Harris ran from the Biden policies that were actually popular with voters | Daniela Gabor

The Harris campaign dumped Biden's FDR-style ambitions for boring neoliberal policy planks that were an electoral dead-end

The post-mortems of Kamala Harris's loss to Donald Trump all agree on one thing: that Harris stuck too close to Biden. It was deliberate, pundits charge, pointing to the now infamous October appearance on ABC's The View, where Harris said There is not a thing that comes close to mind" that she would have done differently. But the pundits are wrong.

Harris did distance herself from Biden where it hurt her most. She dumped his Rooseveltian transformative ambitions to bring back big government. Instead, she returned to the Obama-Clinton of a small or neoliberal state that highly influential Democrats like Jake Sullivan had already known was an electoral dead end during the first Trump administration.

Daniela Gabor is professor of economics and macrofinance at SOAS, University of London. She is working on The Wall Street Consensus, a book on the return of the transformative state