This is the week when Kamala Harris stopped being a serious contender for president

With her latest unfortunate pivot, Harris consigned herself to the political graveyard

Earlier this week, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders sent out a tweet. It certainly isn’t unusual for presidential candidates (or, as we know too well, sitting presidents) to use Twitter, but this particular tweet stood out. It read: “I don’t go to the Hamptons to raise money from billionaires. If I ever visited there, I would tell them the same thing I have said for the last 30 years: We must pass a Medicare for All system to guarantee affordable health care for all, not just for those who can afford it.”

Sanders was taking a thinly-veiled swipe at his opponent senator Kamala Harris. The previous weekend, Harris had attended a fundraiser in the Hamptons, an exclusive seaside area in New York state known for NYC resident getaways. Speaking at the event, in front of a crowd of uber-wealthy potential donors, Harris reaffirmed her belief in “capitalism”. She also reportedly told donors that she has “not been comfortable” with the Medicare-for-All proposal pushed by Sanders.

Reports of Harris’s rebuke of the Sanders healthcare plan soon spread online. People reminded her that she herself co-sponsored the plan just two years ago. In 2017, she said of the plan that “this is about understanding, again, that healthcare should be a right, not a privilege. And it’s also about being smart […] It also makes sense from a fiscal standpoint, or if you want to talk about it as a return on investment for taxpayers.” A press release from April this year reiterated that sentiment.

While arguments over the rights and wrongs of each candidate’s healthcare policy continue, Harris’s healthcare pivot sticks out as a big political misstep. Scrolling through Twitter, her apparent backtrack drew criticism from across the political spectrum. Supporters of Sanders, but also Trump’s 2020 campaign director and the Republican Party’s communications director, fumed at the California senator’s U-turn.

But was it really a U-turn? Disagreements over healthcare have been building between Harris and Sanders for weeks. Sanders was critical of Harris’s healthcare plan – which leaves more space for private insurers and takes 10 years longer to implement – when it was released last month. In July his campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, said: “Call it anything you want, but you can’t call this plan Medicare-for-All. Folding to the interests of the health insurance industry is both bad policy and bad politics.”

The accusation of “bad politics” is both true and untrue. In fact, Harris’s problem is that she is often too good at reading the political mood and pivoting her policy accordingly. Her 2017 support of Sanders’s plan was welcomed as a shrewd reading of the Democratic Party’s mood on healthcare, boosting her progressive credentials ahead of a possible White House run. We saw this astute nature again when she came out swinging for Joe Biden in the first televised debate, positioning herself as the perfect person to take him on. And again when she positioned gun control as a central part of her campaign early on, long before her opponents jumped into action in the wake of last month’s horrific shootings in El Paso and Dayton. This focus on public safety is not only popular, but highlights the positives of her prosecutor background.

Yet Harris has discovered the hard way that she is never going to win over enough voters on the left of the Democratic Party to become Biden’s main challenger. Voters on the left are uneasy about her background as a prosecutor. Her past stances on the death penalty, marijuana offences and the detention of children – combined with her history of jailing parents whose children missed school – have come under particular scrutiny.

This gap in Harris’s defences was brutally exploited by fellow Democrat Tulsi Gabbard during the second televised Democrat debate. Gabbard attacked Harris’s record as a prosecutor with such vigour that she ended up essentially assassinating her character live on air. It was the stand-out moment of both debates and Harris struggled to respond convincingly.

Now, using that same political intuition she’s always had, Harris is reacting by attempting to re-steer her campaign. She’s pivoting back to the centre, hoping that if former vice president Biden continues to misstep, she may become the centrist candidate of choice. If chosen, she’d likely face off against Warren or Sanders, who will represent the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

The problem with this strategy is it doesn’t have the faintest chance of happening. While it does make sense that Harris would eventually pivot towards the centre after receiving little joy from the left of her party, this race has always been about who will face Biden. His final opponent will be the person offering a sufficiently radical and different vision from his.

In other words, Kamala Harris has just consigned herself to the political graveyard.

The trouble with Harris’s talent of sensing the political mood and adjusting her standpoint accordingly is that, over time, this can have a detrimental effect on a politicians’ perceived trustworthiness. While navigating her many policy pivots, Harris has missed the fact that the biggest question mark lingering over her is her character. What does she actually believe? Can she be trusted?

Harris has now pivoted herself into a corner. Unless a major scandal engulfs the Biden campaign, she doesn’t have much chance of reaching the final two in the race to become Trump’s 2020 opponent.

If Sanders’s tweet is anything to go by, he and Elizabeth Warren will be lining up to highlight Harris’s inconsistences at the next televised debate in September. Those polling above her will want to put some distance between the top three and the rest of the field, while those polling below Harris will see her as a target. The vultures are preparing to circle.

If this week showed us one thing, it’s that Kamala Harris won’t be America’s next president – but I’m still excited to see where she pivots next.