by Carl P. Leubsdorf
When Kamala Harris first sought the presidency in 2019, she leaned left, backing Medicare for all, urging a ban on the oil recovery process known as fracking, praising the “defund the police” movement.
But as the newly minted Democratic presidential nominee, she is pursuing a more centrist course and has abandoned those more ideological stances. She even backs a border bill that funds Donald Trump’s wall.
The changes have prompted Trump to assail her as “the greatest flip-flopper in history,” though Trump too may merit that moniker.
After all, when he re-registered in 2012 as a Republican, it marked the fifth time he had changed his party affiliation in 25 years.
And according to a 2016 NBC News study, Trump made “141 distinct shifts on 23 major issues.” Most notably, he went from being an abortion rights supporter to the fervent foe whose Supreme Court nominees helped overturn those rights to lately disdaining a national abortion ban.
In accepting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement, Trump hailed him as “an incredible champion for so many of these values that we all share,” though earlier he called him “one of the most liberal lunatics ever to run for office.”
Candidates often adapt past positions to suit present realities, and it’s standard practice for their rivals to assail those changes. It’s easy to see why voters get confused.
The fact is no presidential candidate is consistent on everything. And in most cases, their current positions are more significant than their past ones, because they more closely signal their presidential intentions. Still, inconsistency remains a legitimate debate and ad target.
And while there is no guarantee a victorious candidate will maintain every campaign position, most by and large pursue the policies they promise. Post-election reversals can create the kind of political trouble the first President George Bush encountered in abandoning his campaign pledge to oppose all tax increases.
In recent years, congressional Republicans have often taken “all or nothing” positions, reflecting polls showing Republicans far less amenable to compromise than Democrats. And so too did Trump, to a greater extent than other recent presidents.
A classic example was when he was offered an immigration compromise in 2019 that funded the wall he was extending on the country’s Southern border if he’d accept legal status for hundreds of thousands of “dreamers,” young people brought illegally to the United States as small children.
In the morning, he signaled his openness to the deal. After lunch, he reversed himself, presumably after pressure from his most fervent anti-immigration adviser, Stephen Miller.
And though Trump consistently called for the badly needed infrastructure upgrade that President Joe Biden and the Democrats ultimately enacted, he rejected the compromises the Democrats wanted, saying he wouldn’t work with them while they were investigating his administration.
Trump’s attitude represented a sharp change from the practice of Ronald Reagan, who was a far more pragmatic president than his more ideological campaigns suggested. “I’d rather get 80 percent of what I want than go over the cliff with my flags flying,” said Reagan, who acquiesced in tax increases he opposed to get the promises of spending cuts he sought.
Unlike Trump, Biden worked with a bipartisan Senate coalition to achieve a compromise infrastructure bill. Harris, who was part of that and other negotiations, shows every sign of being similarly pragmatic, as she has in adapting past positions in her current campaign.
When she first sought the presidency in 2019, the early Democratic debate was dominated by liberal Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Both backed Sanders’ plan to extend Medicare to provide health insurance for all Americans, a proposal notably opposed by Biden.
Seeking to compete with them, Harris proposed a combination that adopted the Sanders plan of government health insurance for all but kept a role for private insurers. Though a potentially palatable compromise, it was something she had great difficulty in explaining, and her candidacy never gained traction. An aide said recently it’s something she no longer favors.
The same is true with fracking, an important issue in pivotal Pennsylvania, and defunding the police. Her campaign says Harris has always favored funding the police, though CNN reported she said in a 2020 radio interview that the “defund the police” movement “is about rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities.”
It’s a safe bet Trump will raise these issues in their September 10 debate, assuming it takes place, as he has on the campaign trail. But there’s no sign yet that his contentions of flip-flopping have dented Harris’ momentum, though some interviews with undecided voters showed a desire for more specificity.
Abrupt policy changes reflecting campaign pressures are tricky politically and potentially counterproductive. A classic case occurred in 1968, after the Democrats’ tumultuous nominating convention.
Seeking to attract votes from the supporters of his two antiwar opponents, presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey abandoned his all-out support of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and urged a bombing halt.
It helped him close the gap against Republican rival Richard Nixon, but it angered President Lyndon Johnson who tacitly favored Nixon and did little to help Humphrey. On Election Day, Humphrey narrowly fell short.
There’s a reason most candidates prefer to provide generalities to indicate their general ideological thrust, rather than specifics opponents can compare with their prior stances.
