Q&A of the Day – How Liberal Is Kamala Harris?
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Today’s Entry: @brianmuddradio Harris is to the left of even Biden. Please do an analysis of this. People need to see and hear it.
Bottom Line: When President Biden was running for reelection, it was his track record that was in focus. With Vice President Kamala Harris now the Democrat’s presumptive nominee it is appropriate to turn our attention to her track record and her voting record. Her track record as VP is often defined with Harris having been tasked with addressing the border crisis in the spring of 2021, with record illegal immigration having transpired ever since that designation. As vice president however, her job is to follow through with the objectives of the president’s administration. In other words, it’s perhaps appropriate to suggest that Harris’ border failures were all part of the Biden administration's plan. The bigger question is, for example, what is her border plan (which is a good question but that would be hard to be worse than the current one she’s had oversight responsibilities for).
In attempting to compare Harris’ voting record to Biden’s for the purpose of discerning where she falls on the ideological scale, it’s a bit more challenging than it may seem. There was no overlap between Biden’s and Harris’ time in the Senate to directly compare voting records and with Harris serving as Biden’s VP we don’t know where she would have stood relative to his positions as president. But what we do have is a very clear indication of where she stands relative to congressional Democrats and perhaps most notably where she stands in contrast to her competition for the presidency – Donald Trump.
Harris spent four years in the Senate which happened to coincide with the four years of the Trump presidency. As a result, we can compare her voting record directly to the voting records of other members of congress and to Donald Trump’s positions as president. So, let’s get to it.
There were 120 senators that cast votes during Trump’s four years in office. Of them, only six senators were less likely to vote for President Trump’s position on issues brought before the senate. In other words, if President Trump’s position on the issues is used as the barometer of a “conservative position” Kamala Harris’ voting record in the senate was the 7th most liberal, or in other words, more liberal than the voting record of 94% her collogues. By comparison, Senate Democrat leader Chuck Shumer’s voting record was 7% more conservative than Harris’ and only Senators Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Elisabeth Warren, Jeff Merkley, Kirsten Gillibrand and Ben Lujan had harder left voting records (and Bernie Sanders’ voting record was almost identical with only a 0.3% difference in the votes between Harris and Sanders). So, in other words, if one is attempting to infer the ideological shift this country might see should Kamala Harris become president, the closest comparison is Bernie Sanders.
Kamala Harris voted in line with Trump’s position only 16.4% of the time. By way of comparison the average Democrat voted in line with Trump’s position 26% of the time and the most conservative Democrat (Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota) voted with Donald Trump’s position about 55% of the time. That info provides an indication of how far the divide is between Harris and Trump in the upcoming election. There’s effectively an 84% degree of difference in policy positions between Trump and Harris. In my research this represents the greatest divide in overall policy positions between the two major party candidates that I have studied. Now, on the one hand this isn’t especially surprising in that Gallup, for example, has decades worth of data studying the political ideologies of the left and right in this country and what they’ve studied most recently is the greatest divide along ideological lines yet. On the other hand, the difference between the average Democrat and Republican on any given issue is still only about 40%. On the issues Gallup has identified the country as currently being center-right. Effectively this means that the political gap between Harris and Trump is twice that of the average voter who is a Democrat and a Republican but that on the issues the country is on balance a bit more closely aligned to the positions of Donald Trump than to those of Kamala Harris.
Of course there’s always this potential caveat. Is the politician Kamala Harris has been up to this point the way she intends to govern if given the opportunity going forward? We know for example that Donald Trump turned out to be more conservative as president than many Republicans originally thought he might be. We’ve also observed as Joe Biden as president has been far liberal than many Democrats four years ago believed that he would be (and far to the left of his long-established senate voting record). But as always there are two sides to stories and one side to facts. These are the facts as we know them today.