Flip-flopping or reframing? Kamala Harris faces scrutiny over shifting campaign positions

Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign launched just over a month ago. In the short time she’s been running, she’s made an effort to differentiate herself from the policies of President Joe Biden while also reconstructing her past, which was marked by progressive politicking.
Harris’ speech at the Democratic National Convention focused on capturing the attention of the American center. ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl said Friday that Trump loyalists often refer to Harris “as a San Francisco liberal, as a radical. They call her comrade Kamala.”
“If you take out the section on abortion rights, much of this speech could have been delivered at a Republican convention, a Republican convention before Trump,” Karl added.
As Harris attempts to move away from her past policies, in the hopes of attracting moderate and independent voters, conservatives have tried to give her the nickname “Kamala Chameleon.” Earlier this month, MAGA INC., a Trump campaign super PAC, released a website with that name, featuring various policies Harris previously favored and her recently changed position, like backtracking on “Bidenomics” as an economic solution or defunding the police.
“It’s a lot of mind-changing for the public to absorb without further explanation,” The Washington Post wrote in an opinion piece. “Without hearing Ms. Harris articulate her thought process, she runs the risk of leaving voters to wonder whether she is just shifting with the political winds, or, indeed, planning to revert to previous positions after she’s won the presidency.”
Sarah Croco, an associate government and politics professor at the University of Maryland, in an interview with the Deseret News argued it’s hard to make the flip-flopping label stick to Harris since she has shied away from sharing specifics. Voters, the media and political consultants may not label her changing positions as flip-flops but they’re taking note of her campaign isn’t sharing much.
Despite major flip-flops from Trump, his businessman status and wheeling-and-dealing attitude have, to some degree, shielded him from this attack.
But former presidential candidates like Sen. Mitt Romney and former Sen. John Kerry had a tougher time after changing their minds about issues like abortion and the Iraq war, respectively.
With less than 70 days until the election, voters are still unfamiliar with Harris. Her achievements in the second-highest office in the county aren’t captivating: Aside from breaking the record for the number of tie-breaking votes cast, her time working on immigration issues only garnered criticism as the overwhelming crisis at the southern border worsened.
In an effort to ride the wave of popularity she experienced after becoming the nominee, Harris has so far avoided all media interviews, local or national — although she is scheduled to give her first primetime interview alongside her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Thursday on CNN.
In the 2019 Democratic presidential primary, Harris said she supported “Medicare for All” and promised to ban fracking. She also backed the idea of rolling back Trump’s border policies. This election cycle, Harris dropped her push for expanding federally funded health care and her disdain for fracking. She is also tougher on immigration at the moment — even saying she supports building the border wall — thanks to Trump attacking her as an ineffective “border czar.”
In 2020, when the country faced civil unrest, voters had less of an appetite for a law-and-order politician, so Harris gladly discarded her tough-on-crime image and presented herself as someone who sought to “defend the little guy,” said Croco.
“It’s really interesting how they still want to keep her (attorney general) credential front and center,” she said.
But, the political science professor, added, she doesn’t see any of her slightly tweaked positions as major “flip-flops.”
“To me, what she is doing is changing how she frames herself on the national stage,” she said. “Flip-flopping is just a classic thing that politicians have to do when they are changing constituencies,” allowing them to attract a new and larger voter base.
In every general election, “we see both sides running to the center,” said Cruco. A political primary has the opposite effect, when candidates face members of their own party, forcing them to distinguish themselves from each other by taking extreme positions, the political science professor explained.
But Marty Carpenter, a partner at Northbound Strategy in Salt Lake City, argued a politician’s best bet is to have strong values and principles that they adhere to, and to work within their chosen framework of values.
“Kamala Harris is out essentially saying things that don’t match up with where she’s been in previous campaigns. They don’t align with the administration she’s been a high ranking member of,” Carpenter said. Voters can feel patronized when Harris says what they want to hear, instead of her actual position, he added.
“We all know the line from ‘Hamilton,’ when Alexander Hamilton asks Aaron Burr, ‘If you stand for nothing, what will you fall for?’” Carpenter said.
Romney, R-Utah, struggled to shake off the “flip-flopper” label when he ran for president in 2008 and 2012.
Running in the national Republican primary after serving as governor of Massachusetts, a perennially blue state, Romney moved away from some of the positions he took when he ran for state office.
Abortion emerged as a major pain point for the GOP senator. In a 1994 Massachusetts senatorial debate against the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy, Romney said he believed “abortion should be safe and legal” and promised to uphold Roe v. Wade as the law of the land. He reaffirmed his stance during the Massachusetts gubernatorial debate in 2002 by saying he would “protect a woman’s right to choose.” But something changed in 2007, following his time as governor.
“Look, I was pro-choice. I am pro-life. You can go back to YouTube and look at what I said in 1994. I never said I was pro-choice, but my position was effectively pro-choice. I changed my position,” he said in a radio interview in 2007, the same year he entered the crowded GOP presidential primary. He also switched to opposing tough gun control laws, denying climate change and retracting his support for Massachusetts’ “Romneycare” as a model for the rest of the country.
At the time, “he could point to this track record,” but not too loudly, to avoid angering the GOP voter base, Croco explained.
During the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama also switched to supporting gay marriage in response to his party’s changing stance. The Obama campaign accused his GOP opponent of having “Romnesia,” meanwhile those who were left-leaning defended Obama, saying “he has seen the light” and “evolved,” Croco said.
Voters of the past also found it harder to ignore Kerry’s flip-flopping on the Iraq war during the 2004 presidential campaign. First, he implied that voting against a wartime funding bill meant abandoning the troops. Then, he voted against a $87 billion supplement funding package for American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kerry had changed his vote to a no when another bill, meant to fund the $87 billion through tax cuts, didn’t pass.
“I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it,” he infamously said. Even though polls at the time indicated a waning interest in the Iraq war, Americans ultimately favored not changing “their horse midstream” and opted for the incumbent commander in chief, former President George W. Bush.
“The theory is that flip-flopping makes politicians look wishy washy or that they’re not committed or unprincipled. But in reality, humans change their minds all the time,” and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, Croco said.
Trump didn’t have a track record in politics before he jumped into the 2016 presidential race. But he did make campaign donations to Democrats and Republicans and was a registered Democrat.
Trump has changed his views (sometimes more than once) on abortion, TikTok, a Chinese-owned social media app, and cryptocurrency, which he no longer thinks is a crime-riddled scam. More recently, he said he would allow foreign nationals who graduate from U.S. colleges and universities to attain a green card automatically post graduation. He came to this decision after meeting with Silicon Valley venture capitalists and Trump donors David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya, who asked Trump to give them the ability to “import the best and brightest from around the world to America,” as Politico reported.
Carpenter, the political consultant, said, “What you get with Trump is the brand that he’s built, that he’s a deal maker.” People understand that businessmen enjoy and need flexibility, he added.
At a CNN town hall in May last year, Trump refused to say publicly who he would like to prevail in Russia’s war against Ukraine, and instead said all he wants is for “everybody to stop dying.” He also declined to say whether he thought Putin was a war criminal.
“If you say he’s a war criminal, it’s going to be a lot tougher to make a deal to make this thing stop,” Trump said.
Trump’s habit of going off script, occasionally for hours at a time, also diverts attention away from policy, making it hard to nail him down for flip-flopping. But, perhaps, the word doesn’t have as much power as it did more than a decade ago.
“It’s much more of the Wild West in the communication strategy game than it was 12 years ago,” Carpenter said. “When you’ve had 12 more years of people talking about flip-flopping on issues, the audiences get a little deaf to it.”