Kamala Harris has been renouncing progressive positions one-by-one. During her short-lived 2019 presidential campaign, Harris was a supporter of single-payer healthcare, a fracking ban, and a federal jobs guarantee. No longer. On July 26th, a campaign official told the Hill that Harris “will not seek to ban fracking if she’s elected,” even though she had previously said there was “no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” The following day, CNN reported that “the vice president no longer supports a single-payer health care system,” despite having co-sponsored Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All bill back in 2017. And on July 31, a Washington Examiner exclusive revealed that Harris has “changed her position” on a federal jobs guarantee—a component of the Green New Deal she backed in 2019—and no longer supports that either. 

This is bad politics. In the 2004 presidential election, one of the dominant charges against John Kerry was that he was a “flip-flopper,” meaning he had opportunistically changed his positions for political convenience. (Republicans even made actual flip-flops listing the issues he’d been on both sides of: “For” on the left foot, “Against” on the right.) Brazenly changing your positions like this implies that you don’t actually believe in the things you say you believe in, and makes it very hard for voters to trust that what you’re saying at any given time is what you truly think. 

Moreover, moving to the right on policy will not prevent Trump and his proxies from attacking Harris as “dangerously liberal,” a line they’ve already started using. This is a lesson Democrats should have learned in the Obama years. No matter how much Barack Obama tried to portray himself as a reasonable centrist and make compromises with Republicans, he was still attacked as a “socialist” whose healthcare plans would lead to “death panels.” Today, the GOP is not going to suddenly say “Well, I guess we should stop attacking Harris as a radical.” But her abrupt U-turns on policy will allow them to deploy a second line of attack, namely that she’s untrustworthy and doesn’t keep a consistent position on anything, which wouldn’t be wrong. 

It’s obvious why Harris has been ditching these positions. There is a common view in politics that progressive policies are unpopular and radical, and that to be electable you have to run to the center. This belief is empirically false. A federal job guarantee, for instance, is a very popular policy, and gets an average of 59.1 percent approval in national polls. In fact, it’s even consistent with conservative values. The alternative to a job guarantee is to leave people who actively want to work sitting around uselessly with nothing to do. That’s absurd and irrational, and the basic premise of a job guarantee is that if you want to work, you will be found something to do. It’s hard to see how anyone could object to that—especially when the United States has an abundance of work that needs doing, with crumbling bridges, a nationwide teacher shortage, and so on. 

Single-payer healthcare is also a winner. Despite relentless right-wing propaganda about socialized medicine, the majority of Americans say they support some form of public healthcare. Giving Medicare to everyone makes complete sense. Our private for-profit healthcare system is a disaster that causes unnecessary death, suffering, and bureaucracy. We can fix it, making people healthier, wealthier, and happier. A president who successfully gave everyone quality healthcare would earn the lasting respect of the American public. Single-payer is a no-brainer and support for it is a political asset, not a liability. 

A fracking ban is a more contentious policy. There’s a lot of public skepticism toward fracking, but there are arguments that instead of an immediate ban, there needs to be a careful transition away from it. Even many of those who oppose an outright prohibition on fracking tend to agree that we need to get off fossil fuels sooner rather than later, the only question being how the transition should be structured. Harris could quite easily emphasize the consensus that we need to eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels as soon as possible, and explain to the public why that includes moving away from fracking as fast as we can without doing major economic damage.

Progressive policies are good ideas, because they’re designed to transform people’s lives for the better. They are attacked by those who have a financial or ideological interest in maintaining the problems. Corporations don’t like the idea of a job guarantee, because if people are less scared of unemployment, it’s harder to exploit them. The private insurance industry that profits off people’s misery does not like the idea of a government program rendering it unnecessary. And of course the fossil fuel industry depends for its survival on us continuing to wreck the planet. 

It’s good that Harris was once committed to introducing sensible policies to deal with major problems. There’s no reason for her to run away from her record. Running away from it is, in fact, harmful, because it means ditching ideas that could give people a strong reason to want to support you. “I promise not to give you healthcare” is a much less inspiring pitch than “I will prevent your insurance company from gouging you.”

Criticizing Harris for her pivot, then, is not an attempt to help Trump by tearing down the Democratic candidate. It’s an attempt to point out that the Democratic candidate is making a bad move that will make it harder to defeat Trump. Donors may hate progressive policies and pressure Harris to drop them—we know that billionaires are trying to get her to commit to firing trust-busting FTC director Lina Khan, for instance. But it’s just not accurate to say that progressive policies are a liability that need to be ditched out of pragmatic concern for winning. To win, be bold. Propose real, meaningful change that will excite people and give them a reason to come out and vote for you. Defend your record when people attack it. Ditching these policies makes Harris look calculating and dishonest, which is not what you want when you’re trying to portray your opponent as calculating and dishonest. 

There are some encouraging signs that Harris understands the public is not anti-progressive. Her selection of Tim Walz as her running mate defied the Washington orthodoxy that she would benefit from adding someone reassuringly centrist. But the question is what Harris and Walz are going to do, not how they talk, and we need to see an agenda that is going to excite the public.