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Posted: 2024-10-16T18:18:52Z | Updated: 2024-10-17T02:12:10Z

Moderate Democrats are preparing to push for a bigger role in staffing the White House and key agencies if Vice President Kamala Harris prevails in November, setting up a battle with progressives who are hoping to continue President Joe Biden s moves to upend decades of economic consensus on trade, labor and antitrust enforcement.

Leaders at Third Way, a centrist group, are preparing lists of staffers for a potential Harris transition and are determined to avoid a repeat of 2021, when they say progressive groups ended up winning personnel fights. They were organized. We were not at all, admitted Matt Bennett, one of the groups co-founders.

We took it on faith that Biden had run as a moderate and had won the nomination as a moderate, Bennett said. The centrist faction believed that would dictate the staffing, he added, but it didnt.

It was the pandemic that set the stakes: Amid the crisis, Biden cast his presidency as FDR-sized , with his eyes set on an activist government response to the pandemic akin to that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This search for FDR-sized responses to the crisis led Bidens team to seek out those with FDR-sized answers.

Progressives did not come to dominate the administration in any way, but they have held influence in midlevel positions in economic agencies and councils across the government and, in some cases, led regulatory efforts and policymaking in a way they didnt in other recent Democratic administrations. Now, progressives want to continue to expand on this agenda while the business-aligned wing of the party wants Harris to return to a more lax enforcement policy for corporate America.

So far, Harris political operation is remaining silent on any postelection intentions, leaving unresolved questions about which and how many open positions are even available for the two ideological camps to battle over.