GOP ready to pounce on Harris policy pivots
Vice President Harris’s quick pivot to her White House bid has prompted an about-face on multiple key issues that could affect outcomes in battleground states, handing former President Trump and Republicans a prime attack line.
In the roughly one week since Harris replaced President Biden as the probable Democratic nominee, her campaign has moved to distance her from a series of positions she took when she was a candidate in the 2020 presidential primary.
She no longer supports a ban on fracking, a campaign official said, nor does she support expanding the Supreme Court. She no longer backs a single-payer health care system after previously endorsing a "Medicare for All" proposal, the campaign official confirmed, or a government-run, gun-buyback program.
Harris also supports additional border funding put forward by the Biden administration, a break from her 2020 primary stance that Immigration and Customs Enforcement should, at a minimum, be reformed.
Republicans say the policy pivots give them another arrow in their quiver for the three-month sprint to November.
“She’s going to say whatever she thinks will get her elected, but I don’t know how you trust anything someone says when they take 180-degree opposite positions depending on who they’re talking to,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said. “I just think she’s not a credible person.”
“I’m always a little shocked and surprised at cynicism and hypocrisy,” he added when asked if he is at all surprised by the rebrand.
Harris’s allies have pushed back, arguing the electorate will care more about her vision for the future than stances she took five years ago.
“They need to let Kamala go out there and win people over. Talk about the issues that matter to swing-state voters, the economy, child card, abortion and fertility treatment rights,” said one Democratic strategist who has worked with Harris. “Let Kamala be Kamala and she’ll win people over like she always does. You already see that with her exploding on TikTok with young people."
“Remember, voters care a lot more about the future than the past. They’ve been clamoring for new leaders in this race,” the strategist added. “And the future looks a lot more like Kamala Harris than it does Donald Trump.”
Still, the vice president’s reversal on nearly a half-dozen issues comes as she attempts to make headway in key battleground states. Among them is Pennsylvania, where fracking has been a key issue for voters for more than a decade.
In a number of interviews and appearances in 2019, Harris said she was in favor of banning the practice — a stance David McCormick, the GOP’s Senate candidate in the Keystone State, and others have sought to highlight and connect to the state’s Democratic incumbent.
“The Biden-Harris-Casey energy agenda has essentially been to stop fossil fuels, and transition from lithium batteries and solar panels from China,” McCormick told Fox News late last week. “It truly is out of step [with] where most Pennsylvanians are.”
Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) on Tuesday defended the switch in position, arguing that having like-minded stances with the top of the ticket is good for everyone.
“On gas extraction, I’ve always been supportive and very supportive and have voted against any kind of a ban,” Casey told The Hill. “To have alignment and consensus on that is obviously a positive.”
In a survey released late last week by The Hill and Emerson College, Harris trails by 2 points against Trump in Pennsylvania — the same margin the former president held over Biden ahead of the June debate that ultimately pushed the president out of the race. Trump led Biden by 5 points following the debate.
Seizing on another hot-button issue, the Trump campaign on Tuesday launched its first television ad attacking Harris, focusing on her role as Biden’s “border czar” while mixing images of migrants coming across the border and the vice president dancing.
Top Trump allies argue that the latest change in Harris’s political posture only feeds into the GOP’s narrative that she is among the most liberal members of her party and that she cannot be trusted.
“She’s got so much we can run on. It’s just really exposing her to who she really is,” said Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.). “She’s no moderate … Joe Biden was kind of a puppet of the progressive movement. She is the progressive movement.”
“She can’t flip-flop her positions because she was there as a senator. She ran on it, she campaigned on it and since she’s been vice president, she’s spoken about it multiple times,” he continued. “Her words will do it enough. We just have to replay it for the American people.”
Trump and his campaign have similarly shrugged off efforts by Harris and her campaign to reposition herself on certain issues, arguing it won’t resonate with voters.
“In politics, when you start off saying something, that's where you are. And she was for defund the police. She was for open borders. She was for having anybody come in,” Trump told Fox News on Monday.
Trump may not be the ideal messenger for that argument, however. He has frequently reversed himself on various policy matters, including this year, when he came out against a ban on TikTok despite signing an executive order to ban the app while he was president.
Taylor Budowich, head of the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc., argued Harris “has always been” a “dangerous liberal,” a sign of how attack ads will target the vice president in the months to come.
“Kamala is going to run on whatever dishonest, poll-tested and focus-grouped agenda her consultants cook up. It won’t work,” Budowich posted on the social platform X.
For now, polling since Harris entered the race as the likely Democratic nominee has shown the vice president has gotten a bump in approval rating. An ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted Friday and Saturday showed Harris’s favorability rose from 35 percent to 43 percent compared to just a week ago, while her unfavorability rating dropped from 46 percent to 42 percent.
And Harris has pushed back on some of the accusations from Republicans.
"You may have noticed Donald Trump has been resorting to some wild lies about my record. And some of what he and his running mate are saying, it's just plain weird," Harris told donors in Massachusetts.
"But the bottom line is we have our work cut out for us. OK? We have our work cut out for us," she continued. "And this is not going to be easy. But I know something about the folks in this room. We can do hard things. And we like hard work."