Bill Maher says Kamala Harris must convince voters she's not part of 'worst excesses of the left'

Comedian Bill Maher said Thursday that Vice President Kamala Harris needed to convince voters that she isn’t part of a “stealth version” of the far left. 

“Kamala’s big, I think, challenge here to win over the undecided voters is to convince them that she’s not part of what they suspect she might be, sort of a stealth version of the worst excesses of the left. I said there’s a coalition of Trump voters, people who really like him. There certainly are those, and then there’s people that don’t necessarily like him that much, but they still think he’s less crazy than stuff that strikes them as aggressively anti-common sense,” Maher said.

Maher, who also regularly criticizes former President Trump, joined MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough for an interview after the MSNBC host joined him for an episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher” on Friday. 

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Bill Maher said Vice President Kamala Harris has to convince voters she’s not part of the “excesses” of the far-left during an MSNBC interview. (Screenshot/MSNBC)

He also spoke about wokeism, and said that while the term used to mean “being alert to injustice,” it’s changed.

“Language is a living, breathing entity. Words change, and they migrate, and they take on a different meaning and ‘woke’ now has to answer for, or people have just used the word to describe a number of extreme things on the left,” Maher said. 

Harris campaigned on far-left policies during her first bid for the presidency in 2019, and expressed support for banning fracking, a mandatory buyback program for semiautomatic rifles and eliminating the filibuster to pass the Green New Deal. 

Harris also said she would eliminate private insurance and institute a single-payer health care program in 2019. She famously changed her “answer” the morning after the June 27, 2019, debate hosted by NBC News, saying she misunderstood the question and favored keeping supplemental private health insurance. She lost support from some progressives after the switch.

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Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a CNN town hall in Aston, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday. (AP/Matt Rourke)

The vice president has backtracked on most of the policies she ran on in 2020, fracking in particular. 

Harris’ campaign said the vice president “does not support a total ban on fracking.” But the vice president emphasized during an interview with CNN that her “values have not changed.”

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“I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed. You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed, and I have worked on it, that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time. We did that with the Inflation Reduction Act,” Harris said.

Fox News’ Danielle Wallace contributed to this report.