A few weeks ago, I wrote that if I had the opportunity to use Ranked Choice Voting in the 2024 Presidential Election, I’d rank Dr. Cornel West first on my ballot (though I think his foreign policy is naive), Claudia De La Cruz second (though she’d be assassinated within the first 100 days), and Vice President Kamala Harris third (though she’s not the radical leftist I’d prefer her to be).
Unfortunately, presidential elections in the United States take place within a de facto two-party system where voters can only cast their vote for one candidate. As a result, most voters choose between what they imagine to be the lesser of two evils.
Thankfully, I don’t believe this is the case in 2024. I genuinely believe that Vice President Harris, while not my ideal president, will serve as a good-faith representative of America’s working class and middle class, and I’m relatively happy to give her my vote.
The DEI Candidate
Let’s ignore that Vice President Harris is more qualified for public office than her Republican opponent. We’ll ignore that she is a law school graduate who has only ever worked on behalf of “the people.” We won’t give credit to her history of having been elected by the fifth-largest economy in the world to serve first as their Attorney General and then as their Senator in Congress. We’ll ignore the four years she just spent working beside the President in the White House, where she represented our nation in international conferences, with foreign leaders, and in thousands of domestic environments.
Instead, let’s pay specific attention to her heritage as a mixed-race woman raised by a single mother in a working-class household. Let’s highlight that she is a child of two immigrants. Let’s note that she has ancestors from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Let’s remember that she was the first woman, African American, and South-Asian American to be elected Attorney General and the second black woman and first South Asian Senator in the history of the United States. Let’s remember that, as Vice President, she is also, currently, the highest-ranking female in American history.
If elected, she will become the first female president of the United States, the first South Asian American president of the United States, the first Jamaican American president of the United States, and the second African American president of the United States.
Representation matters, especially for kids. It will be significant to see a female president, a black president, a black female president, a South Asian president, and a mixed-race president making decisions in the Oval Office. I support the future that such a sight will inspire.
I also think it matters to have Vice President Harris’ diverse background motivate the shape of American politics. I like knowing that a mixed-race woman raised by a single, immigrant mother who experienced financial struggles is sitting at the head of every table where major decisions are being made that will influence the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans, not to mention the rest of the Earth’s population.
I prefer her background to the greedy, white, racist, Aryan-mythologizing, toxically masculine perspective that former President Trump promises to bring to the table.
Her opponents can call her the DEI candidate, but I support DEIB initiatives for a reason: because in a country that continues to be beset by racism, sexism, and misogyny, they’re absolutely necessary.
Of course, Vice President Harris isn’t actually a DEI candidate. She is, as I said, eminently more qualified than her opponent.
Harris Administration Policies I Can Support
Despite what her opponents would have you think, Vice President Harris has made many of her plans clear. It might have taken a little bit, but she’s only been the nominee for about 12 weeks, and before she could formalize her plans, she needed to pick a vice-presidential candidate, plan and write a major speech at a party convention, develop a stump speech, prepare for her first major televised interview, and then prepare for her first (and likely only) debate with her opponent.
So yeah, the woman has been busy.
But a week or two ago, she published her plans on her website and began sending out details in emails and explaining them in local interviews and on the stump. Her opponent’s plans, meanwhile, are more “concepts of a plan” than anything else, despite knowing that he’d be running for rëelection since his attempted coup failed in 2021.
Here are the policies she proposes that I wholeheartedly support:
- Federalizing protection of a woman’s right to control her body
- Increasing the Child Tax Credit to $6,000 for families with newborn children
- Increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit for working families with low wages
- Rolling back the Trump Tax Cuts for wealthy Americans
- Enacting a minimum tax for billionaires
- Quadrupling the tax on stock buybacks
- Providing tax incentives to home builders who build starter homes sold to first-time homebuyers
- Providing a $40 billion fund for local solutions to build housing, including finding innovative methods for financing construction and requiring builders to develop affordable housing solutions
- Making it more costly for private-equity firms to acquire single-family rental homes
- Preventing collusion between landlords to jack up rents in a community
- Giving millions of eligible families who are first-time homebuyers $25,000 in downpayment assistance
- Capping the out-of-pocket expenses for prescription drugs at $2,000 for everyone, not just seniors
- Cracking down on pharmaceutical companies and pharmaceutical middlemen who use their size to block small companies and pharmacies from competition
- Work with states to cancel even more medical debt for Americans (the Biden-Harris Administration has already canceled $7 billion in medical debt)
- Banning price gouging on food and groceries
- Limiting profits on food and groceries
- Blocking unfair mergers and acquisitions in the food industry
- Helping new small businesses by raising the startup expense tax deduction from $5,000 to $50,000
- Increasing the share of federal contract dollars that go to small businesses
- Update the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 with the modern PRO Act (sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders), which protects employees’ rights to organize and collectively bargain, and sign the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would set a minimum nationwide standard of collective bargaining rights that states must provide to public service workers
- Continue the Biden Administration’s fight to provide relief on student loan debts
- Remove unnecessary degree requirements for federal jobs and challenge the private sector to do the same, improving opportunities for millions of Americans who don’t have a college degree to get a well-paying job, opening new routes to the middle class
- Work to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines (if the Supreme Court lets her)
- Require universal background checks on gun purchases
- Support red flag laws to keep guns away from dangerous Americans
- Support Supreme Court reforms, including ethics rules and term limits
- Support veterans by ending veteran homelessness and investing in mental health and suicide prevention
- Fight for a path to citizenship for immigrants living in the United States
Harris Administration Policies That Concern Me
Immigration
I worry about any immigration reform that a MAGA-driven Republican party would be willing to vote for and a Democratic majority that is so anxious to take immigration off the list of concerns that it throws hardworking families under the bus.
I am also concerned that the Harris Administration and its allies in Congress would allow its desire to appear “tough on immigration” to damage any approach to an empathetic asylum system.
In short, my concern is not that Harris will be too lenient on immigration but too influenced by America’s nativist tendencies. Her status as the daughter of immigrants reduces my concern, but politicians are going to politician.
Israel
Vice President Harris says she “will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and she will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.” I support the first part of that sentence; I’m concerned about the second.
It seems to mean that the Harris Administration would always be willing to sell weapons to Israel, but in the United States, it is illegal to transfer weapons when it is likely they will be used to commit genocide, crimes against humanity, or violate the Geneva Conventions and other human rights laws. It is a matter of record that Israel has intentionally directed attacks against civilians and civilian objects, including serious acts of violence against children. Yet the Biden-Harris Administration, with the support of Republicans and Democrats in Congress, recently approved another $20 billion in weapons sales to Israel — thankfully, my legendary senator is attempting (though probably failing) to block it.
Climate Change
Vice President Harris and other centrist Democrats will always prioritize “the economy” over the necessary and drastic steps we need to take to limit the tragic effects of human-caused climate change. She (and the rest of the Democrats) need to realize that the climate is the economy.
Lower agriculture yields mean higher grocery prices. Florida’s decreased exports of oranges and sugar contributed roughly 20% to food inflation in May 2024. Punishing heat in America’s farmlands has destroyed crops, and supply chain disruptions caused by floods and storms have increased transportation prices from the farm to the grocery aisle.
The inability to get home insurance due to extreme weather events wreaks havoc on the real estate market. Lenders and insurance companies are revising home valuations based on the heightened risks of flooding, hurricanes, and wildfires. It’s nearly impossible to get home insurance in some parts of Florida, Louisiana, and California, and it’s just going to get worse.
Not to mention that according to one study, home building drives roughly 39% of total global emissions. In 2023, the Rocky Mountain Institute reported that new home construction in the United States creates the yearly carbon equivalent of 138 natural gas-fired power plants or the yearly emissions from entire countries such as Norway, Peru, and Sweden (yet the Harris Administration promises to increase home construction over the next four years by three million units, with no mention in its plan to ensure carbon neutrality in the process).
The list of ways that climate is the economy continues: the price of timber, copper, and rubber; the health of outdoor workers in areas with extreme heat; the flood of undocumented workers over the border due to the effects of climate change in their home nations; the financial impacts of “states of emergency” on Federal and state budgets; the blackouts and surge energy pricing caused by hotter days, etc.
Vice President Harris does not prioritize the effects of human-caused climate change the way our national leader needs to, and that concerns me.
We Live In A Two-Party System
Do I wish President Biden announced in 2023 that he would not run for rëelection, therefore allowing the voters in the Democratic Party to benefit from a competitive primary season? Of course, I do!
However, I doubt I would have been happier with the eventual winner than I am with Vice President Harris. As a self-proclaimed member of the radical left, I recognize the majority of the Democratic Party does not support the kinds of policies or candidates I prefer (hell, most of my friends don’t support my policy preferences). With Senator Sanders being too old to run for president and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez not yet willing to put her hat in the ring, there probably wouldn’t have been a primary candidate with the charisma and the willingness to successfully represent the left wing of the party.
As a result, even with a full-blown Democratic primary, I’d be where I am today: generally satisfied by the Democratic nominee with major reservations when it comes to immigration, Israel, and climate change.
But we don’t have ranked-choice voting and the nominee from the other major party is a bona fide heel who not only gets off on causing pain and chaos but also seems to genuinely desire federal policies that drastically run counter to my own.
Vice President Harris isn’t my ideal candidate, but our future depends on policies that support working families, defend women’s rights, and at least acknowledge the reality of the climate crisis. That’s why, despite my concerns, I’ll cast my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris—and I beg that you’ll join me