To Win, Kamala Must Move to the Center

Americans view Harris as too progressive. Tonight may be her last best chance to course correct.

Kamala Harris arrives at Philadelphia International Airport ahead of a televised debate on September 10. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images.)

Kamala Harris is on track to lose the election.

The race is extremely close. Either outcome is well within the realm of possibility. But if the election were held today, Harris would be favored to win the popular vote—and Donald Trump would be favored to win the electoral college. 

After skewing towards Harris for much of August, betting markets now believe that Trump has the better odds of coming out on top. According to Nate Silver’s forecast, he currently has a 64% chance of winning.

All of this is reason for Harris to change her campaign strategy. As my colleague Sam Kahn rightly argued in Persuasion, she has been extremely risk-averse: Rather than seeking to advance her cause in interviews and unscripted public appearances, she has stuck to big rallies at which she recited her stump speech. As a result, a surprisingly large share of the electorate (31%) says that they don’t feel they know the woman who is asking them to let her run the country for the next four years. But as the latest New York Times poll reveals, the problem goes beyond that: Millions of swing voters say that Harris is too progressive for their tastes—and her cautious attempts to tack back to the center haven’t been enough to fix that problem.

Tonight’s debate may be Harris’ last, best chance to fix that vulnerability before it’s too late. The most revealing finding of the latest poll published by the NYT wasn’t that Trump now narrowly leads Harris in the national vote. It is that, at 44%, the share of voters who say that Harris is too liberal is far greater than the share of voters, 32%, who say that Trump is too conservative.

On the face of it, this seems absurd. Donald Trump refused to accept the outcome of the 2020 election and inspired a mob to storm Congress. Senior Republicans favor a total ban on abortion, and even “moderate” adversaries of Trump have joined Trump in “promising” to invade Mexico. Some of the most prominent media figures of the American right have been on Russia’s payroll or given deferential interviews to historians who appear to favor Adolf Hitler over Winston Churchill. Needless to say, I don’t personally share the opinion of the plurality of my compatriots.

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But as is usually the case in politics, there is some method behind the apparent madness. For despite all of the ways in which Trump remains a genuinely extreme—and dangerous—candidate, he in fact has loudly and deliberately tacked towards more moderate positions on key social and cultural issues.

Polls and referenda have, since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, made clear that the position long held by the Republican Party regarding abortion is deeply unpopular. So, rather than tying his fate to the issue, Trump announced that he would veto any federal restrictions on abortion. Democrats claim that Trump’s words are hollow, and, given his long track record of broken promises, they may well prove to be right; but, for many voters, his costly break with parts of his own base was a meaningful sign that he would not be beholden to the most socially conservative wing of his movement.

When many of the proposals put forward by a team of MAGA-world insiders hoping to give coherence to a second Trump term became toxically unpopular, Trump proved similarly willing to throw them under the bus. As soon as Democrats started to get some traction with their attacks on Project 2025, he claimed that he didn’t know much of anything about the project and would ignore it once in office. The sincerity of this disclaimer may once again be doubtful. But as the Times recently reported, it was sufficiently forceful to upset allies such as Paul Dans, the project’s leader—and Trump's willingness to court condemnations from putative allies like Dans only helped to convey for many swing voters an impression of independence of spirit. 

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Harris has in some small and implicit ways proven willing to tack to the center as well. Her solid speech at the Democratic National Convention emphasized broadly popular values like freedom and patriotism. The convention as a whole was clearly designed for the consumption of voters who are yet to be persuaded rather than activists who have long ago made up their minds. The campaign is doing some important things right.

While Harris was enjoying an electoral honeymoon as a candidate, and riding high in the polls, it was tempting to think that this would be enough. Perhaps Harris could quietly abandon the identitarian language that fueled much of her 2020 primary campaign, reverse course on a few unpopular policies like a proposed ban on fracking, and avoid upsetting any of her more progressive allies. But with the election less than two months away, with less-informed voters tuning into the campaign, and with the polls trending back towards Trump, it is becoming obvious that this simply won’t be enough to allay their fears. If she wants to convince them that she isn’t too extreme for their tastes, she has no choice but to differentiate herself from the leftmost wing of her party in a manner that is loud and explicit. Thankfully, it is perfectly possible for her to do this without selling out unnegotiable liberal values like tolerance and inclusion. 

Harris missed an opportunity to do so early in her campaign when many of her supporters instinctively started to organize along the lines of race and gender. When this trend reached its logical end point with a meeting of “White Dudes for Harris,” she could have warmly thanked the organizers for their commitment—and asked them to reconsider the nature of the call: “We are fighting for an inclusive America in which your gender and the color of your skin does not determine your place in society, your opportunities in life—or which Zoom call you’re invited to,” she might have said by way of explanation.

It isn’t too late yet. Even tonight, there will be plenty of opportunities for Harris to demonstrate that she is willing to veer from party orthodoxy. When the debate turns to the topic of abortion, she can passionately defend a woman’s right to choose—while acknowledging that, as in every single European country, there should be some legal restrictions on late-term abortions. When the topic comes to the pandemic, she can excoriate Republicans for mainstreaming conspiracy theories about life-saving vaccines—and also acknowledge that it was wrong for many public schools to close their doors to students for months or years on end. And when the topic turns to affirmative action, Harris can passionately champion the need to create opportunities for the most disadvantaged Americans—while acknowledging that the admissions system of leading universities have in practice too often favored the affluent, including those drawn from minority groups, over poor Asians and whites. 

None of these positions constitute a betrayal of progressive principles. Every one of them would, according to polls, align Harris with a clear majority of the electorate. Any one of them would create an uproar among parts of the activist left. Far from being this strategy’s bug, that should be seen as one of its attractive features.

Many Americans have recognized that Harris is cautiously inching towards the center. But as long as she is not willing to do that in ways that will upset some of her allies, most will continue to interpret this as a form of opportunism. Nothing would prove that she means business, and has genuine independence of spirit, like taking a position that causes an outcry in the activist class that has such an outsized voice in the Democratic coalition—and then, crucially, sticking to it.

Sadly, everything suggests that Harris is unlikely to heed this advice. She will stick to her uncontroversial talking points, too worried about courting controversy or upsetting part of her base to make a surprising move. With so much on the line, her instinct—and that of her advisers—is to avoid all risks.

But avoiding all risk is only risk-free when you are headed for a positive outcome. Right now, polls, electoral forecasts, and betting markets suggest that this is not the case. On a conservative estimate, the likelihood of Trump being back in the White House four short months from now is 50%. What’s truly risky isn’t a break with the cultural orthodoxies of the activist left. It’s a continued refusal to speak for the majority of Americans who want a president who is both inclusive in values and independent in spirit.