Fact Check: Is Kamala Harris ‘more liberal than Bernie Sanders’?

Claim: President Donald Trump said during Thursday’s debate that Kamala Harris is “more liberal than Bernie Sanders” and is eager to see government-run health care.

Rating: Mostly false

Details:

Harris has been one of the Senate’s most consistent liberal votes, though whether she is the most liberal is open to interpretation.

Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal advocacy group that compiles ratings based on votes it regards as crucial to its mission, gave Harris perfect scores in 2017 and 2018. Sanders also got a perfect score in 2018, and a 95% in 2017.

ADA also gave 13 other senators perfect scores in 2017 and eight others in 2018. The Democratic Senate average was 88.8 in 2017 and 88.6 in 2018.

Before coming to the Senate, Harris was often criticized by liberals for her tough policies as a prosecutor. She was California’s attorney general from 2011 until coming to the Senate in 2017, and San Francisco district attorney from 2004 to 2011. Harris boasted that she was the state’s “top cop” as attorney general.

But in the Senate, she’s been squarely in the liberal corner. Trump and his backers often point to Harris’ enthusiastic backing of Sanders’ Medicare for All plan in 2017. “I intend to co-sponsor the Medicare for All bill because it’s just the right thing to do,” she tweeted.

In 2019, she began her run for the Democratic presidential nomination and told a CNN town hall in January “I believe the solution – and I actually feel very strongly about this – is that we need to have Medicare for all. That’s just the bottom line.”

But her support for the Sanders’ plan began to erode during her campaign.

In the Democrats’ first debate in June, Harris raised her hand when moderator Lester Holt of NBC News asked, “Who here would abolish their health insurance in favor of a government-run plan?”

After the debate, though, Harris told NBC she had misinterpreted the question. “In my vision of Medicare for All, it includes private insurance where people can have supplemental insurance,” she said.

A month later, she described her views in a piece for the Medium web site, saying “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.”

Biden wants to strengthen the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, by boosting federal subsidies so people can more easily pay premiums. He also backs providing a “public option,” or government-run health care that people could choose.