Five years ago, standing in front of a crowd of some 20,000 people in Oakland, California, Kamala Harris announced that she was running for president. “My whole life, I’ve only had one client: the people,” she said. Now that President Biden has dropped out of the race and Harris has become the presumptive Democratic nominee, it’s fair to start asking what, exactly, she plans to do for her client if she wins in November.
Despite Harris’s long career and remarkable rise in politics — she has served as the San Francisco district attorney, California’s attorney general, US senator, and, most recently, vice president — it’s still difficult to predict what her campaign, let alone presidency, will look like. Although Harris has been vice president for three years and ran a presidential campaign in the 2020 cycle, she’s managed to avoid being neatly pigeonholed into any ideological box. Unlike candidates Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, who are easily remembered for their Medicare-for-all or wealth-tax proposals, Harris’s 2020 campaign fizzled out with few, if any, policy ideas or slogans being closely associated with it.
At any point in her two-decade political career, she could fit the description of a number of “types” of Democrat: centrist, moderate, progressive, liberal, establishment, or outsider. But besides her “ ” identity, none of those labels has ever effectively captured her way of thinking or how she would govern as president. That might .