Five issues where Harris has shifted to the center

Vice President Harris has moved to the political center throughout her years-long career in Washington, a dynamic that has come into sharp focus as she seeks to attract moderate voters and keep former President Trump from winning a second term in the White House. 

Harris has been in public service for decades, jumping from San Francisco district attorney, to California attorney general, to U.S. senator, to 2020 presidential contender, to vice president under Joe Biden. In the course of that span, she’s shifted policy positions on a number of issues, largely to reflect the different constituencies she’s represented at different stations of her career. 

The Harris campaign has defended that evolution, saying her current views have been fashioned most significantly by her most recent role as President Biden’s No. 2.

“The Vice President's positions have been shaped by three years of effective governance as part of the Biden-Harris Administration,” a Harris campaign adviser told The Hill.

Yet Republicans have pounced on the reshaping of her policy platform, pointing to progressive positions she’s taken in the past as evidence that she’s too liberal to lead a country that’s split roughly 50/50 between the parties. They’re hoping to highlight certain pieces of her record in states and districts where they might alienate moderate voters. 

“Kamala owns the Biden record from the past four years, plus she has all these statements from her 2020 run for president,” a House GOP strategist said this week. “There is a congressional district in America [where] voters will absolutely hate one of those policy positions.”

Questions surrounding Harris’s current policy positions are sure to surface Thursday night when the Democratic nominee and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), participate in a televised interview with CNN — her first extensive engagement with the press since she rose to the top of the ticket. 

Here are five issues where Harris has shifted her position throughout her time in Washington.

Fracking

Fracking — the process of injecting a high-pressure blend of water and chemicals into the ground to extract hard-to-reach oil and natural gas — is anathema to environmentalists. And as Harris sought the presidential nomination in 2020 she made crystal clear that she would side with liberals in support of eliminating the controversial practice. 

“There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” Harris said at the time.

The Biden administration, however, has approved thousands of new fracking permits, infuriating environmental groups, and Harris’s campaign has since emphasized that, as president, she would not seek a fracking ban. 

Republicans are eager to make fracking a big campaign issue, particularly in swing states like Pennsylvania, where the procedure is an enormous engine of economic activity. 

“We have several swing districts in Pennsylvania: extremely unpopular,” the GOP strategist said of Harris’s previous support for a ban.

EV Mandate

This week, a Harris campaign official blasted an email warning that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the GOP's vice presidential candidate, was headed to Michigan to promote “lies” about Harris's record on the domestic economy. Among them, the official cautioned, was the contention that Harris supports a mandatory shift to electric vehicles, or EVs. 

“FACT: Vice President Harris does not support an electric vehicle mandate,” wrote Ammar Moussa, Harris’s director of rapid response.

Yet Harris, as senator, had been among five original co-sponsors of the Zero-Emission Vehicles Act of 2019, which would have required car manufacturers to sell only zero-emission vehicles after 2040 or face civil penalties.

The Harris campaign has been quick to emphasize that the Biden administration never adopted such a position. Instead, the Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2021, provides incentives designed to promote the shift to electric vehicles, but does nothing to mandate them. 

It’s an argument the Trump team has rejected as it seeks to highlight Harris’s past positions. 

“Harris’s campaign has tried to erase her radical record from history,” the Trump campaign charged in an email blast on Wednesday. 

Defund the police

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, at the hands of a Minneapolis Police officer in 2020, Harris voiced support for local government officials who sought to shrink law-enforcement budgets and divert those funds to community programs. The idea was to promote public safety by preventing crimes from happening, rather than focusing taxpayer dollars on prosecuting criminals after the fact.

The “defund the police” movement, as it was branded, became enormously controversial, especially as certain crimes spiked across the country in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

California officials were on the front lines of that campaign, and when Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti sought to shift as much as $150 million from the LAPD budget into separate programs designed to create jobs and expand health access — particularly in minority communities — Harris endorsed the concept. 

“I applaud Eric Garcetti for doing what he’s done,” she said in the summer of 2020, after she had dropped her presidential bid but before she was tapped as Biden’s running mate.

In a separate interview around the same time, Harris — a long-time prosecutor — lamented that cities were “militarizing” their police forces at the expense of public education. 

As Harris now vies for the White House, her campaign has sought to downplay her previous support for cutting law enforcement budgets. Mitch Landrieu, the national co-chair of the campaign, told CNN recently that she supports police funding — alongside funding for “rehabilitation” programs “and things that might [make the] criminal justice system safer.” 

“Our actions indicate that she wants to fund the police, but she wants to do the other things as well,” Landrieu said. 

Republicans, however, see an opening to accuse the presidential hopeful of being soft on crime. 

Building the border wall

In 2017, months after she was sworn into the Senate, Harris vowed to “block any funding” for Trump’s border ball. The California Democrat underscored that stance three years later, following her unsuccessful presidential bid, writing on Facebook “Trump’s border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and won’t make us any safer.”

But during her time as vice president, Harris voiced support for the bipartisan border bill a group of senators penned earlier this year — which includes hundreds of billions of dollars for the border wall. During her speech at the Democratic National Convention last week, she said she would sign the legislation if it landed on her desk.

“I refuse to play politics with our security, and here is my pledge to you. As president, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law,” Harris said.

The bipartisan border bill — spearheaded by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) on the GOP side — would have provided $650 million for building and reinforcing miles of new border wall. The framework, however, languished in the Senate after Trump urged Republicans to vote against it.

Republicans have been quick to point out Harris’s change in tune on the border wall, especially as the party zeroes in on the vice president’s handling of the situation at the southern border.

“Kamala Harris continues to flip-flop on policy issues, the latest being the border wall. Too bad we have the receipts,” Rep. Erin Houchin (R-Ind.) wrote on X. “Don’t fall for her false promises; she welcomed this invasion, and if she had any real plans to address the border crisis, she would do it now.”

The Harris campaign, for their part, are characterizing some of Harris’s policy stances as central to facilitating bipartisan compromises.

“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. 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,” a Harris campaign spokesperson told The Hill. “As President, she will take that same pragmatic approach, focusing on common-sense solutions for the sake of progress.”

Mandatory gun buyback program

During her campaign for president in the 2020 election, Harris threw her support behind a mandatory buyback program for military-style assault weapons, a concept that divided Democratic candidates that cycle. Some were in favor of a mandatory initiative, while others backed a voluntary one.

Harris, at an MSNBC gun control forum in 2019, declared “we have to have a buyback program, and I support a mandatory gun buyback program.”

“It’s got to be smart, we got to do it the right way,” she added. “But there are 5 million [assault weapons] at least, some estimate as many as 10 million, and we’re going to have to have smart public policy that’s about taking those off the streets, but doing it the right way.”

Since then, however, Harris has moved away from that policy. A Harris official told The Hill that she would not advocate for a mandatory buyback program.

The conversation surrounding a buyback program for assault weapons cropped up during the 2020 presidential campaign amid a wave of mass shootings. The initiative offers compensation to individuals who relinquish their firearms to an organization.