Analysis of Kamala Harris’s Economic Record | 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. According to DW-NOMINATE, a measure that compares the votes of senators and representatives and ranks members from -1 (most liberal) to 1 (most conservative) Harris was the second-most liberal member of the Senate when she served from 2017 to 2021, behind only Elizabeth Warren. In fact, her overall voting record is more liberal than that of Bernie Sanders. Though it is difficult to compare members across time, Harris s score (-0.709), which is based largely on economic votes, ranks among the more left-wing in American history.
Harris s senatorial record differs starkly from that of her boss. While Biden shifted left on entering the White House, he remained a moderate across his nearly four-decade Senate career. His approximate -0.3 DW-NOMINATE score put him close to the middle of his party throughout his time in the upper chamber.
When Harris was in the Senate, she introduced and co-sponsored bills that would have dramatically shifted U.S. policy leftward. In 2019, she unveiled a $10 trillion plan to reduce greenhouse gases to zero by 2045 five years faster than proposed in the uber-progressive Green New Deal. Harris also advocated for an end to fracking, a measure that, had it taken effect, would have stopped about two-thirds of all oil production in the United States.
Her health-care record is similarly progressive. In 2017, Harris co-sponsored Sanders s Medicare for All bill, which would have ended private insurance in America; It s just the right thing to do, she said of her support for the bill. In preparation for her 2020 presidential campaign, she released a new plan that still would have extended Medicare to all Americans but that allowed private insurers to offer a plan within the government-run system. Both proposals were on the left of the Democratic Party, even the increasingly liberal party of the past five years.
Hoo boy.