Vice President Kamala Harris is battling to win moderate swing state voters by burying her liberal record in the Senate.
Ms. Harris served four years as the junior senator from California, establishing one of the most liberal voting records among all Democrats, including self-declared socialist Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont.
When she became vice president in 2021, her liberal voting streak continued. She cast the Senate’s tie-breaking vote a record 33 times to confirm some of the most liberal executive branch appointees and federal judges and to pass nearly $2 trillion in federal spending that many economists blame for driving inflation to near 40-year highs.
The website voteview.com, operated by the University of California, Los Angeles, scored Ms. Harris as more liberal than 99% of the Senate during her tenure from 2017 until 2021.
“While Harris may campaign as a moderate, analysis of her economic record does not support that label,” wrote Judge Glock, director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at the institute’s publication, City Journal. “In her time in the Senate, Harris positioned herself on the far left of a Democratic Party already moving sharply to the left.”
Ms. Harris left her legislative record far behind when she embarked on the presidential campaign trail, where a voting record to the left of Mr. Sanders won’t play to the crowds of battleground state voters whom she must win over to defeat her opponent, former President Trump.
Ms. Harris has addressed rallies in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and other battleground states but isn’t boasting about her Senate voting record or legislation she co-sponsored while in the Senate or during her brief presidential bid in 2019.
Among those proposals was a 2017 bill she co-sponsored with Mr. Sanders. The “Medicare for All” legislation would have banned private health insurance and created a government-run system open to everyone, including illegal immigrants.
At the time, Ms. Harris called the legislation “the morally and ethically right thing to do.” She said, “It just makes sense from a fiscal standpoint.”
Her campaign pitch in Pittsburg last week made no mention of that proposal or a 2019 plan she authored that would have required a carbon-free economy by 2030, eliminated gas-powered cars, and ended all new gas and oil drilling leases on public land.
Instead, Ms. Harris promised that if elected president, she would support small businesses and implement policies to help the working class and those struggling to afford housing and groceries.
Sounding like a moderate, Ms. Harris accused Mr. Trump of supporting an agenda that would raise prices and hurt workers.
At a rally in Pittsburgh on Labor Day, Ms. Harris told the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers that Mr. Trump’s proposed tariffs on some foreign goods would amount to a de facto tax increase. While president, she said, Mr. Trump approved Labor Department rules that reduced the number of management-level workers eligible for overtime pay from an Obama-era proposal. And Mr. Trump opposed raising the minimum wage, Ms. Harris said.
“We see and know and fight for a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by but to get ahead. And so we will continue to build what I call an opportunity economy so that every American has an opportunity to buy a home or start a business or build intergenerational wealth and have a future that matches their dreams and ambitions and aspirations,” Ms. Harris said.
Ms. Harris’s priorities on Capitol Hill were aimed at driving government policies to the left.
From the Senate floor to the president’s desk, she blazed a liberal path that belies some of her promises on the campaign trail.
While promoting herself as tough on crime in presidential campaign speeches, Ms. Harris leaves out her votes to advance those who have worked to decriminalize many offenses.
Ms. Harris, for example, broke a tie in the Senate in 2021 to confirm Boston’s liberal district attorney, Rachel Rollins, to serve as U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts.
Ms. Rollins’s resume as Suffolk County District Attorney in 2018 was viewed by critics as soft on crime. She campaigned for the job by promising that shoplifting, drug possession, destruction of property, some driving violations and resisting arrest would no longer be prosecuted.
After Ms. Harris helped her win Senate confirmation to become the Bay State’s top prosecutor, she didn’t last long in the job. Ms. Rollins resigned in 2023 after the Justice Department inspector general determined she leaked “non-public” information to the media to hurt a political candidate she opposed.
Ms. Harris also cast the tie-breaking vote to confirm liberal college professor Lisa Cook to serve as the first Black woman to sit on the Federal Reserve Board.
Republicans tried to block the confirmation, arguing Ms. Cook, a Michigan State University professor, was far too inexperienced and was unable to articulate her views on monetary policies or how to lower the nation’s sky-high inflation during her 2022 confirmation hearing.
Ms. Cook, based on her statements and posts on social media, would also inject political bias into her role on the Fed, Republicans warned.
“Professor Cook has supported race-based reparations, promoted conspiracies about Georgia voter laws, and sought to cancel those who disagree with her views, such as publicly calling for the firing of an economist who dared to tweet that he opposed defunding the Chicago police,” then-Sen. Patrick J. Toomey, Pennsylvania Republican, said ahead of her confirmation vote.
On the campaign trail, Ms. Harris is pledging to lower food prices and housing costs, but her tiebreaking vote in 2021 contributed to the high cost of living, economists say.
In March 2021, Ms. Harris was the tiebreaker on the Senate’s $1.9 trillion COVID relief spending package, which included $1,400 stimulus checks, extended food stamp increases, health care premium subsidies and unemployment benefits.
Households earning up to $160,000 in joint income annually were eligible for the stimulus checks.
Republicans unanimously voted against the package, warning it would lead to inflation and slow the economic recovery from the pandemic. Ms. Harris’ vote pushed the measure to passage.
Economists later said pumping nearly $2 trillion into the economy after two other COVID-19 spending packages helped drive up inflation, which peaked at more than 9% in 2022.
To counteract inflation, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, clobbering those paying monthly credit card bills with higher interest and making it much harder to afford a home.
As one of the most liberal senators, her voting record extended to illegal immigration, now a top voter concern and one she pledges to resolve if elected president.
In 2018, she voted to the left of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, New York Democrat, opposing his bipartisan bill to spend $25 billion on securing the border in exchange for providing a pathway to citizenship for 1.8 million “Dreamers” who came to the U.S. illegally as children.
Ms. Harris and other liberal Democrats who voted to block the bill opposed provisions that would have prevented Dreamers from sponsoring their parents for legal status, and they complained the bill made too many other concessions they viewed as anti-immigrant.
Since then, millions of illegal immigrants have poured over the southern border, most of them during the Biden-Harris administration.
On the campaign trail, Ms. Harris promised to get tough on border security and to sign a border security bill that has failed to win enough support to pass Congress, thanks to Republican opposition. The measure includes more than $20 billion for border security, including money to hire 1,500 additional Customs and Border Protection personnel.
Republicans said the measure will do little to end the illegal immigration crisis, but Ms. Harris is using the legislation to frame Mr. Trump, who also opposed the bill, as weak on border security.
“I went after transnational gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers that came into our country illegally. I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won,” Ms. Harris told supporters in Atlanta as she highlighted her record as a California prosecutor. “Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been talking a big game about securing our border, but he does not walk the walk.”
The Harris campaign did not respond to a media inquiry about the vice president’s voting record.
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.