Harris is simultaneously too liberal in her policy preferences for much of the country and too insincere in the brand of progressivism she adopted as it became in vogue in the Democratic Party. When it was fashionable even in California for Democrats to lock ’em up, she did so, few questions asked. When the way to get ahead was playing footsie with defund the police, she quickly adapted to that new reality too. Her record on this is nowhere near as lengthy as Biden’s. The former vice president and 36-year-long Delaware senator has ingratiated himself to the Democrat’s power brokers for decades, be they segregationists or socialists. But Harris’s chameleon-like political shape-shifting attracted the attention of Democratic primary voters, and accounts for why she did not last very long in the fight for the number one spot.
This is the campaign that many of those advising Trump clearly want to run. It is the one that worked against Hillary Clinton in 2016, terrifying conventional conservatives who thought she was some kind of revolutionary; demoralizing progressives who believed she was a corporate shill; and animating working-class whites and new populist right-wingers who understood her to be a little of both. Biden-Harris lend themselves well to replicating the same arguments four years later.
Now the bad news: against Biden, this particular campaign strategy hasn’t been working.
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