Tipsheet

As Voters Go to the Polls, What Does Kamala Harris Actually Believe?

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  November 05, 2024 10:01 AM

It's finally here.  Election Day is upon us.  This ride is almost over. As voters cast ballots all across the country, how many of them feel confident about what Kamala Harris actually stands for?  She has run an overwhelmingly substance-free, empty campaign -- closing out with a 'unity' message, right on the heels of her party shouting 'Nazi,' 'fascist,' 'Hitler,' and 'garbage' over the final weeks of the campaign.  For most Democrats and hardcore Trump opponents, the (D) next to her name is more that sufficient.  She's generally on their side, and she's not Donald Trump.  It's an easy call.  For most Republicans, she's a San Francisco leftist, and an unimpressive one at that.  Voting for Trump is the clear choice.  But beyond the '[preferred candidate], obviously' ranks are many Americans who are at least somewhat conflicted about their decision.  

For better and for worse, they're very familiar with one option.  Donald Trump has been a dominant political figure for nearly nine years, four of which entailed his presidency.  People know his record, and polling suggests that in spite of many issues they have with his personality, temperament and character, they increasingly see his presidential record as a success -- or at least preferable to what the country has experienced over the subsequent Biden-Harris administration.  All things considered, would the country be better off under the previous leadership, or the current leadership?  Trump appears to have an edge on that question.  Elsewhere on the ballot is Kamala Harris.  Who is she?  What does she really believe?  What would she do, if elected?  Four years ago, she ran for president as a far left figure, straining to outflank even a Socialist like Bernie Sanders.  There wasn't a radical position she wouldn't adopt, or an extreme pander she wouldn't indulge.  

Over the last few months, after she was parachuted into her party's nomination after they ejected their elected nominee, her staff has offered deflections or reversals on nearly every major position she held just a few years ago.  Here's just a small montage of examples:


As I noted in this tweet, the parade of reversals doesn't merely represent a politician flip-flopping. Politicians do that. But most politicians don't do nearly as much of it as we've seen from her, and usually the candidates themselves announce and explain their new positions.  She has not explained any of her 180's, in terms of why or how her thinking shifted.  Also, many of the whiplash-inducing "new" "positions" have been relayed to reporters via anonymous aide's texts and emails.  In the clip above, we see Harris arguing passionately for policies that she's now insisting she would never embrace or pursue.  Why did she embrace or pursue them, then?  And what changed?  The answers, in my opinion, are that she pursued far-left ideas because that's who she truly is, as a product of the wacky one-party basket case that is California politics.  And what changed is that she's trying to win a national election now, so she's trying to appear more moderate than her record demonstrates.  And she won't explain these volatile swings due to a combination of not really thinking through any of it, and not wanting to offer any specifics that could alienate voters on either side of the issues on which she's abruptly and supposedly adopted a 'new' position.  This is her strategy all the way to the very finish:


She has been ducking questions on this matter for weeks.  And now that she'd voted, she'd saying it's too late to talk about it, as she doesn't "intend to create an endorsement."  This woman was the District Attorney in San Francisco.  She was the Attorney General of California.  She starts many her pre-programmed answers on various topics by reminding voters that she was a 'tough' prosecutor.  But she won't say how she voted on a major crime referendum in her own state, and a popular one at that:

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She's masquerading as a unity-minded, reasonable, bipartisan 'moderate,' despite nothing in her history reinforcing any of that. Here is a golden opportunity for her to fortify her last-minute makeover with something solid, and she won't do it. Supporting a tough-on-crime referendum that even most Californians support (San Francisco has already tossed out their left-wing DA, and Los Angeles now appears primed to do the same) would be the sensible, mainstream play here.  But taking that path would amount a something of a repudiation of her own leftist policies in the state, which could invite unpleasant questions. Plus, the people who oppose the initiative are the 'social justice,' equity-focused, identity-obsessed base of her party.  They're the people she has reflexively sided with for years.  In some ways, she owes them her career.  She's one of them, really.  And so her response to this entirely reasonable question is to say that voters don't get to know how she voted on a major public policy issue, that goes to the heart of her own political record, in her own home state.

This is not some closet pragmatist who finally feels liberated to shed her previous extreme views, now that she has permission to do so on a national stage.  She's someone who can taste the power of the presidency and is willing to say whatever her handlers think she should in order to achieve that power.  And, evidently, that includes telling voters that in addition to refusing to explain her vast array of 'new' stances, she also will not or cannot identify one single error or flaw from her unpopular administration over the past four years:


This is a 'change' election, according to public opinion surveys. People are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo and the direction of the country. She is a change candidate, in that she'd changed a massive chunk of her worldview over a handful of weeks. She is not at all a change candidate, though, in that she is the incumbent who looks back on her current administration and sees perfection. I'll leave you with a point about how certain events could (or should) be making Trump's closing argument for him, if only he'd let them (and of course, much of the media is eager to avert the country's eyes from both stories):


In fairness, he did reference the awful jobs report in this legally-mandated 'equal time' message aired on NBC:


Now that you've finished reading this piece, if you have not yet done so already, stop whatever else you're doing -- and go vote.