Decoding Kamala's big priorities

Which issues will she campaign on? And what would she do as president?

Welcome to a Saturday edition of Progress Report.

A few notes before we get to tonight’s newsletter:

1️⃣ In her first ad since replacing President Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris framed the fight with Republicans as a battle over freedom — something I’ve been urging Democrats to do for two and a half years.

2️⃣ The Associated Press cannot definitively confirm that JD Vance hasn’t ever had sex with a couch, an astounding statement proves that humiliating your weirdo hard-right soft boy opponents beats playing into their aspiring strongman personas.

I’ve also been arguing for years that Democrats should be merciless about humiliating these freaks. My friends and I were doing it to Ron DeSantis back when most Democrats feared him. It can have a major impact on public perception, leading to grassroots joyriding and brutal narratives like this.

3️⃣ It seems that Democrats have gotten the message, though because they won’t touch the allegedly soiled sofa, they are instead using a viral clip of Vance arguing that parents should get more votes than non-parents as a centerpiece of their Vance Is Weird campaign.

As I reported on Monday, the idea is actually the latest warped priority that the far right is attempting to mainstream from the Federalist Society fringe, and you can see what a priority the proposal is for them by the kind of defense the right is mounting of the unequal suffrage system.

Yesterday, the National Catholic Register published a rebuttal of the near-universal condemnation, citing a legal scholar at Notre Dame (whose law journal published the piece I referenced Monday) and a number of failed efforts to implement it elsewhere. These people throw as much shit against the wall as they can until something sticks.

4️⃣ Progress Report is now open to ethical advertisers that align with our values. If you rep an organization, campaign, or other group that wants to sponsor or advertise on an award-winning, frequently prescient political newsletter with 24,000+ engaged subscribers, please reach out to me by emailing JordanZakarin@gmail.com. I’m also open to consulting opportunities.

➡️ In today’s issue: After taking a deep dive into the Democratic Party platform under President Biden last week, I’m taking a reported deep dive into what Harris would do as president, and what she might campaign on to get there. Later this weekend, I’ll have an update on voting rights, ballot initiatives, and more.

Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.

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Decoding Kamala’s big priorities

As his vice president, Kamala Harris was charged with helping to sell President Joe Biden’s economic accomplishments and rallying Americans around his vision for the next four years. Now that she’s replaced him as the presumptive Democratic nominee, Harris is going to be the one setting the party’s agenda.

With a resume largely built in the courtroom and campaign platforms designed for Democratic primaries, Harris’s past is likely an imperfect barometer for the kinds of policies she’d pursue as president. Even so, experts and journalists say it’s safe to place Harris in the center-left of the Democratic Party, more progressive on some issues than others but never a holdout when party consensus shifts in a more liberal direction.

“All the evidence suggests that she understands the tremendous shift of worldview and understanding of the tools available for economic policymaking that we've seen,” says Suzanne Kahn, the vice president of the Roosevelt Institute. “I think that she will continue to campaign on and hopefully execute on an agenda that is not overly deferential to the market and afraid of using the power of the government. I think that she understands the new economic thinking that says the government's role is to shape markets so that they work for the American people.”

Kahn is a co-author of Sea Change, a report released by the Roosevelt Institute in November that chronicled that shift away from neoliberalism, expressed largely through the rebuilding of American industrial policy and a resurrection of competition-focused antitrust enforcement. Reports indicate that the vice president has not played a major role in the planning of those policies, but her involvement in other parts of the agenda suggest a simpatico philosophical approach.

“I think that she's likely to lean in on things that apply that view beyond the places we've seen it applied under the Biden-Harris administration,” Kahn predicts. “It’s thinking about industrial policy in not just manufacturing industries, but as it applies to care and service industries.”

Harris has regularly mentioned childcare during her first week as the presumptive Democratic nominee, elevating an issue that she has made a priority for years. She hasn’t laid out any details — it’s been a pretty busy week — but there’s a significant paper trail on this one.

While in the Senate, Harris co-sponsored the Child Care for Working Families Act, which would have subsidized care to ensure access for all kids under the age of 13. After the care elements of Build Back Better were jettisoned from what eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act, Harris spearheaded an administration rule that capped the cost of child care for around 80,000 very low-income families.

Now that the industry is being taken over by private equity, most significant for Kahn was a bill Harris introduced in 2019 that would have facilitated after-hours childcare in public schools to allow parents to finish the workday without paying exorbitant fees for help in the late afternoons.

“It was a real vote of confidence for thinking about how to do it in creative ways that don't just rely on the private sector,” Kahn points out.

Affordable childcare is essentially impossible in a private sector does not involve significant government intervention and support. The costs of doing business in an era of soaring rents, consumer goods inflation, and skyrocketing insurance prices have left little room for the most important expense: paying caretakers and teachers a living wage.

Childcare workers are some of the most underpaid professionals in the country, with a median wage of $14.60 an hour leading to a serious shortage of qualified workers in the industry. In 2019, Harris introduced the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, which would have protected childcare workers among others from the rampant wage theft that drains their paychecks even further. The Child Care for Working Families Act would have significantly increased their wages and subsidized the cost of care for millions of Americans.

Though any presidential primary platform should be taken with a grain of salt, or at least seen as the outer-edge of what a candidate would do in office, Harris’s proposal to provide six months of paid family and medical leave put her far ahead of other Democrats both then and now. For context, the paid leave provision in Build Back Better would have guaranteed one month of paid leave.

Harris has always had a close relationship with care workers’ unions, including the SEIU, one of the largest organized labor unions in the country. She also had close links to farm workers unions, received strong reviews with a speech at the American Federation of Teachers’ annual convention, and quickly earned the endorsement of all the labor organizations that backed Biden.

That’s become standard for Democrats, Teamsters notwithstanding, and for all the GOP’s talk about appealing to union members, Project 2025 is a blueprint for destroying the labor movement and subjugating working people altogether. But Harris has been making promises to continue the Biden administration’s emphasis on labor rights.

"As head of the White House Labor Task Force, I have led our work to eliminate barriers to organizing in both public and private sectors, including for teachers," Harris said during her speech to the AFT. "But there is more that we must do."

Whether Harris would follow Biden in prioritizing such strong union protections for union labor in trade deals and major spending bills remains to be seen, but she did take the public lead on the administration’s new wage protection rules for government contractors last year.

Where there is some uncertainty is how Harris would treat tech platforms who exploit workers. Having risen through San Francisco and California state politics during the tech industry boom times, the vice president has an immense number of close connections in Silicon Valley. Most prominent is her brother-in-law and close adviser, Tony West. A former Obama DOJ official, West is now the chief legal officer at Uber, putting him at the center of a multi-front fight against drivers and state officials who have sued the company over misclassification and wage theft.

Harris never pursued Uber or other “gig economy” platforms for their exploitative practices, and was late to endorsing California’s AB-5, a law that made it far harder to misclassify workers as independent contractors instead of employees. The law became moot after Prop 22, but the tech community still sees the vice president as an ally judging by the influx of mega-donations and hearty endorsements that they have showered on her since last weekend.

They haven’t really been subtle about what they want in exchange for the funds; billionaire donors Reid Hoffman, who gave millions to a Harris-Biden Super PAC, and Barry Diller, who said he plans to max out, have both called on Harris to fire FTC chair Lina Khan, who has led the charge in the government’s aggressive return to enforcing antitrust law. Khan has enraged a business world used to few checks on its ability to collude, limit competition and rip off consumers, and there are competing views on whether Harris would endorse so many crackdowns on tech companies in particular.

During her time as California’s attorney general, Harris took action to sue polluters and for-profit colleges, among other industries. The settlement she won against big banks that took reckless action during the mortgage crisis was politically deft but perhaps less punitive to financial institutions and less helpful to distressed homeowners than she touted.

One area of corporate regulation where Kahn suspects that Harris would be willing to go further than Biden is on raising corporate taxes. The Trump tax cuts expire next year, and should Democrats retain or win back any branch of government, a bruising fight is in store.. As a senator, Harris supported higher corporate tax rates than anything Biden was willing to include in his major legislation, and many of her various proposals would have been paid for with revenue from higher taxes on both business and the wealthy.

Increased tax revenue would be used in part for more material help for working families. Harris’s LIFT the Middle Class Act, introduced in 2018, would have provided up to $500 per month to middle class Americans, serving as a super-sized Earned Income Tax Credit delivered via direct deposit. While it was one of several likeminded proposals introduced during a mini-arms race among progressive presidential contenders and senators running for re-election, it presaged the expanded Child Tax Credit, which was 30% smaller yet still eradicated half of child poverty before it expired in 2021.

How should Kamala campaign?

Last week I suggested that Harris would be smart to distinguish herself by backing a few bold, forward-looking policies that Biden wasn’t yet willing to overcome his ingrained DC institutionalism to endorse. Chief among them was expanding and rebalancing the Supreme Court, an idea Sen. Ed Markey subsequently revived later in the week. Biden himself was getting ready to endorse a more mild kind of court reform, so Harris really needs to go bigger.

“I hope the Harris agenda takes that on directly and really tries to think about how do we rebuild our governing capacity to deliver for people more efficiently?” Kahn suggests. “I hope we think about the structure of the Senate and the filibuster and the courts. Last weekend, we saw the Democratic Party make a statement about this being an election about the future of our democracy, so now it's time for the policies behind that. [Harris] should put that front and center, because even economically, we can't deliver for the American people if everything is blocked by the Supreme Court or Senate gridlock.”

In 2019, Harris said she was open to the idea, though again, she was campaigning for president in a primary.

A new poll finds that the vice president has a lot of work to do if she wants to establish her own distinct brand of policy doctrine, but also a relatively blank canvas, unburdened by current unrest.

“While Harris is not associated with many popular policies enacted during Biden’s presidency, she’s also not closely associated with one of Biden’s biggest vulnerabilities: inflation,” the Democratic polling firm Blueprint wrote in a memo accompanying its latest snap survey results. “Just 23% of voters associate Harris with inflation, whereas a significantly higher share associate her with electorally advantageous issues for Democrats, such as abortion and birth control (52%) and healthcare (31%).”

Here’s a breakdown of which specific administration policies the public associates with the vice president:

Blueprint was launched by Reid Hoffman, the aforementioned Silicon Valley billionaire, in part to push the party toward the center. Tellingly, the memo accompanying the survey results suggest that Harris take a “pointed, populist” approach to campaigning, but includes balancing the budget among the sample policies such a message would include.

Still, it should be noted that the expanded child tax credit, perhaps the Biden administration’s single-most successful and popular initiative, is right near the top of the list. That people don’t associate Harris with high prices but do give her solid credit for her role in the expanded CTC and other financial benefits is an indication that for all the bluster about how the stimulus bills caused inflation, she’s on very solid ground to go big on policies that put money directly in people’s pockets.

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