US vice-president Kamala Harris may be the undisputed frontrunner for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, but despite being in the public eye for decades her position on some key policy areas is unclear.
Harris was first elected as district attorney of San Francisco in 2003. She later served as attorney-general of California before being elected to the US Senate in 2017. She ran a short-lived presidential campaign of her own before being selected as Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020. Since then she has focused on supporting Biden’s agenda rather than articulating her own.
Here is what we know about where she stands on five key policy issues:
Foreign policy
This is one of the few areas where Harris has supported Biden but occasionally sought to stake out her own positions. As vice-president, she has increasingly represented the US and Biden at major meetings of world leaders, including at the Munich Security Conference and, more recently, last month’s Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland.
But in recent months she has also started to diverge from Biden, most notably in her statements regarding the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. In March, she called for an “immediate ceasefire” given the “immense scale of suffering” there. This is a marked contrast with the president, who has long been a staunch supporter of Israel and backed prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s war effort despite a frosty relationship between the two men.
Biden and Harris are expected to meet Netanyahu when he comes to Washington this week to address a joint session of Congress.
Economics
One of the Biden administration’s biggest priorities has been reining in sky-high prices in the aftermath of the pandemic. Harris has been a staunch supporter of the president’s efforts to reduce inflation and this weekend said bringing down the price of petrol and other daily costs was a “top priority”.
Harris has also championed Biden’s landmark legislation to boost infrastructure investment and accelerate the pivot to clean energy. As vice-president she has also focused her efforts on the so-called care economy, including expanding access to affordable childcare and aid to senior citizens.
Before becoming vice-president, she spearheaded housing-related initiatives in the Senate, including a proposal to give tenants paying more than 30 per cent of their gross income on rent refundable tax credits. She also backed tax credits for people making less than $100,000 and pushed for wealthy Americans to pay more in taxes to fund an increase in teacher salaries.
On trade, she has been highly critical of Donald Trump’s plans to impose across-the-board tariffs if re-elected, arguing that the levies will hurt consumers. She has insisted she is “not a protectionist Democrat”, although she has opposed past trade deals – including then-president Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership – because of a lack of sufficient environmental protections.
Abortion
Harris has long been a champion of reproductive rights, and after the 2022 US supreme court decision to strike down Roe v Wade, which had for decades enshrined the constitutional right to an abortion, she became the Biden administration’s leading voice calling on Congress to pass a new law guaranteeing access to the procedure for women across the country.
Abortion was a winning issue for Democrats at the ballot box in the 2022 midterm elections and subsequent off-year elections. As an 81-year-old Catholic man who in the past supported abortion restrictions, Biden was often seen as an awkward messenger on the issue. But Democrats believe Harris, who stands to be the first female president if elected, could be a standard-bearer on the issue heading into polling day.
Law and order
Harris had a long career as a prosecutor before she became a senator. Her record as a “tough on crime” public attorney attracted the ire of some progressive activists when she first ran for president in 2020. But her positions on law and order, policing and issues relating to racial justice appear to have shifted over time and she has moved to the left, in line with many in the Democratic Party, in recent years.
As a senator and later a presidential candidate, Harris pushed for marijuana legalisation and criminal justice reform, including actions to reduce the number of people who are incarcerated for nonviolent offences.
In the wake of George Floyd’s killing and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, she helped introduce legislation that would have made it easier to prosecute police officers and crack down on police misconduct.
Immigration
Harris’s tenure as vice-president has been undermined by Biden’s early decision to give her the responsibility for addressing the root causes of migration to the US in Latin America. This made her the symbol for one of the administration’s biggest political vulnerabilities: the surge of migrants at the US-Mexico border.
Harris stumbled through early media interviews on the subject, and came under widespread criticism, including from members of her own party, for not visiting the border until several months after she took office.
But the blame has shifted in recent months and Harris backed the bipartisan border security deal that was later torpedoed by Trump, who was loath to give the White House a political win in an election year. The bill would have allocated tens of billions of dollars to hiring more border security agents and asylum officers, and closed the US-Mexico border if the number of crossings hit a seven-day average of 5,000, or 8,500 in a single day. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
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