for her failure to keep the border secure and communities safe. Kamala Harris is just as weak, failed and incompetent as Joe Biden — and she’s also dangerously liberal," Leavitt explained. "Not only does Kamala need to defend her support of Joe Biden’s failed agenda over the past four years, she also needs to answer for her own terrible weak-on-crime record in California. A vote for Kamala is a vote for more crime, inflation, open borders, high gas prices, and war around the world, and our team will make sure every American knows it."
Harris' liberal history not only potentially affects her own chances, but also perhaps down-ballot races as well. Republicans have a strong chance at taking back control of the Senate this cycle, with many vulnerable Democratic incumbents running for reelection.
On Tuesday morning, The Hill published an article warning about how the "Rise of Harris roils Senate battleground races." Just as Trump did on the Tuesday call, such a report notes that "Senate Republicans strategists are zeroing in on Harris’s vice presidential record as a 'border czar.'"