Washington, DC – Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to the Democratic National Convention next week on the tailwinds of endorsements from major progressive organisations — a nod to the party unity she has inspired.

But that marks a shift for Harris, who has not always enjoyed a cosy relationship with the progressive wing of her party.

Keep reading

list of 3 itemsend of list

Still, many progressives see Harris’s candidacy in the 2024 presidential race as an opportunity to chart a more leftward course for the White House.

“Vice President Kamala Harris has a unique relationship with the progressive movement,” said William Walter, the executive director of Our Wisconsin Revolution, a battleground state organisation that pledges to “stand for progressive principles”.

Walter told Al Jazeera that Harris is no progressive dreamboat: She has struggled to convey the same authenticity and clarity of message as progressive icons like Bernie Sanders.

“But a lot of progressives recognise that democracy is quite literally on the ballot this November,” he said, referencing the threat he perceives in Harris’s Republican rival, former President Donald Trump.

The first step, Walter explained, is to stop Trump from retaking the White House.

“Once we prevent that, I think that’s when the real work begins. That’s when we need to start pressuring the Democratic Party to expand into the working-class-centred party that we have been in the past.”

‘People-first presidency’

Harris’s meteoric rise as the Democratic nominee has been unorthodox, to say the least.

In late July, her boss, President Joe Biden, abruptly withdrew from the presidential race and threw his support behind Harris instead.

Biden — seen as a centrist — had been courting middle-ground voters in the months before his exit. But when Harris took over the Democratic ticket, her campaign went in a different direction, embracing a distinctly populist angle.

On Friday, for instance, she unveiled a sweeping economic plan aimed at “lowering costs for American families”, including through the elimination of medical debt for many Americans and bans on “price gouging” for groceries.

The policy proposals also featured subsidies for first-time homebuyers and a $6,000 tax credit for families of newborns, covering the first year of a child’s life.

Harris also adopted Trump’s proposal to eliminate the federal tax on tips, an idea popular with service industry workers. Her campaign has played up her history working at the fast-food chain McDonald’s, as a symbol of her middle-class roots.

In her first campaign speech, Harris flashed a populist streak. “Because we are a people-powered campaign,” she said, “that is how you know we will be a people-first presidency.”

She has pledged to champion progressive priorities, including affordable housing, increased access to childcare and paid family leave.

But even as she has been embraced by progressive leaders, Harris has moved to the centre on other issues.

For example, when she first ran for the presidency in 2019, she supported Sanders’s Medicare for All legislation, which would have established a “single-payer system” and done away with private insurers.

This year, however, her campaign has said she will not support a single-payer system and will focus instead on other mechanisms for lowering healthcare costs.

And despite plans to address climate change — another progressive priority — Harris has baulked at supporting a ban on fracking, a controversial method of extracting oil and natural gas.

Harris the prosecutor

Another point of contention between Harris and the progressive movement is her background in criminal justice.

On the campaign trail, Harris has leaned into her past as the district attorney of San Francisco and the attorney general of California, the state’s top law enforcement official.

She has argued that her background as a prosecutor makes her the ideal candidate to defeat Trump, who has 34 felony convictions.

“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she told a crowd this month in Detroit, Michigan. “So hear me, Detroit, when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”

But Harris’s history as a prosecutor has previously been seen as a liability among progressives, who are largely in favour of criminal justice reform.

During her 2019 presidential campaign, for instance, memes circulated online declaring, “Kamala is a cop.” Progressives expressed concern about hard-knuckle policies Harris had embraced as a prosecutor, including one that would have levied criminal charges against parents of repeatedly absent schoolchildren.

Critics argued such policies would help to fuel mass incarceration, which disproportionately affects people of colour.

Harris’s defenders, however, have argued her tenure as a prosecutor was much more complicated than what critics portray. At one point, she even proposed diverting police funding to other government agencies.

Ameshia Cross, a Democratic strategist, told Al Jazeera she believes the criticisms against Harris at the time were a result of the cultural moment.

The US was in the middle of a reckoning over police violence against Black people in 2019 and 2020, and social movements like Black Lives Matter were on the rise.

“During Kamala Harris’s first run for the White House, when she was in the primary, one of the main hits that she took — as well as anybody who had a prosecutorial background — was related to Black Lives Matter, policing issues and accountability when it came to progress and police reforms,” Cross explained.

“I do think that it really took a lot of the wind out of her sails, particularly when it came to young voters.”

But for some racial justice activists, the concern about Harris’s commitment to police reform has endured.

“Police accountability, police reform, stopping them from murdering Black and brown kids is still a pressing issue,” Chivona Newsome, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Greater New York, told Al Jazeera.

Newsome argued that Harris has not shown she is serious about police reform. She pointed to the police killing of Sonya Massey, an unarmed Black woman shot in her home on July 6, as grim reminder of the continued urgency of such reforms.

“In 2020, Biden and Harris rolled the tide because everyone was screaming ‘Black Lives Matter’,” she said. “But when they won the office, nothing has been done.”

Because Harris entered the 2024 presidential race so late, she did not have to compete in state-level primaries — a process Newsome feels could have forced the vice president to take a stronger stand on criminal justice reform.

The National Black Lives Matter organisation has so far declined to endorse Harris, citing the lack of a regular primary season.

‘Incremental, progressive changes’

The 2024 race presents other new challenges for Harris’s campaign as it courts left-wing voters.

Progressives have clashed with Biden over his support for Israel’s war in Gaza — and some question whether Harris will break from her boss’s pro-Israel policies. One of her campaign advisers has already doused the hope she would embrace an arms embargo against Israel.

Domestically, some segments of the progressive left worry that donors like Barry Diller, the founder of Fox Broadcasting Company, and Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, could push Harris to abandon antitrust campaigns against business monopolies.

Diller and Hoffman have been publicly pushing for Harris to replace Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan — a champion of monopoly busting — if she enters the White House.

That is one area that progressive supporters will be closely watching in the coming weeks, according to Alan Minsky, the executive director of Progressive Democrats of America.

The group, which has chapters in 31 states, has thrown its weight behind Harris. It is the first time the organisation has ever endorsed a candidate in the general election. A resounding 92 percent of its members voted to endorse Harris in a formal poll.

“I think the way our activists have looked at it, the baseline was not what we saw in 2019. The baseline was where we saw the Biden campaign,” Minsky said.

“When Biden stepped down and Harris stepped up, we felt a huge groundswell of support from our base from Harris — and that included many of our activists.”

Minsky explained that Harris’s history indicates she could better represent progressive policies than Biden has.

For instance, he drew a comparison between Biden and Harris on single-payer healthcare: Biden never supported it. Harris did.

It is “better to have somebody who once supported it and clearly has thought it through, even if she eventually turned away from it”, Minsky said.

He also sees Harris as part of a larger turn by the Democratic Party towards a more progressive economic agenda — moving away from a more neoliberal platform that favoured privatisation and deregulation.

Still, Minsky said that, if Harris wins the presidency, he expects only “incremental, progressive changes that can set us towards what does really need to happen”.

“We do not mean to be just a simple cheerleader,” he said of his organisation. “We anticipate that Kamala Harris as president will not enter office poised to fulfil our agenda, which we are adamant is the agenda the American people want and the best agenda for the society.”