Sanders, holding back endorsement, seeks influence with Harris

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has held off from officially endorsing Vice President Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee, and he is seeking to help shape the focus of her campaign and her agenda if she is elected.

Sources close to Sanders say he has no intention of challenging Harris, who is on a glidepath to winning the nomination after President Biden’s decision to not seek reelection.

Harris has seen no significant opponent line up to challenge her, and a bid by Sanders, who has twice run second in Democratic presidential primaries, is “off the table,” according to a source close to him.

“It’s clear that she’s going to be the nominee,” said a source close to Sanders, who nonetheless cautioned it’s not clear whether Democrats are “better situated against Donald Trump” with Harris instead of Biden atop the Democratic ticket.

“She’s got energy and enthusiasm right now, and I assume there will be a [polling] bump, but the question is how long does that last,” the source added.

Sanders encouraged Biden to stay in the race, and he spoke with the president and his top political and policy advisers in recent weeks to help outline a Biden plan for the first 100 days of his second term.

He’s seeking to play a similarly influential role with Harris’s campaign for the White House, according to people familiar with Sanders’s outreach to the Biden administration.  

Sanders, a member of the Senate Democratic leadership team, believes it will be critical for Harris to champion the populist economic ideas that made him a force to be reckoned with in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries.

“The vice president is the Democratic nominee, and I'm going to do everything I can to make sure she's the president, but I think for her to become president, she's going to have to be talking about issues that impact the 60 percent of Americans, working people who are living paycheck to paycheck,” Sanders said in a short interview with The Hill.

Harris was tapped to lead the Biden administration’s efforts to address the root causes of mass migration from Central America, and she also played a prominent role in advocating the administration’s support for protecting voting rights and abortion rights.

But she’s had a smaller role in selling Biden’s economic agenda to the American public and tackling one of the biggest issues in the campaign: inflation.

Sanders is expected to support Harris’s presidential bid, but just how enthusiastically he does so will depend on how far she goes in embracing the issues of economic justice he has advocated throughout his career, such as proposals to lower the cost of prescription drugs and health care.

“The views of working-class voters of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin are just so fundamental to the course of this election cycle. Right now, you look at where her standing is with a lot of working-class voters, and there’s a ton of room for Kamala” to improve her standing, the Sanders ally said.

“She hasn’t really, since she’s been vice president, stated terribly strong views about how she thinks and talks about the economy,” the source added.

Sanders’s allies say that the popular 82-year-old senator could help Harris with young people and progressives. A USA Today/Ipsos poll conducted in 2022 found that Sanders had the highest favorability rating of 23 potential 2024 White House candidates.

Harris embraced some of Sanders’s boldest ideas before the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, when she co-sponsored Sanders’s Medicare for All legislation.

Since then, Sanders has put more emphasis on expanding Medicare to cover dental and vision care and expanding the $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket prescription costs to more people.

One Democratic senator who isn’t a big fan of Sanders’s progressive brand of policymaking, however, said Harris won’t need his enthusiastic endorsement to drive voters to the polls.

“Democratic voters want to turn the page on people that are in their 80s, including Bernie Sanders, and I think they’re grabbing onto Kamala Harris, which is good,” the senator said.

“Young people who have felt totally shut out of all this are happy that she’s there. Maybe the most angry, bitter, p‑‑‑ed-off Bernie supporters” won’t back her without the Vermont senator's endorsement, the senator added.

“She’s never going to agree to what he wants her to agree to,” the lawmaker predicted.

Other progressives in Congress, such as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), have enthusiastically backed Harris, too.  

Sanders, the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, helped put together the broad outlines of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda in 2021.

As chair of the Senate Budget Committee three years ago, Sanders pushed the Biden administration to embrace a $6 trillion budget reconciliation proposal that included the expansion of Medicare and proposals to lower the cost of prescription drugs.

A Democratic strategist allied with Sanders said the Biden administration hasn’t moved aggressively enough to fight inflation and challenge what the source called “price gouging” by corporate America.

“This is the challenge that Kamala Harris has: This campaign blew up because of that debate performance by President Biden, but we can’t forget that we were losing before the debate. So if someone is just Joe Biden 2.0, that is not a winning strategy,” the strategist said. “There has to be a more forthright acknowledgment of the economic pain that many middle-class and working-class people are feeling in this country.

“You cannot just have talking heads on TV talking about how great things are, and if you don’t think they’re great, then you’re clearly mistaken or stupid. That’s not going to build credibility with anybody. We’ve got to acknowledge that prices are too high,” the source added.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a leading Senate progressive who also ran against Harris in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, defended the vice president’s long record on economic justice.

“I’ve known Kamala Harris for nearly 15 years, when she was attorney general in California and I was setting up the [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.] She and I were fighting shoulder to shoulder against the giant banks that were trying to cheat homeowners,” said Warren, who has endorsed Harris.

“She has worked since then on student loan debt, price gouging [and on] hundreds of ways in which giant corporations cheat people. This is a huge part of both her resume and her deep personal commitment. I don’t have any doubts about who she is and what she’ll fight for,” she added.