Ross D. Franklin/AP Photo
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event, October 10, 2024, on the Gila River Indian Community reservation in Chandler, Arizona.
The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
Democratic Party progressives have largely projected solidarity with Kamala Harris against the greater threat of a second Trump term, despite a campaign pitched directly at the moderate Republican voter. However, her embrace of high-dollar fundraising from the financial and technology industries has prompted consternation. To wonkish lefties, one of the big questions is whether, if elected, Harris will maintain the carefully brokered intra-Democratic detente on economic issues established by her current boss, President Joe Biden.
That will be especially relevant if Democrats manage to gain control of the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives. Under similar conditions a few years ago, with the thinnest of majorities, progressives unexpectedly became Biden’s most loyal allies as he delivered a slew of employment- and worker-focused spending bills and policies nicknamed “Big Fiscal.” Harris’s well-heeled friends from corporate America are dead set against her finishing the business of that brief era, such as by passing the pro-union PRO Act.
So will Harris be Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton? Big Fiscal or Big Business? We can’t expect clear answers until after November 5th, but a leading indicator will be one of the most important personnel decisions she’ll make, if elected: her White House chief of staff.
The chief of staff’s duties change from administration to administration, but almost always, they decide what the president gets to see. That makes them a crucial circuit breaker. If the chief of staff doesn’t think you matter, then you won’t get your ideas in front of the president.
We can see how powerful this is by contrasting Biden’s two years of a Democratic trifecta (2021-2022) with Barack Obama’s (2009-2010). Obama’s first chief of staff was Rahm Emanuel, a man who built a career out of blaming the left for his own nonstop failings. During the 2008 transition, Emanuel bullied colleagues within the incoming Obama White House out of even proposing their Plan B stimulus, which they already knew was too small to fill the hole left by the financial crisis. The result was the long, painful Great Recession, which did enormous damage to the Democratic brand.
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By contrast, Biden’s more progressive policies led to an immediate turnaround from the COVID-19 economic collapse and set the stage for today’s booming economy. (They were also the most popular policies he pursued as president.) This reflected, among other factors, Biden tapping Ron Klain as his first chief of staff. Unlike Emanuel, Klain saw Democrats to his boss’s left not as embarrassments, but as coalition partners worth keeping “in the tent pissing out [rather] than outside the tent pissing in,” to paraphrase Johnson.
Klain, a mainstream Democrat and longtime Biden aide, took seriously that his boss’s close victory over Donald Trump depended on a fragile coalition of rivals. He recognized that populist economic policies made sense in the political moment, and saw that backstabbing workers during a pandemic would spell disaster. In short, he understood that a popular-front alliance between the left and the center requires actual compromise from both groups. Progressives embraced Klain not as one of their own, but as an honest broker in a role too frequently occupied by the likes of Emanuel, Bill Daley, and Jeffrey Zients.
Klain respected progressives enough to grant them a seat at the Oval Office’s strategy sessions on domestic policy. In return, progressives cheered on a president whom none of them really wanted, even when it required biting their tongues. They all played politics, in other words—haggling out the sort of compromise that centrists claim no one but themselves can do. The result has inevitably prompted criticism, including on the left, but did deliver robust employment and reinvigorated the antitrust and labor movements. It also infuriated C-suites nationwide.
Multinational executives are now intent on restoring what is, in their minds, their rightful place as the only meaningful advisers for the Harris White House’s economic policy. The easiest way to do so would be ensuring her chief of staff is closer to Emanuel than Klain. This could prompt open intra-Democratic hostility on economic issues unseen since the early Obama era. But it would let corporate America win the game by default.
THE PROBABLE CONTENDERS FOR HARRIS’S CHIEF OF STAFF all have skeletons in their closets. But some candidates are certainly better than others.
Take Harris’s current chief of staff and automatic front-runner Lorraine Voles, a by-the-book Democratic communications operative, for better or worse. She was Fannie Mae’s head of communications during the 2008 financial crisis, including when it received its $130 billion federal bailout. Disclosure forms show her husband currently owns stock in military contractors, fintech firms, telecom giants, and Big Tobacco. Her stint at Fannie followed her tenure at Porter Novelli, a groundbreaking PR firm that catered to some of America’s most troubling corporate elites. Voles certainly might put pragmatism over class loyalty—but that should not be taken for granted without the kind of outreach that Klain conducted in 2019 and 2020.
Then there’s Sen. Laphonza Butler (D-CA), a longtime Harris ally who’s currently filling out the late Dianne Feinstein’s Senate term. Butler had a long career in the Service Employees International Union, even rising to become its California local’s president. But in 2018, she left to take a job with the Democratic political consultancy Bearstar Strategies, which worked on Harris’s Senate campaign and describes themselves as “California’s top spin doctors.”
Plenty of union leaders leave for better-paying work. But at Bearstar, Butler represented Uber in negotiations with her former SEIU colleagues over the rideshare firm’s efforts to block legislation reclassifying rideshare drivers as employees. Among other things, that would have qualified Uber drivers to form a union. Harris endorsed the bill, which Butler worked to quash. It ultimately passed, but Uber later nullified it via a ballot initiative. By that time, Butler had become Airbnb’s top lobbyist.
Butler’s Uber ties would be on theme for Harris. Her brother-in-law Tony West is the firm’s top lawyer, a fact that reportedly weighed on the Teamsters’ decision not to endorse Harris’s campaign.
Obviously, Butler has deep ties within labor and across progressive politics, and a strong record overall. In the Senate, she was just one of 11 votes to force an investigation of potential human rights violations in Israel’s war on Gaza. But that does not mean we should ignore her efforts on behalf of Silicon Valley. Stakeholders are well within their rights to ask her some tough questions as to how much her time there impacts her view of the world, including Harris’s coalition.
Most troubling by far, though, would be former Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA). Harris’s record and campaign rhetoric show a tentative yet welcome interest in fighting climate change. But Richmond built his name as one of Big Oil’s favorite House Democrats, receiving a whopping $520,000 from fossil fuel interests from 2007 to 2020. In return, he gave the industry, which is powerful in his home state of Louisiana, exactly what they wanted.
Richmond voted in favor of expanding offshore drilling; blocking regulation of coal ash; exempting interstate pipelines from environmental review; weakening oversight of fracked gas; and approving the infamous Keystone XL pipeline. All of this despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Richmond represented “Cancer Alley,” the disproportionately Black region between New Orleans and Baton Rouge where extreme air pollution from fossil fuel projects has left residents with cancer risk 50 times higher than the national average. A Guardian review found Richmond didn’t even mention air pollution once in his first two years in office.
Then there’s Richmond’s willingness to downplay white supremacist ties among his fellow lawmakers. “I don’t believe Steve Scalise has a racist bone in his body,” Richmond once said about his fellow Louisiana representative, who gave a speech to a group led by former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, and who described himself as “like David Duke without the baggage.” After 147 Republican lawmakers refused to certify that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election, Richmond said, “I don’t think that the Republican lawmakers question the legitimacy of his election … that will soon go away.” It has not. Instead, both Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance (who has plenty of ties to white supremacists) and House Speaker Mike Johnson have now refused to say that Biden won the election.
Richmond has also parroted the oldest, dumbest, papier-mâché excuse for opposing a robust social safety net: “When you start saying ‘free college,’ ‘free health care,’ the only thing you’re leaving out is a free car and a free home,” Richmond told The Washington Post in 2016. “Who is going to pay for it? How are you going to pay for it? That is our responsibility to make sure that young people know that.”
It’s actually Richmond’s responsibility to know the basics of how government spending works. Had he manned the Oval Office doors instead of Klain in 2020, we’d probably be struggling through another recession right now. Instead, an active government left the U.S. with the strongest post-COVID economy in the Global North.
Harris should take that seriously as she plans out her White House, should she win the election next month. No one expects the upper echelons of a Harris administration to resemble those of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. But whether she likes it or not, young progressives are a core part of Harris’s voter base—with the capacity and willpower to cause political problems if they don’t get a seat at the table. A Democratic popular front is an honorable, necessary strategy. But it only succeeds if no one is taken for granted.
