Harris Rolls Out More of Her Policy Agenda Ahead of Debate

Vice President Kamala Harris outlined a policy platform on her campaign website this past weekend, filling in some of the details of how she proposes to address specific issues including taxes, the economy, healthcare and foreign policy. The release comes just days before the Democratic candidate faces off against her Republican challenger, former President Donald Trump, in a debate Tuesday night.

Harris has scrambled to define her campaign since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race on July 21. In many cases, she has adopted the platform laid out by the man she hopes to succeed in the White House, but she has also sought to put her own stamp on key issues such as corporate tax rates and housing assistance, even as she has moved away from some of the more liberal ideas such as Medicare for All that she embraced during her run for the 2020 Democratic nomination.

The platform outline is broken into four sections — economy, personal rights, public safety and foreign policy — each of which includes a comparison to what it calls “Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda,” a reference to an in-depth policy report created by the conservative Heritage Foundation for Trump to follow if he wins the election, although Trump has sought to distance himself from that effort.

The economy section on Harris’s website provides the most detail, with 10 specific policy prescriptions, some of which she has already discussed. Harris says she wants to cut taxes for 100 million working- and middle-class Americans by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, while raising taxes on the wealthiest. She proposes to provide first-time homebuyers with up to $25,000 to help with down payments, and to give new tax breaks to startup businesses and small business owners.

Without providing much by way of details, Harris also says she wants to lower child care costs, ban corporate price gouging on groceries, raise the minimum wage and tackle the climate crisis while lowering energy prices.

Comparing her economic platform to her opponent’s, Harris says her “lowering costs agenda is a stark contrast to Donald Trump’s plans to jack up prices, weaken the middle class, cut Social Security and Medicare, eliminate the Department of Education and preschool programs like Head Start, and end the Affordable Care Act.”

Voters still learning: Some undecided voters say they want to hear more about what Harris proposes to do in the White House. In the New York Times/Siena College poll of 1,695 likely voters released Sunday, 28% of respondents said they need to know more about Harris, compared to just 9% who said the same about Trump. Two-thirds of those wanting to learn more about Harris said they were specifically interested in her policies.

Some supporters say Harris is trying to walk a line between policies that are broadly popular and policies that are realistic, although her message may not be getting through to voters. “I think she’s not getting enough credit for being an astute technocrat,” Ben Harris, a senior Treasury Department official under Biden, told The Washington Post. “She’s a combination of populist concerns and a healthy dose of centrism, while trying to be fairly fiscally conservative and realistic by keeping her plans targeted.”

Critics, meanwhile, say the Harris agenda threatens to destroy the American economy. Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, attacked the Harris platform at some length on social media, claiming that it would fail to help ordinary Americans. A Trump campaign spokesperson said Harris’s policies “rival some of the most socialist and authoritarian models from world history.” And Newt Gingrich, the fire-breathing former speaker of the House who now serves as an adviser to Trump, said Harris is just trying to cover her tracks. “It’s not complicated: You have a San Francisco radical who believes in big government socialism, who has a 3-and-a-half-year record of ruining the economy,” he told the Post. “Her consultants have told her she has to move to the middle, so she’s trying to figure out things to do that somehow would make it work better.”

The bottom line: Harris has provided more details on her agenda, blunting accusations that she is trying to win the presidency without telling voters where she stands. But it’s not yet clear whether the effort will be enough to convince undecided voters that she is offering a viable alternative to Trump — or a change from Biden.