WASHINGTON — As Kamala Harris pivots to the center in the final weeks of the 2024 presidential election, the agenda she’s using to convey a pragmatic streak includes various unanswered questions as she cautiously jettisons some past progressive positions.
Two days before her first debate with Donald Trump on Tuesday, Vice President Harris released a policy page on her campaign website, marking the most comprehensive agenda of her presidential bid. It highlighted her recent cost-focused plans to lower the price of groceries and housing, and to boost the child tax credit, which are the most detailed she has offered.
But the agenda includes gaps and ambiguities on major issues — like the minimum wage, paid leave and child care funding — that could leave voters wondering what types of policies she would push for if elected. Some sections are backward-looking and focus more on touting the record of the Biden-Harris administration, while also criticizing Trump’s agenda. Harris claimed the nomination unusually late after President Joe Biden dropped out in July, and her website evolved from the page set up for his campaign.
It remains to be seen whether the lack of specifics will hurt Harris politically against a Republican opponent with a haphazard approach to policymaking who has struggled when asked for specifics on issues like child care and abortion. In a recent New York Times poll, 3 in 10 voters said they “need to learn more about Kamala Harris,” compared with 1 in 10 who said that about Trump.
Some voters are forgiving about Harris’ changing positions.
“It’s a shift that I understand,” said Sydney Smith, a graduate student at Wake Forest University in the swing state of North Carolina, where Harris held two rallies on Thursday. “I’m a progressive, or at least I strive to be, but I also want to be more of a pragmatic progressive. So I can understand that shift to the center.”
Republicans scoff at her pivot to the center, arguing that the more progressive positions Harris took in 2019 represent her true beliefs.
“I don’t think she’s serious about it. I mean, she wants to be all things to all people,” Sen. John Cornyn, of Texas, who is running to be the next Senate GOP leader. He said Harris hasn’t convincingly explained her evolution on now-abandoned stances like banning fracking. “I’m not buying it.”
Minimum wage, paid leave and child care gaps
Parts of the Harris policy page tout her role in the legislative successes of the current administration, such as the Inflation Reduction Act and infrastructure law.
During the debate, Harris did not mention the CHIPS and Science Act, a landmark accomplishment, by name. Harris’ aides say she prefers to avoid acronyms and pushes her team to make sure she’s talking about things in a tangible, accessible way for regular people.
The health care section of Harris’ agenda focuses more on what the Biden-Harris administration has done than plans for the future. It calls for continuing existing Affordable Care Act subsidies and extending Medicare’s $35 cap on monthly out-of-pocket insulin costs to all Americans. Unlike Biden in 2020, Harris doesn’t call for adding a public option to the ACA marketplaces. (Her campaign did not comment when asked if she favors a public option.)
The Harris agenda vows to “fight to raise the minimum wage,” but doesn’t say how high she wants it to be. It says she would “establish paid family and medical leave,” without getting specific on the number of weeks or other guarantees she supports. The agenda calls for “ensuring hardworking families can afford high-quality child care,” without outlining how.
In response to queries by NBC News, the Harris campaign declined to provide specifics on those issues. Her campaign declined to say whether she supports Biden-backed ideas like expanding Social Security benefits and extending Medicare coverage for dental, vision and hearing. (Her agenda says she would “strengthen Social Security and Medicare” with new tax revenues to finance them.)
Many Harris ideas — such as legalizing abortion nationwide, protecting voting rights and capping insulin at $35 for all Americans, not just those on Medicare — would require piercing the Senate filibuster to enact. The Harris campaign would not say whether she supports doing away with the 60-vote rule to pass those measures.
The bulk of Harris’ agenda would be subject to congressional approval, likely requiring Democrats to control the House and Senate to have a strong chance of passage. It’s not unusual for presidential candidates to leave some details to Congress, although campaign platforms often form the opening salvo on Capitol Hill regarding a new president’s plans.
Harris tilts rightward on immigration
On immigration, Harris has repeatedly touted her record as a prosecutor and insists she would broadly support the bipartisan Senate-negotiated border security bill that House Republicans tanked at Trump’s urging. But she has yet to publicly detail whether she supports some of the specific provisions in the legislation. For example, the bill includes $650 million in previously allocated — but unspent — money for border wall construction. She had previously called Trump’s border wall a “stupid use of money.”
Some Democrats now concede that some barriers — along with drones and other technology — should be used to help secure the border. She has yet to explain her thinking on that as she repeatedly touts other portions of the bill, such as its funding to increase the number of Border Patrol agents.
Trump is also light on specifics for much of his agenda. Just this week he called for replacing the Affordable Care Act, but said only that he has “concepts of a plan” when pressed on his alternative.
Trump has also floated mandating IVF coverage for all Americans, drawing skepticism or opposition from many in his own party. The former president has not detailed how the ambitious proposal would be paid for. The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology has said its member clinics performed 389,993 IVF cycles in 2022. At a cost of around $20,000 apiece, that would come to $7.8 billion for that one year.
When asked about Trump’s lack of specificity on some issues, his national press secretary Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement: “President Trump has outlined many different substantive Agenda 47 policy plans to solve the problems Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have created, including a detailed economic plan to end inflation, bring down energy and housing costs, and cut waste from the federal government.”
Unlike Trump, however, Harris seems to be crafting her shifts to align with the mainstream of her party’s members in Congress.
“They’ve consulted with us,” Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in an interview.
“We’re going to be walking people through these issues,” he said. “On price gouging, we believe in markets. We also believe that there ought to be some guardrails if consumers are getting hammered.”
Harris has been asked twice — during her CNN interview and the ABC News debate — about her policy evolution. Both times, she said, “My values haven’t changed.” She noted that she said four years ago during the 2020 vice presidential she wouldn’t seek to ban fracking.
Hasan Pyarali, a recent graduate in North Carolina, said Harris is trying to appeal to a broader electorate than she was in 2019, when she sought the Democratic nomination.
“I think that she’s doing what politicians do, which is try to represent everyone in America,” he said. “We understand it’s a general election. It’s different than a primary, and so she has to appeal to a wide swath of voters.”
