Kamala Harris Moved Right. Did It Cost Her the Election?

This story is a collaboration between Atmos and Teen Vogue.

Take the name off the ticket, and you might be confused about which presidential candidate you're looking at: embracing record oil and gas production, towing a Cheney around the campaign trail, patronizing Gaza protestors, keeping tight-lipped on trans rights, and promising some of the most restrictive immigration policies in decades. No, it's not former president Donald Trump. It's Vice President Kamala Harris, after she decided to run on a conservative-lite platform in a failed attempt to lure anti-Trump, center-right voters to her coalition.

Harris' rightward shift during her short-lived 2024 presidential campaign perplexed the progressive members of her party's base. In principle, you could see the logic—that it would cleanse the absurd perception on the right that she's a radical leftist while appealing to Republicans who disavowed a return to Trump-era policies. As we now know, the ploy failed. According to NBC News exit polls, Harris won over just 5% of Republican voters— 1% less than President Biden did in 2020.

Did the strategy cost her the election? That's hard to say. She was flying against tremendous headwinds to begin with, strapped to a historically unpopular president , in an economy that voters feel terribly about, in a global political climate that seems deadset on punishing incumbents over Covid-related inflation , and given only 107 days to make her case to the electorate. But given the breadth and depth of her loss, it clearly didn't help.

You might've thought Harris would have diverged from her opponent, former and now incoming President Donald Trump, when it came to climate change. When Harris took the nomination, there was genuine enthusiasm from climate organizations. Harris had her own climate bona fides from her time as San Francisco's district attorney and as California's attorney general—not to mention casting the tie-breaking vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) , the single-biggest federal expenditure on climate change. Many climate advocates saw Harris as the only real option on climate , in no small part because of the threat of another four years of Trump. The climate-denying former president promised to scrap environmental regulations for billion-dollar campaign donations from Big Oil, and Project 2025 , among other things, vowed to repeal Biden and Harris' signature climate legislation.

Advocates told the Guardian's Dharna Noor that Harris had been presented with an opportunity to embrace more populist messaging around climate change. Noor's report concluded by observing that several parts of the climate movement were united in connecting climate change to Israel's bombing of Palestine, which has created immense emissions . Palestine, of course, was yet another subject that Harris refused to differentiate herself on from President Biden.

Days later, however, Harris told CNN's Dana Bash that she was against banning fracking (and denied it was backtracking on her previous stance during the 2020 primaries), and argued the passage of the IRA was enough to compensate for it. Even upon its passage, it was clear then that the IRA would be inadequate to combat the scale of the climate crisis. It's not even enough to meet the U.S.'s 2030 greenhouse gas emissions targets.

"We didn't agree with everything Harris was doing on her campaign, but we did everything we could to help her get elected, and it wasn't the most comfortable thing always," Saul Levin, campaigns and political director of the Green New Deal Network, told Atmos. Levin says they were plugging their noses to prevent Trump, even though they disagreed from "a moral and scientific standpoint, but also from a strategic standpoint" about the pro-fracking comments. "We recognized the threat of Donald Trump and we were optimistic about what might be possible."

In the wake of Harris' loss to Trump, the climate movement is now stuck on its back foot, let down by a candidate who refused to make strong commitments and instead leaned to the right. "The working class abandoned Democrats because Democrats abandoned them," Elise Joshi, executive director of Gen-Z for Change, told Atmos, citing a post-election statement from Senator Bernie Sanders. Joshi has worked with the Biden administration on climate policy and reaching young voters in the past, but has simultaneously criticized the Biden administration's more lackluster climate efforts . "Working people in Appalachia were hit with a devastating hurricane and we didn't discuss how Big Oil and billionaires are causing this crisis and expecting our tax dollars to clean up their mess."

"The Democratic Party must reflect, and I have little hope that they ever will. That's why I'm shifting focus to building a strong, mobilized left from the ground up," Joshi added.

Some saw the refusal to take a pro-environment stance as a campaign killer. "With reproductive rights, she did not waiver. She did not give a single inch," said Hannah Reid, a climate advocate with over 100,000 followers on TikTok , where she often weighs in on politics and organizing strategy. "With climate, she did waiver, and she did give an inch, and that doesn't make sense."

August polling from Data for Progress, released two weeks after Harris entered the race, found that "a strong majority" of voters preferred Harris' approach to climate policy, wanted to see an administration that would hold oil and gas companies accountable, and wanted a Harris administration that would build on the clean energy progress made under Biden. But by October, climate advocates were sounding the alarm.

Harris marketed herself as a contrast to Trump, who openly chummed up with oil companies . But while the Harris campaign ran ads against Trump's climate record , she failed to offer an alternative vision on the climate crisis, or to be moved by advocate pressure.

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Simultaneously, the campaign was appealing to conservative voters and politicians. "We're talking about courting neocons who support endless war when the military is one of the largest triggers of the climate crisis," Collin Rees of Oil Change US told the Guardian . "She's courting members of a party that we know is not serious on climate even though we are all around us seeing the climate emergency."

It was a confusing tone to strike as liberals simultaneously fearmongered about the threat of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which offers a terrifyingly detailed blueprint to dismantle every lever of power the federal government has to protect the environment. It was also a far cry from the 2020 Biden campaign's pivot left after Bernie Sanders was ousted from the presidential primary, when Biden committed to a transition away from oil during a debate with Trump.

A former advisor to Bill Clinton on climate told the Guardian in October that avoiding an issue where Harris has substantive differences from Trump "might be the right political decision." We've now seen that was wrong—including in Pennsylvania, the prize-catch swing state this election cycle, where climate experts knew that voters wanted stronger climate policy. One 2024 poll found that 78% of Pennsylvanians "are in support of significantly increasing use of clean energy."

One Pennsylvania town saw so much flammable methane infiltrate their well water that people were fainting in the shower and tap water became flammable. "Sure as hell, I'm not voting for either of those two assholes," one resident, who blames the loss of most of his teeth to fracking's impact on his drinking water, told the Guardian.

This sentiment was borne out by potential voters, according to Reid, who hit the Philly streets to speak with voters after the Trump-Harris debate. "After she had said We are going to support fracking, you had people in Philly—an area which, we now see, she did not see the turnout that she needed—say that they did not like that she was going around fracking, that they didn't understand why she was doing it," Reid told Atmos. "She wasn't going to win Pennsylvania by flipping fracking voters, she was going to win Pennsylvania by increasing turnout in Philly, which she didn't inspire people to do. It's frustrating because it would have been quite easy."

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"Most women, at the frontlines of fighting for their rights and the rights of nature, have no choice but to continue the fight no matter what politician takes office."

The Hill's Hanna Trudo, who reports on the left and third-party movements, told Atmos that the constituencies that went to Sanders in 2016 were among those who shocked the media by going for Trump in 2024. "It's notable that despite the traction within the Sanders movement as recently as the 2020 Democratic primary, when he was the runner-up to Biden, no figure on the left emerged to run after Biden announced he would not seek a second term," Trudo said. "Early Sanders supporters were not okay with the lack of a Democratic primary against Clinton, and we've seen that play out similarly with the quick move to elevate Vice President Kamala Harris."

Now, the climate movement is forced into a defensive crouch. Any promise of a Harris administration they could pressure to the left is gone, replaced by a looming president who thinks that climate change is just going to create more beachfront property . Would campaigning on the left—on climate and beyond—have changed the outcome of the race? Given the historic and ubiquitous nature of her loss, it sure wouldn't have hurt.

Stay up-to-date with the politics team.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

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