The Atlantic: “Harris’s potentially pliable ideology, in other words, could prove useful to progressives. It’s also something that she has in common with her running mate. When I asked him to define Harris’s politics, Larry Cohen, the chairman of Our Revolution, the political-action committee spun out of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, described her the same way one might describe Biden: ‘a centrist Democrat who has shown willingness in the past to consider progressive ideas.’ At one point, a Biden nomination was a nightmare scenario for many American progressives. Yet in the past few months, the former vice president and his fiercest critics on the left have reached a tentative détente: Biden has adopted some of the most liberal policies proposed by his former primary rivals, including Elizabeth Warren’s bankruptcy plan, and he invited a group of Sanders-aligned activists to advise his campaign. The $2 trillion climate plan he announced in mid-July was met with glowing praise from influential lefty groups such as the Sunrise Movement, which first came to national prominence after its members held a protest outside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office on Capitol Hill.”

“‘Some of our administrations who have been the boldest haven’t always been the most progressive,’ Tory Gavito, the president and co-founder of the progressive Way to Win network, told me. Many liberal Democrats were skeptical of Lyndon B. Johnson’s commitment to progressive reforms when he arrived in office, given his southern background and establishment ties. But Johnson was responsible for ‘some of the most levelizing, equalizing policies in recent history,’ Gavito noted, adding that progressives shouldn’t underestimate the potential for similarly ambitious legislation from a Biden-Harris administration.”