What would a Kamala government be like?

During the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, Kamala Harris ran as a progressive, to the left of Joe Biden. She supported Medicare for All, a government-run health plan that would cover everyone, along with other policies similar to Bernie Sanders’ agenda. Biden supported more limited government intervention and defeated Harris and all other left-leaning Democrats by leaning to the center.

When Biden picked the former California senator to be his running mate in 2020, it put Harris on track to become the first female vice president. Now that Biden has withdrawn from the race, Harris is the Democrat most likely to win the presidential nomination at the party’s convention during the third week of August, and potentially become the first female president of the United States.

While Harris started out more liberal than Biden, she’s likely to continue nearly all of Biden’s policies as a candidate and — if he makes it that far — as president, rather than reverting to his 2020 agenda. Here are four reasons why the Kamala Harris of 2024 will be much more like Joe Biden than the Kamala Harris of 2020.

The expiration of some of Trump’s tax cuts now dominates the political agenda. Trump’s tax cuts for individuals expire at the end of 2025, and that’s a big deal, as Biden might say. This will likely be the biggest legislative fight of the next president’s term, whether it’s a D or an R.

If Harris or another Democrat is president, powerful lawmakers like members of the House Ways and Means Committee will likely call the shots on what happens to Trump’s tax cuts. “Even if Kamala Harris comes in and has a different agenda, she’s going to embrace the Democratic tax package from the House Ways and Means Committee,” Henrietta Treyz, managing partner at investment research firm Veda Partners, said recently on the Yahoo Finance Capitol Gains podcast.

Biden’s 2025 tax plan mirrors what top lawmakers in the House and Senate are advocating: higher taxes on individuals earning more than $400,000 a year and an increase in the corporate tax rate. Trump and his fellow Republicans want to make all of the 2017 tax cuts permanent and further reduce corporate taxes.

What happens next depends not only on who the next president is, but also on which party controls Congress. If Harris or another Democrat becomes president and the Democrats also gain control of Congress, taxes on the wealthy will almost certainly increase, with a modest chance of a small corporate tax increase. If the GOP wins, nothing will change and taxes will likely remain as they are. If there is a split, there are many possible outcomes as the two parties negotiate.

Biden tried to impose some progressive policies — and failed . In a way, this does Harris a favor by demonstrating the limits of what a president can do through executive action and making some progressive policies unfeasible in 2024.

The most notable example of this is student debt relief. In 2020, Sanders and other progressives favored forgiving most or all student debt, while Harris had a complicated plan to forgive up to $20,000 in debt. Under Biden, there has never been a realistic chance of legislation to cancel student debt, even though Democrats controlled Congress during Biden’s first two years in office.

Biden has tried to get the job done through executive orders, with courts blocking much of what he has tried to do. This much is clear: The president has limited power to cancel student debt without a law authorizing it. That’s the best excuse for any progressive candidate in 2024 to say he’ll do it through executive action. We now know that’s not likely, which eases the pressure on a progressive candidate to make impossible promises.

Medicare for All has disappeared as an issue. It was never plausible, given that it would obliterate employer-provided health care, which covers nearly half of all Americans and works well for many of them. Biden never proposed getting rid of it, and so he never had to explain what would happen to people who enjoyed their coverage and might otherwise have lost it. Instead, Biden supported and signed into law changes to the Affordable Care Act, which grew increasingly popular as it covered more people. Harris would be crazy to revive Medicare for All, and one would hope she was smart enough to know that.

Many of Biden’s policies are popular. Voters largely support Biden’s plan to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy to help stabilize Medicare and Social Security and rein in the growing national debt. Biden also negotiated and signed two major bipartisan bills, one funding infrastructure and another aimed at rebuilding U.S. semiconductor manufacturing.

Biden’s green energy bill, while partisan, has spurred investment in at least as many red districts as blue, and it’s unlikely to go away even if Trump wins. Unfortunately for Biden, it’s the rambling, octogenarian man voters have turned against, not what he represents. If Harris can recast Biden’s agenda as her own, she’ll likely be a much better presidential candidate in 2024 than she was in 2020.

By Rick Newman, Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist.