Vice President Harris has moved increasingly toward the political center over the course of her long career in Washington, a vigorous that is particularly evident now as she seeks to win over moderate voters and prevent former President Trump from seeking a second term in the White House.
Harris has been in public service for decades, serving as district attorney in San Francisco, then attorney general in California, then U.S. senator, 2020 presidential candidate and finally vice president under President Biden. Over that time, she has changed her policy positions on a number of issues, largely to reflect the different constituencies she has represented at different stages of her career.
The Harris team defended this development, arguing that her current views were largely shaped by her recent role as Biden’s No. 2.
“The vice president’s positions were shaped by three years of effective governance as part of the Biden-Harris administration,” a Harris campaign adviser told The Hill.
But Republicans have rushed to revamp her platform, pointing to her past progressive positions as evidence that she is too liberal to lead a country split roughly 50/50 between the parties. They hope to highlight certain aspects of her record in states and districts where they could alienate moderate voters.
“Kamala has the Biden record of the last four years, plus all these statements from her 2020 presidential campaign,” a Republican strategist in the House of Representatives said this week. “There is one congressional district in America [where] Voters will absolutely hate one of these policy positions.”
Questions about Harris’ current policy positions are sure to arise Thursday night when the Democratic nominee and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), take part in a televised interview with CNN, their first extensive talk with the press since she rose to the top of the ballot.
Here are five issues on which Harris has changed her position during her time in Washington.
Fracking
Fracking – the practice of injecting a mixture of water and chemicals into the ground under high pressure to extract hard-to-reach oil and natural gas – is anathema to environmentalists. And when Harris ran for president in 2020, she made it clear that she would side with liberals who support the end of the controversial practice.
“There is no question that I support a ban on fracking,” Harris said at the time.
However, the Biden administration has issued thousands of up-to-date fracking permits. Environmental groups are furiousand Harris’ campaign team has since stressed that as president would not search a ban on fracking.
Republicans are keen to make fracking a major election issue, especially in swing states like Pennsylvania, where the process is a huge economic driver.
“We have several swing districts in Pennsylvania: extremely unpopular,” the GOP strategist said of Harris’ previous support for a ban.
EV mandate
This week, a Harris campaign staffer sent out an email warning that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the Republican vice presidential nominee, would travel to Michigan to spread “lies” about Harris’ record on the domestic economy. Among them, the staffer warned, was the claim that Harris supports a mandatory switch to electric vehicles.
“FACT: Vice President Harris does not support an electric vehicle mandate,” wrote Ammar Moussa, Harris’ rapid response director.
But Harris, as a senator, was one of the five original co-sponsors the Zero-Emission Vehicles Act 2019which would have obliged car manufacturers to sell only zero-emission vehicles after 2040, otherwise they would have to face civil sanctions.
The Harris team was quick to stress that the Biden administration has never taken such a position. Instead, the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2021 provides incentives designed to encourage the switch to electric vehicles but does nothing to mandate them.
The Trump team rejects this argument and tries to highlight Harris’ previous positions.
“Harris’ campaign team has sought to erase her radical past from history,” the Trump campaign team accused her in a flood of emails on Wednesday.
Disempower the police
Following the killing of unarmed black man George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, Harris voiced her support for local government officials who sought to cut law enforcement budgets and redirect those funds to community programs. The idea was to promote public safety by preventing crimes instead of spending taxpayers’ money on prosecuting criminals after the fact.
The “Defund the Police” movement, as it was called, became enormously controversial, especially as certain crimes increased across the country in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
California authorities were at the forefront of this campaign, and when Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti sought to reallocate up to $150 million from the LAPD’s budget to separate programs designed to create jobs and improve access to health care – especially in minority communities – Harris supported the proposal.
“I applaud Eric Garcetti for what he has done,” she said in the summer of 2020, after she withdrew her presidential candidacy but before she was nominated as Biden’s running mate.
Around the same time, Harris, a longtime prosecutor, complained in a separate interview that cities were “militarizing” their police forces at the expense of public education.
As Harris now fights for the White House, her campaign team is trying to downplay her past support for cutting police budgets. Mitch Landrieu, the campaign team’s national co-chair, (*5*)CNN recently said It supports the funding of the police – in addition to the funding of “rehabilitation programs” and things that [make the] Criminal justice system safer.”
“Our actions indicate that she wants to fund the police, but also do the other things,” Landrieu said.
However, Republicans see this as an opportunity to accuse the presidential candidate of being too easygoing in his approach to crime.
Construction of the border wall
In 2017, months after her swearing-in to the Senate, Harris vowed, to block “any funding” for Trump’s border ball. The Californian Democrat underlined this stance three years later, after her unsuccessful presidential candidacy, Writing on Facebook“Trump’s border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and will not make us safer.”
But during her time as vice president, Harris spoke in favor of the bipartisan border bill that a group of senators drafted earlier this year — which would spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the border wall. During her speech at the Democratic National Convention last week, she said she would sign the bill if it landed on her desk.
“I refuse to play politics with our security, and here is my promise to you. As president, I will reintroduce the bipartisan border security bill he vetoed and sign it into law,” Harris said.
The bipartisan border bill — pushed by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) on the Republican side — would have provided $650 million to build and reinforce miles of up-to-date border wall. But the bill remained stalled in the Senate after Trump urged Republicans to vote against it.
Republicans have been quick to note Harris’s change in tone on the border wall issue, especially as the party focuses on the vice president’s handling of the situation at the southern border.
“Kamala Harris continues to vacillate on policy issues, most recently on the border wall. It’s a shame we have the evidence,” said Republican Rep. Erin Houchin of Indiana. wrote on the social platform X“Don’t fall for her false promises; she welcomed this invasion and if she had real plans to resolve the border crisis, she would be implementing them now.”
The Harris campaign, in turn, describes some of Harris’ policy positions as central to enabling bipartisan compromise.
“While Donald Trump remains true to the extreme ideas of his Project 2025 agenda, Vice President Harris believes that real leadership means bringing all sides together to build consensus. This approach has enabled the Biden-Harris administration to achieve bipartisan breakthroughs on everything from infrastructure to gun violence prevention,” a Harris campaign spokesperson told The Hill. “As president, she will take the same pragmatic approach, focusing on common-sense solutions in the interest of progress.”
Mandatory gun buyback program
During her 2020 presidential campaign, Harris supported a mandatory buyback program for military-style assault rifles, a concept that divided Democratic candidates this election cycle. Some favored a mandatory initiative while others supported a voluntary one.
Harris told an MSNBC gun control forum in 2019: “We need a buyback program, and I support a mandatory gun buyback program.”
“It has to be smart, we have to do it right,” she added. “But there are 5 million [assault weapons] at least some estimate it is 10 million, and we will need smart policies aimed at getting these people off the streets, but in the right way.”
Since then, however, Harris has backed away from that policy. A Harris aide told The Hill that she would not support a mandatory buyback program.
Discussion of an assault rifle buyback program arose during the 2020 presidential campaign amid a wave of mass shootings. The initiative offers compensation to individuals who surrender their firearms to an organization.
