Republicans claim Kamala Harris was the U.S. Senate’s most liberal member. Is that true?

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It’s been a favorite Republican claim for years: Kamala Harris was the Senate’s most liberal member.

During her four years as a senator from California, Harris was always close to being the most liberal. In one of those years, 2019, she was listed as the most liberal of all senators.

“The contrast could not be more stark—on the one hand, you have a Radical Left puppet candidate who is FAKE, FAKE, FAKE, and on the other hand, you have a president who will FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT for America,” the Trump War Room, an arm of the campaign, tweeted last week.

In fact, since leaving the Senate in January 2021 to become vice president, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee has inched away from many of her more liberal positions. Yet the Republican drumbeat continues. It’s a big part of the GOP’s strategy to define the largely-unknown Harris to voters.

Below, we fact-check some of the most frequently cited claims about Harris’ liberal record.

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The most liberal?

▪ “Kamala Harris was the most liberal member of the United States Senate,” said Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance last month.

NOT ALWAYS TRUE.

This often-repeated claim cites an analysis by GovTrack, an independent group that studies congressional voting records, which in rated Harris as the Senate’s most liberal member. It has since removed that page from its site.

“We determined that the limited data available in a single year was not sufficient to create a reliable portrait of the activity of legislators, particularly given the ebbs and flows of the legislative calendar, and therefore did not serve as a useful tool to our users and the American public, said Joshua Tauberer, GovTrack founder.

GovTrack has a page on Harris that compares her ideological record to others, and other data remain on the site.

In the Congress that ran from 2017 to 2019, she was rated the fourth most liberal senator. In the next Congress, from 2019 to 2021, she was rated second most liberal, behind Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind.-Vt..

GovTrack explains that its ideology analysis “assigns a score to Members of Congress according to their legislative behavior by whether they sponsor and cosponsor overlapping sets of bills and resolutions with other Members of Congress.”

It also noted that the score “only takes into account a small aspect of reality,” and says “keep in mind that there are many important aspects of being a legislator besides what can be measured, such as constituent services and performing oversight of the executive branch, which aren’t reflected here.”

End private health insurance?

▪ “She wants to outlaw private health insurance,” Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said last month at a conservative conference in Florida.

TRUE — at the start of her Senate career.

Harris enthusiastically supported Sanders Medicare for All plan in 2017, which would have all but ended private insurance.

The Sanders initiative went nowhere. Harris backed away in 2019 during her presidential run, saying she would support a plan that included private insurance so people could have supplemental insurance.

“We will allow private insurers to offer Medicare plans as a part of this system that adhere to strict Medicare requirements on costs and benefits,” she wrote on the Medium web site.

Abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement?

▪ Lyin’ Kamala supported abolishing ICE,” said Trump at a rally in Charlotte last month.

NOT TRUE.

In 2018, Harris was sympathetic to liberal thinking about how to deal with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Some liberals wanted ICE, which enforces immigration policy, abolished. But Harris didn’t go that far.

She told MSNBC in 2018 that “I think there is no question that we’ve got to critically reexamine ICE and its role and the way it is being administered and the work it is doing.

“And we need to probably even think about starting from scratch because there’s a lot that is wrong with the way that it is conducting itself and we need to deal with that,” she said.

Harris and Biden

The Harris campaign counters that she has been a strong supporter of Biden administration proposals on health care, immigration and other incendiary issues — positions that barely resemble her views years ago.

They also argue that she has a record of being tough on crime and border protection, citing her years as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general.

“Democrats are also already making the election about a prosecutor versus someone convicted of felonies,” said Christian Grose, academic director of the USC Schwarzenegger Center.

But Republicans see a way to define Harris, whose political image is still being shaped in voters’ minds, and they’re hammering away.

As financial markets reeled Monday, Trump warned Harris’ liberal ways would mean a “Kamala Crash!!!.”

“Markets will NEVER accept the radical left lunatic that DESTROYED San Francisco and California, as a whole,” he wrote on his Truth Social site.