Kamala Harris has pivoted aggressively to the economic middle since becoming her party’s presidential nominee, relenting on some proposed tax hikes, eagerly touting the support of billionaire Mark Cuban, courting crypto and using rhetoric that can sound almost Republican.
Some progressives are worried it’s more than just talk.
Progressive leaders told NOTUS they’re seriously concerned that Harris is preparing to jettison Democrats’ recent economic populism in favor of a restrained agenda more focused on tax cuts than providing direct financial relief. Even if her aims are still firmly liberal, progressives fear a Harris presidency would still be a severe regression from the more robust populism of Joe Biden’s presidency and set the party down a center-left path they had hoped was left behind years ago.
“Many folks who provided the thought leadership, the sweat equity, the white papers for Bidenomics are just trying to understand where we’re headed next,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the progressive group Groundwork Collaborative. “And whether or not Harris sees the last four years of Bidenomics as a success, or if she has concerns about it and how those concerns would manifest in her administration.”
Owens and other economic populists interviewed for this story acknowledge that they are uncertain about exactly how Harris would govern, and they strongly prefer her over Donald Trump. But their concern adds to a growing debate in Washington about what Harris really believes in and what policies she would prioritize if she wins in November. At issue is whether this campaign is a mirage or if it more closely reflects her genuine worldview than the ultra-left campaign she ran in 2019.
“She just ain’t that liberal,” said Erica Payne, founder of the progressive group Patriotic Millionaires. Payne compared Harris’ ideology to that of centrist Sen. Mark Warner. “It’s not that she’s hiding it, she just isn’t.”
Progressives worry that even if Harris loses, her pivot is proof that they’ve lost influence in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party and, at a minimum, they face an uphill fight to regain it over the next several years. They also have a distinct worry that, regardless of what Harris’ shift means for her governing vision, it amounts to bad politics. Some progressive strategists told NOTUS that Harris’ campaign is pitching different stories to donors and voters and it could come back to bite her if she wins.
To the swing state voters seeing her ads on TV, she’s touting the progressive wins of the Biden administration, like the fight against price gouging. To the moneyed and Biden-frustrated, the Harris campaign is presenting a lower capital gains tax proposal than Biden has and an easing up of regulatory oversight.
“That might be convenient to them in the short term, but they’re creating an explosive dynamic for themselves after the election,” one progressive strategist told NOTUS, “by trying to run a campaign one way to voters and run it another way to a bunch of rich people who have been targets of government enforcement.”
The Harris campaign declined to comment for this story.
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Harris’ economic agenda, especially from the perspective of deficit-focused fiscal conservatives, isn’t classically centrist by any objective measure. It includes provisions to help build housing, expand the child tax credit, provide $25,000 in down payment assistance and go after price gougers. She also unveiled a plan this month to expand Medicare to let the program pay for long-term elder care at home.
But progressive and populist critics point to campaign advisers, rhetorical shifts and policy rollbacks as causes for concern.
The clearest example, they say, is Harris’ proposed 28% capital gains tax rate on the wealthiest Americans. The plan is a hike from the current 20% rate, but it’s significantly lower than the 39.6% rate Biden was running on. The proposal won effusive praise from Cuban. (Trump hasn’t formally proposed a capital gains tax rate. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan, which Trump has distanced himself from, proposes a 15% capital gains tax rate.)
Harris is doing plenty else to worry progressives, both behind the scenes and in her speeches. Crypto leaders think the Harris campaign is courting them after a crypto-skeptical Biden administration; Harris’ brother-in-law, Uber executive Tony West, is one of Harris’ closest advisers; Harris has promised to nominate a Republican to her cabinet; and she’s spoken against “regulation through litigation” and emphasized a “pro-innovation” stance some read as a signal of relaxed corporate regulation.
In a speech last month to the Economic Club in Pittsburgh, Harris said, “We need to engage those who create most of the jobs in America.”
“Look, I am a capitalist. I believe in free and fair markets,” she said.
On Tuesday, Harris proposed protecting crypto assets as part of an overall economic outreach to Black voters.
Harris’ economic proposals are more limited and piecemeal than the broad agenda embraced by Biden, some progressives say. They specifically praised the president’s multitrillion-dollar American Rescue Plan, a robust industrial policy backed by additional trillions in government spending and oft-expressed loyalty to the labor movement. It’s an approach that progressives point out has led to a robust economy.
“If a pivot is planned, folks are looking for an explanation for why it’s necessary,” Owens said.
Progressives worry Harris’ capital gains tax moderation was a sign of the influence of Mark Cuban and current White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients. Harris’ biggest chance to influence policy as president could come with the expiration of the Trump tax cuts, making their concern about her views of the tax code all the more pressing.
“Look, what’s actually happening is Mark Cuban and his consiglieres like Jeff Zients are gleefully carrying the water of the billionaire class. And over cigars, scotch and poker, they’re positioning themselves as the Kamala Harris economic whisperers,” Payne said.
The panic about billionaires like Cuban carrying the campaign message to businesses took center frame last week as progressive lawmakers rose to defend Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan — beloved by progressives for her rigorous enforcement of long-ignored anti-monopoly laws.
After Cuban told Semafor he wouldn’t support keeping Khan on as chair, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X, “Anyone goes near Lina Khan and there will be an out and out brawl. And that is a promise.”
Cuban in response emailed NOTUS, “Im not in the administration and dont plan on being in the administration. Im not involved in that decision at all.”
Revolving Door Project founder Jeff Hauser told NOTUS he’s less concerned about Harris maintaining Biden’s populist anti-monopoly track record and more concerned she might pivot toward corporate interests on finance and crypto regulation.
“She’s not really talking affirmatively about what good bank regulators could be doing, and she’s not really as closely associated with those issues as she is on the anti-monopoly front. So I’m definitely a little worried about what that would foretell for entities,” Hauser said, listing agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve and others where the president has significant influence.
To some progressives, Harris looks more comfortable this campaign than she ever did while running to the left in 2019.
Her background as a prosecutor, which generally produces more moderate politicians, and her membership in Generation X, which entered politics at a time when party officials were more regularly conditioned to move to the center, make them question how committed Harris is to a liberal economic vision.
“I can tell you, in my focus groups that consist of friends and colleagues and people who come out of the communities that we’re talking about, they want to know, ‘Does Kamala understand what happened to us?’ That’s the first question,” said one senior labor official, granted anonymity to speak candidly about Harris. “Does she understand these used to be thriving communities until public policy tore them apart,” referencing past anti-labor policies Biden has reversed course on since taking office.
But even Harris’ critics emphasized they had not yet lost hope about her potential presidency. They might be worried about the direction of her campaign, they say, but they still think her administration could act differently.
“She’s moving in the wrong direction. She’s not moving that aggressively in the wrong direction,” Payne said. “She’s doing what all her political advisers are telling her to do.”
Larry Cohen, former president of Communications Workers of America, said he cared more about Harris’ housing and health care agendas — and her greater openness to doing away with the legislative filibuster in the Senate — than any of her overtures to Cuban or crypto lovers.
“I don’t like it at all,” Cohen said. “But that’s not compared to health care or housing, jobs, or right to work.”
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Progressive leaders aren’t just worried about the substance of Harris’ pivot — they’re also freaked out about the politics.
“I don’t think moving to the sort of neoliberal center on economics has proven to be good policy over the last few decades. I think it’s proven to be bad policy, but frankly, in the middle of the campaign season, I think it’s proven to be bad politics too,” House progressive caucus whip, and likely next chair, Rep. Greg Casar told NOTUS. He said, though, that he thinks an economic shift right from Harris may be more “smoke than fire.”
One progressive strategist put it bluntly: “It’s obvious they were trying to get credit with donors, and that’s a bad look for voters they’re trying to target in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.”
Another Democratic strategist who reviewed recent focus groups in Michigan of working-class voters found that many of them were unenthused about the specifics of Harris’ agenda, saying that a plan centered on small-business tax cuts and help for homebuyers didn’t resonate with many of them because they didn’t run a small business and already owned a home.
Harris has made an overt push to win over moderate and former Republican voters, touting endorsements from former lawmakers like Liz Cheney. It’s a strategy designed to help Harris most of all in the suburbs, where polls show her making her biggest gains against Trump. It’s also potentially helped change perception of how she’d manage the economy, with some surveys showing the vice president gaining on Trump when voters are asked which candidate would be a better economic steward.
But some progressives warn that some facets of that approach, like heralding the support of billionaires, won’t work in many blue-collar communities.
“Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban, they can’t deliver a single fucking vote in Kenosha, Wisconsin,” said the senior labor source. “If you lined up in the town square in Kenosha, they wouldn’t be able to bring home a single vote. In fact, they’re negatives.”
The labor official said they were worried Harris was surrounding herself with former advisers to Barack Obama, who embraced a more moderate economic agenda that, in the source’s view, no longer resonates with many voters.
“You can’t go home again, you can’t run for president again in 2008 or even 2012,” they said. “And you can’t go to places that were devoid of economic success and act like hope and change was a great political period, because they remember what hope and change led to.”
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Alex Roarty is a reporter at NOTUS. Claire Heddles is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.