Vice President Kamala Harris is trying to outmaneuver former President Donald Trump and address old vulnerabilities on her policy positions as she starts to fill in how she would govern if elected in November.
Vice presidents rarely have policy portfolios of their own — and almost always set aside any views that differ from those of the Oval Office occupant. Now, after four years of following President Joe Biden’s lead, Harris is taking a cautious approach to unveiling a policy vision in her own right.
But her surprise ascendance to the top of the ticket after Biden dropped his reelection bid also means her policy platform is being pulled together just as quickly.
When Harris inherited Biden’s political operation in late July, the campaign’s website was quietly scrubbed of the six-point “issues” page that framed the race against Trump, from expanding voting protections to restoring nationwide access to abortion. Instead, Harris has peppered her speeches — so far heavy on biography for herself and her running mate — with broad goals like “building up the middle class.” She has called for federal laws to provide abortion access and ban assault-style weapons, but has been thin on the details of what specifically they would entail or how she would convince Congress to make progress on some of the most hot-button political issues.
Asked by reporters on Saturday when she would unveil her policy platform, Harris promised more details this week and added, “It’ll be focused on the economy and what we need to do to bring down costs and also strengthen the economy overall.”
Her team has offered few clues of what it will include. But the first major window into her thinking came this past weekend, with a proposal pulled not from the policy backwaters of the Biden administration or the cutting-room floor of the legislative process but from her rival: Trump.
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Harris announced that she, like Trump, wants to end federal taxation of tipped earnings for workers — with the added caveat that she would limit the plan to those in the lower- and middle incomes. The idea has drawn bipartisan support in recent months and is particularly salient in service industry-heavy Nevada.
It’s also one of the few new ideas embraced by Trump in his 2024 bid to get back into the White House — a bonus in the view of the Harris camp, which has tried to needle the Republican into making unforced errors.
The Republican was none too amused by Harris endorsing the idea, complaining on his social media platform that “This was a TRUMP idea – She has no ideas, she can only steal from me.”
Trump continued on the matter in an interview with Elon Musk on Monday night, criticizing Harris for adopting his idea after what he claimed was harassment by the Biden administration of tipped workers.
On Monday, the White House said that Biden backed the plan too, though White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre wouldn’t address why Biden and Harris didn’t push for it during their first three-and-a-half years in office.
“Obviously, it’s a new idea,” she said, but added later in response to criticism from Trump, “Why didn’t they pass it during the last administration?”
In her first weeks as a candidate, Harris’ most pronounced policy moves have been to back away from liberal stances she took in her failed 2020 bid for the White House, including proposals to ban fracking, establish a single-payer healthcare system and decriminalize illegal border crossings. Harris dropped out of that heated race before a single vote had been cast but recognizes that voters now could punish her for those stances if not quickly addressed.
Another complication for Harris comes from her relationship with Biden, who quickly endorsed her and handed her the keys to his political operation after he dropped out.
“The last three and a half years, they’ve been in sync,” said Jean-Pierre. “They have been certainly on the same page. And I presume that that will continue from here.”
Biden himself only began outlining detailed policy ideas for a second term during his final, frenzied effort to salvage his candidacy after his disastrous June 27 debate against Trump. He advocated for restoring abortion access, raising the federal minimum wage and passing a new surtax on billionaires. Harris has largely embraced all those priorities, including the incumbent’s call for changes to the Supreme Court.
But all those plans would require congressional support, which proved elusive even when Democrats held unified control of Washington during the first two years of the Biden-Harris administration.
Harris’ campaign, meanwhile, suggested that her attempted shifts to the center are reflective of how she would try to bring consensus to government.
“While Donald Trump is wedded to the extreme ideas in his Project 2025 agenda, Vice President Harris believes real leadership means bringing all sides together to build consensus,” said Harris spokesman Kevin Munoz. “It is that approach that made it possible for the Biden-Harris administration to achieve bipartisan breakthroughs on everything from infrastructure to gun violence prevention. As President, she will take that same pragmatic approach, focusing on common-sense solutions for the sake of progress.”
While Trump in recent weeks has resorted to personal and racially tinged attacks on his new rival, his campaign has been working to put Harris’ policy aims front and center, aiming to paint Harris as a radical liberal, pointing to old videos of her discussing policy positions during the 2020 Democratic primary.
“Kamala Harris has flip-flopped on virtually every policy she has supported and lived by for her entire career, from the Border to Tips, and the Fake News Media isn’t reporting it,” Trump posted Sunday. “She sounds more like Trump than Trump, copying almost everything. She is conning the American public, and will flip right back. I will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! There will be no flipping!!!”
Associated Press writers Jill Colvin and Darlene Superville contributed to this report.
© 2024 The Canadian Press